early twentieth century. The wide discussion on this topic, extenuates how ever-changing this topic is and how the blurring of both history and myth has changed historians views throughout modern history. One idea that can be agreed on by the majority however, is the main victim of ‘the Lost Cause legend has been history’. 263 This difficulty in separating history and the myth is simply due to the memory that surrounds the Old South image. Although as Woodward suggests, the’ national myths have been waxing in power and appeal’, the memory of the South seems to be consistently alive in the hearts of southerners and allows the brutal history, of slavery, poverty and labour to be glossed over by the glamorous, if not distorted memory of the pre-Civil War South. 264 Gerster, although continuously agreeing that memory is a large part of the myth argues that the South has ‘yet to be subjected to the kind of broad and imaginative historical analysis that has been applied to the idea of the American West’, henceforth suggesting that further inquiries need to be done. 265 Consequently, due to his lack of recovering the historical facts from the myth, ‘the myth [has] become the ground for the belief… it has become the realities of history’ and as many other poignant myths have in the past, has ‘influenced the course of human action’ becoming, as a result, more powerful than history itself. 266 Overall, it is clear that memory has become an extremely important component of the South image, to both itself and the world’s view, with the myth created of the Old 263 Ibid, p.14. 264 Woodward, p.125. 265 Patrick Gerster, Myth and Southern History; The Old South , (Indianapolis, University of Illinois Press, 1989) p.2. 266 Gerster, Myth and Southern History; The Old South , p.2.
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