"This book recounts how forward-looking Southern boosters, entrepreneurs, and architects in St. Augustine, Richmond, and Atlanta carefully crafted usable pasts to promote sectional reconciliation and attract northern tourists and investors after the Civil War"--Provided by publisher.

Although many white southerners chose to memorialize the Lost Cause in the aftermath of the US Civil War, boosters, entrepreneurs, and architects in southern cities believed that economic development, rather than nostalgia, would foster reconciliation between North and South. In Designing Dixie, Reiko Hillyer shows how these boosters crafted distinctive local pasts designed to promote their economic futures and to attract northern tourists and investors.