This Way to Fun: Tourism Advertising in a Changing Deep South (1976-1981)

Abstract

The tourist image of the South has experienced a profound transformation in the last decades. From a romantic, exotic and anti-modern destination linked with the Lost Cause narrative, the former Confederacy shifted its image towards a more complex and almost chaotic mixture of different images and themes. Analyzing advertisements and documents produced by tourism bureaus in four southern states, the author argues how the main and decisive phase of this transition took place in the years between the mid-1970s and early 1980s both as a reaction to internal developments in the tourism industry and to profound changes in American culture.