Monthly Archives

July 2016

Podcast

Podcast Episode 35

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, July 11-15 and July 25-29, 2016 Topics: The Free State of Jones, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Southern politics, agrarianism, secession, slavery https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-35
Brion McClanahan
July 31, 2016
Blog

Booker Washington’s Bucket

Post Civil War racial adjustment was a problem Southerner whites didn’t want to face and Northerner whites declined to share. When the war started 40% of the Confederacy’s population was black whereas it was only 1% in the free Northern states. Even a century later blacks represented only 2% of the population of Massachusetts, which was the birthplace of abolitionism.…
Philip Leigh
July 29, 2016
Blog

New England Bound

New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America by Wendy Warren; ISBN: 978-0871406729, W.W.Norton, June 7, 2016, 368 pages. Squanto the Indian came out of the woods in the spring of 1621, and taught the Pilgrims how to raise the crops of the New World, thereby saving their lives. What is wrong with this picture? The story is true,…
Terry Hulsey
July 28, 2016
Blog

Shakespeare and the Earl of Oxford

Perceptive and insightful people have known through the centuries that William Shakespeare could not possibly have written the plays and sonnets that had been attributed to him, beginning with certain suspicious posthumous folios. That uneducated hayseed from the North Country about whom very little is known! And, for Heaven's sake, an actor to boot! Impossible! There must be a mystery…
Clyde Wilson
July 27, 2016
Review Posts

Are Southerners Different?

This essay appeared in the 1984 winter issue of Southern Partisan magazine. In the best of all possible worlds, President Reagan, George Will, William Buckley and I—conservatives all—or so it would appear—should be able to sit down over glasses of sour mash and find ourselves in such sweet agreement on the range of problems facing the world and the humankind…
John William Corrington
July 26, 2016
Blog

Do Motives Matter?

A friend of mine is translating a book on Lincoln written by Karl Marx. Her first installment was a refutation by Marx of the European press’s contention that the assault by the North on the South was not about slavery, but about economic and political power. Of course, one cannot divorce the issue of slavery from either consideration but Marx…
Valerie Protopapas
July 25, 2016
Blog

Southern Baptists and the Flag

It appears that the abstractions of the Enlightenment have over the last five-hundred years been read into Scripture and into the theologies of most of the Christian confessions as eisegesis and read back out as exegesis, thereby becoming the metaphysical touchstone of modern and post-modern Christianity. This certainly seems to be the case of the most recent statements by Pope…
Robert M. Peters
July 15, 2016
Blog

Culture War

Transcend yourself and join in the universal struggle to bring about the self-transcendence of all men! –Karl Marx Culture, as the term is used in America in our times, covers a vast territory with ill-defined frontiers. There is primitive culture (flint spearheads, animal and human sacrifice). There is high culture (Shakespeare, Michelangelo). There is, or used to be, folk culture…
Clyde Wilson
July 14, 2016
Blog

Nathan Bedford Forrest

This essay was published as a new introduction for Lytle's Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company and is published here in honor of Forrest's birthday, July 13. This is a young man's book. To have anything more to say about a book you did fifty odd years ago brings you hard up against the matter of time. The young author…
Andrew Nelson Lytle
July 13, 2016
Review Posts

The Free State of Jones: History or Hollywood?

Hollywood has struck again with another “Civil War” movie that, unsurprisingly as it may seem, does not do justice to the real Southland or the Confederacy.  The latest episode is an epic by director Gary Ross, “Free State of Jones,” starring Matthew McConaughey as the film’s hero, Newt Knight. “Free State of Jones” tells the story of a Knight-led rebellion…
Ryan Walters
July 12, 2016
Blog

The Louisiana “Hippeaux”

In America, there are a lot of places you can go that will make you feel like you’re in a foreign country.  Certain areas of Miami, Phoenix, or San Francisco immediately come to mind, and you might feel like you need a passport to go there.  However, I firmly believe that when I travel to some parts of Louisiana, I…
Tom Daniel
July 11, 2016
Podcast

Podcast Episode 34

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, July 4-8, 2016. Topics: American War for Independence, Transcendentalism, War for Southern Independence, Thomas Jefferson, United States Constitution https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-34
Brion McClanahan
July 9, 2016
Blog

Musings of a Southern Antifederalist on the Presidential Election

The one consolation of the Antifederalist persuasion is telling everyone you meet “I told you so.”  Granted, this does not go down well in most circles, be they progressive, socialist, conservative, neo-conservative, constitutionalist, et al.  At best, some of these folk will agree that the Antifederalists were correct about the consolidation of power in the federal government, the excesses of…
John Devanny
July 8, 2016
Blog

A Book for a Southerner’s Bookshelf

Recently a commencement speaker exhorted graduating students to "be on the right side of history." The commencement speaker used the phrase 'be on the right side of history' to mean actively supporting social trends that are currently in fashion. But 'the right side of history' also implies that there are right and wrong sides of history. Indeed there are different…
Gail Jarvis
July 7, 2016
Blog

Through European Eyes

This essay was originally published in Southern Partisan Magazine, 1985. Historians have long misinterpreted the responses of Europeans to the events of the American War Between the States. One of the earli­est cases in point was Karl Marx, who considered himself a scientific historian and a knowledgeable commentator on the great American Crisis. Writing on December 12, 1862, about the…
Paul Gottfried
July 6, 2016
Review Posts

Transcendentalism: The New England Heresy

In 1855 Putnam's Monthly carried an article by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson describing an African village. The vil­lagers, according to Higginson, were "active, commercial geniuses," who enjoyed "a remarkable language, and an even more remarkable recollection of proverbs." In fact, they resembled New Englanders. They were mechanically inventive and commercially fruitful. Their advanced culture was described by Higginson in…
Otto Scott
July 5, 2016
Blog

American Counter-Revolution

A Review of The American Counter Revolution: A Retreat From Liberty, 1783-1800, by Larry E. Tise, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania: Stackpole Books, 1999, 634 pages. A good historian ought to make it clear where he is coming from rather than assume an impossible Olympian objectivity. Then, if he has handled his evidence honestly, he has fulfilled the demands of his craft—whether or…
Clyde Wilson
July 4, 2016
Podcast

Podcast Episode 33

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, June 27 - July 1, 2016. Topics: Brexit, Nullification, Southern Culture, Boxing https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-33
Brion McClanahan
July 2, 2016
Blog

The South: Land of Heavyweight Boxing Champions

The South in the twentieth century has embraced any number of northern athletic imports and made them her own. Arguably, the South has produced the premier basketball player in Michael Jordan, the top baseball player in Ty Cobb, and the greatest football player in Jim Brown. Boxing, however, is not a sport that one associates with Southern bred champions. The…
John Devanny
July 1, 2016
Blog

June Top 10

The ten best for June 2016.  Read 'em again. 1. Oh Say Can You See...Another One Bites the Dust by David McCallister 2. How (and Why) to Dress Like a (Southern) Conservative, Part I by Dan E. Phillips 3. Who Will Be Our Monuments Men? by Lunelle McCallister 4. The Theology of Secession by M.E. Bradford 5. Jefferson Davis: A…
Brion McClanahan
July 1, 2016