Monthly Archives

January 2026

Blog

The Mystery of the Beale Treasure

In 1885, there was published in Lynchburg by James B. Ward a small manuscript, titled The Beale Papers, Containing Authentic Statements Regarding the Treasure Buried in 1819 and 1821 near Bufords, in Bedford County, Virginia, and Which Has Never Been Recovered. The pamphlet, which sold for 50 cents, contained three ciphertexts. A ciphertext is a matter of encrypting or encoding…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 30, 2026
Blog

How a Spanish Officer Became the South’s Most Celebrated Filibuster

Narciso López de Urriola entered the world on November 2, 1797, in Caracas, Venezuela, born to a family of prosperous Basque merchants who enjoyed considerable colonial privilege. His relatives navigated the turbulent Venezuelan Wars of Independence by pledging allegiance to the Spanish crown. History would deliver a bitter irony when this young man, who would eventually epitomize Caribbean liberation movements,…
Jose Nino
January 29, 2026
Blog

Dolly Parton and Southern Endurance

Greatness. In Southern music, “greatness” is rarely the result of innovation alone. More often, it emerges from endurance—specifically, the capacity to move through cultural, commercial, and institutional pressure without surrendering. The South has produced countless musicians whose work crossed boundaries of region, genre, race, and class, but far fewer who managed to do so while retaining control over their voice,…
Tom Daniel
January 28, 2026
Blog

Why Forrest Encouraged an End to Racial Conflict

There is no better place to begin understanding the party politics of the post-reconstruction South than with the Fourth of July celebrations organized by the Independent Order of Pole-Bearers in Memphis, Tennessee, 1875. The Pole-Bearers were a “fraternal society,” or mutual aid society, for the welfare and defense of black people. In attendance at this event were various former Confederate…
Wanjiru Njoya
January 27, 2026
Blog

Southern Conservatism vs. Ideology

American conservatism and Southern conservatism are different. This statement may seem a little confusing since the South is part of America and, besides a brief period in the 1860s, has never existed separately from the United States. However, the society which developed south of Mason and Dixon’s line has a history and tradition stretching far back into the colonial days…
A.A. Wayne
January 23, 2026
Blog

Conflicting Visions of America

Originally published at the Alabama Gazette. “The contest is really for empire on the side of the North, and for independence on that of the South, and in this respect we recognize an exact analogy between the North and the Government of George III, and the South and the Thirteen Revolted Provinces. These opinions may be wrong but they are…
John M. Taylor
January 22, 2026
Blog

The New South, 1877-1919

Originally published at Reckonin.com Historians have found as a useful periodisation “the New South,” beginning with the withdrawal of the last federal occupation troops and the end of Reconstruction and ending with World War I and the election as President Woodrow Wilson, Southern-born and bred, although not very Southern in most of his thinking. Speaking broadly of this period we…
Clyde Wilson
January 21, 2026
Blog

I Don’t Want Christmas to End

I Don’t Want Christmas to End, the 2021 Christmas album by Zach Williams, doesn’t feel as much seasonal as it feels Southern. Recorded at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Zach Williams’ first full-length holiday record does a lot more than borrow the iconography of classic American music as it absorbs the essence of the iconic studio that shaped American…
Tom Daniel
January 20, 2026
Blog

Remembering Robert E. Lee

When Yale history professor David Blight wrote Race and Reunion in 2001, he argued that his attempt to discuss how Americans “remembered” the Civil War offered a new interpretation of the conflict. He termed it “memory studies.” Blight thought that Southerners—and for a time Northerners as well—remembered it wrong, and they did so consciously: Reconciliation joined arms with white supremacy…
Brion McClanahan
January 19, 2026
Blog

Regional Roots in a Global Age

In the twenty-first century, global interconnectedness has become the dominant paradigm of social, economic, and political life. Cosmopolitan ideals, such as global citizenship, transnational governance, and the celebration of universal human rights, have been championed as markers of progress and modernity. Yet, this enthusiasm for a borderless world often comes at the expense of local and regional identities, which are…
Clifford A. Bates, Jr.
January 16, 2026
Blog

The Long Battle Against the South Enters 2026

There have rarely been long-lasting Eras of Good Feelings in the United States.  Clashes between the various cultures existing within the union have more often than not been the norm – clashes over tariffs, wars, abortion, slavery, monetary policy, over the very nature of the union itself. Those clashes are not by any means absent as a new year is…
Walt Garlington
January 15, 2026
Blog

A Venezuelan on Southern Soil

In the tangled web of modern geopolitics, where Venezuela and the United States circle each other with increasing hostility, a forgotten chapter whispers of a time when a Venezuelan patriot walked the American South soil not as an adversary but as an admirer, a student, and ultimately a brother in revolution. His name was Francisco de Miranda, and his story…
Jose Nino
January 14, 2026
Blog

Calhoun’s Doctrine of the Concurrent Majority

Originally published at Mises.org In the absence of effective checks on government power, all governments tend towards tyranny. This explains why John C. Calhoun defended the constitutional principle of limited government, emphasizing the importance of restraining the power of the majority. Calhoun argued that the aim of a constitution is not merely to confer power, but also to restrain it,…
Wanjiru Njoya
January 13, 2026
Blog

Economic Problems of the Southeast

Originally published at Folkchain.org The remains of the Dutch-owned American ENKA plant cover the land in Lowland, Tennessee, like a steel skeleton picked clean. The smokestacks rise red against the sky, two of them, maybe a hundred fifty feet high. The parking lot has cracked enough to let a little wilderness in, an archipelago of grass and weeds pushing up…
Chase Steely
January 12, 2026
Blog

Uncomfortable Truths for the Righteous Cause Myth

The following are uncomfortable truths for "Righteous Cause Mythologists:" 1. Africans created, organized, and supplied the international slave trade without any European involvement or direction, and Northers profited heavily from the institution. 2. Southerners established most of the early abolition societies in the United States. 3. "Jim Crow" segregation developed in Connecticut and was pervasive in New England in the…
Brion McClanahan
January 9, 2026
Blog

What Ambrose Bierce Said About “Confederaphobia”

Ambrose G. Bierce was born in Ohio in 1842. When the War Between the States came in 1861, he enlisted as a Union soldier in the 9th Indiana Infantry. He fought in numerous battles, including Philippi, Rich Mountain, and Shiloh. He suffered a severe brain injury at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain which caused him to resign from the army,…
Timothy A. Duskin
January 8, 2026
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The Mysterious Relationship Between Thomas Jefferson and Black Mathematician Benjamin Banneker

Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806), the son of freed slaves, was a natural scientist and mathematician. Born in Baltimore County, Maryland, little is known of the exact course of his life. He appears to have been mostly self-educated. His early years of manhood were spent mostly on his 100-acre tobacco farm, owned by his parents, freed slaves. He was, however, a tinkerer…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 7, 2026
Blog

An Open Letter to the University of the South

The University of the South appears poised to remove many, if not all, Confederate names and images from its campus and memory because they may smack of Southern treason/secession and slavery. Such removal is a poorly conceived idea. First, secession (i.e., "independence") is probably the one, true and great gift that America has offered Mankind. Second, slavery is an American,…
W.E. Shofner
January 6, 2026
Blog

The Foreign Policy Wisdom America Ignored from John C. Calhoun

Few American statesmen traveled a more remarkable foreign policy journey than South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun (1782-1850). The young War Hawk who promised to conquer Canada in four weeks became the elder statesman warning that conquest would destroy the republic itself. Such a foreign policy transformation would seem foreign to present-day public officials, who are completely enthralled by the…
Jose Nino
January 5, 2026