Monthly Archives

April 2026

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Lee Returns to Richmond

Originally published at A Memoir of the Occupation Richmond, Virginia April 15, 1985 It was raining again. Grey clouds scudding the city’s ruins standing in stark silhouette against the colorless sky. Jagged shards of warehouse riding from the ruined James River waterfront; the business and residential districts block after block of fire-blackened brick, the Tredegar Iron Works no more than…
Enoch Cade
April 30, 2026
Blog

Reflections on the Alamo and Texas Independence

(Continued from Part I) After the fall of the Alamo in San Antonio on March 6, 1836, a disconsolate but resolved General Sam Houston ordered the torching and evacuation of Gonzales, so as to deny resources to the advancing Mexican forces. He then ordered a strategic withdrawal of his own army, as well as that of Colonel James W. Fannin…
Miles Foltermann
April 29, 2026
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Reluctant Secessionist

Secession, grasped in its political sense, is typically defined as a formal withdrawal of one body, qua political state or qua a nascent political state, from another political state of which it is a member. The reason for withdrawal is customarily that what bound the lesser body to the larger political state is no longer binding or that the relationship has become parasitic or toxic. The paradigmatic illustration is the secession of 11…
M. Andrew Holowchak
April 28, 2026
Blog

The Lost Cause

Originally published at From the Desk of Jon Harris Upon the Soviet Union’s dismissal of 146 historians from Czech universities, Milan Hübl, among those dismissed, is said to have observed, “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory.” Hübl went on to predict that after a “new history” takes the place of the old “the nation…
Jonathan Harris
April 27, 2026
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The Sons of Erin and the Sons of Dixie

It’s not unusual for music to preserve historical memory, but it is surprising sometimes where that memory ends up surfacing. One such instance appears in the work of Irish balladeer Derek Warfield, whose songs normally focus on Dublin and Belfast, but in this particular instance, he turns his attention to Dixie. This might seem like a head-scratcher of an unlikely…
Tom Daniel
April 24, 2026
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“Its Brave and Worthy Colonel”: The Life of Felix Labatut

The first man to command a large, organized group of black troops during the Civil War did so for the South. No doubt many are unaware of this fact, given the dismissive treatment often given by modern historians to the Regiment of Native Guards, a volunteer home guard unit that existed in New Orleans from May 1861 to April 1862.…
Shane Anderson
April 23, 2026
Blog

Here Lie Your Brethren

Reflections on the Alamo and Texas Independence, Part I In March of 1930, the former President of the United States, Calvin Coolidge, and his wife Grace had occasion to travel through the State of Texas during a leisurely train trip. During an excursion to San Antonio, they were treated to a private tour of the Alamo. It was here that…
Miles Foltermann
April 22, 2026
Blog

What Makes A Historian?

Some readers have encouraged me to identify as a historian, despite my not having a degree in history. For a long time, I have been reluctant to do so, thinking it would be both presumptuous and misleading, but I have recently changed my mind. Here is why. I think the very first seed was planted when I was interviewed by…
Jeb Smith
April 21, 2026
Blog

Gone With The Wind

Originally published at Reckonin.com At the University of South Carolina is a striking classical Greek building known as the South Caroliniana Library. It was built in 1840 by the outstanding architect Robert Mills and was said to be the first American college building for a separate library. The building anchors one side of the open end of a “horseshoe” of…
Clyde Wilson
April 20, 2026
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Southerners for the King

Never has history been so perverted, never did misrepresentations so effectively deceive. Lewis L. Bogart, United Empire Loyalists (UEL) descendant, Adolphustown, Upper Canada, 1884 The American Revolution in the southern colonies was a ferocious civil war, particularly in the back county.  The 250-year anniversary of the 1776 Declaration of Independence falls on the present year, 2026.  Contemporaries estimated that the…
Charles Roberts, MD
April 17, 2026
Blog

Bring Back the Southern Gentleman

Originally published at 1819News.com There is a man disappearing. Not suddenly – the way a candle gutters – but slowly, the way a word falls out of a language. No one notices until someone reaches for it and finds only air. I knew him once. We all did, or thought we did, which amounts to the same thing in a…
Allen Mendenhall
April 16, 2026
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Constitutional Government and the Tenth Amendment

Originally published at Mises.org In their book Who Killed the Constitution, Thomas E. Woods and Kevin C.R. Gutzman argue that the demise of constitutionalism—the principle of limited government—is by no means a recent development. It can be traced back several decades, “close to a century.” It is not the work of just one political party or another, but an assault…
Wanjiru Njoya
April 15, 2026
Blog

Jefferson Could Play

We love to affectionately remember Thomas Jefferson as a mind detached from the body. Many accounts present him as a man of paper, of correspondence, of carefully arranged ideas set down in elegant prose. The familiar image is that of the “Sage of Monticello,” seated at a writing desk, producing language that would echo across the centuries. That image is…
Tom Daniel
April 14, 2026
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Jefferson’s Bill for Religious Freedom

Jefferson’s most significant writing apropos of freedom of religion is his Bill for Religious Freedom, Bill 82 of the 126 bills proposed by him, Wythe, and Pendleton for the revisal of Virginia’s code of laws in 1776. Dumas Malone states in Jefferson and the Rights of Man, “Belief in the freedom of religion—which to him meant freedom of the mind—lay…
M. Andrew Holowchak
April 13, 2026
Blog

The Tempo of a Civilization

Why does Southern music move the way it does? I’m not talking about a particular instrument it favors or a particular chord progression it follows. I’m talking about why Southern music leans into such a smooth shuffle groove instead of velocity, why it settles back instead of lunging forward, and why it stretches instead of snaps. And why, if one…
Tom Daniel
April 10, 2026
Blog

A Southern Future?

This piece was originally published at Reckonin.com Rather than continuing my detailed history of the Southern people I wish to comment on our situation at the moment, 2026, and prospects for the future. We have never been in greater danger of losing our identity as of the South. The population has changed. There are rust belt refugees. Some of these…
Clyde Wilson
April 9, 2026
Blog

The Strange Career of the Fourteenth Amendment

When the first session of the 39th Congress met in December 1865, Radical Republicans were out for blood. President Lincoln had been assassinated in April and the new president, Andrew Johnson, had crafted what he thought was a good plan of reconstructing the South, based on what he meant by reconstruction and that was to restore those states back to…
Ryan Walters
April 8, 2026
Blog

Distorting the Declaration

No "conservative" has done more damage to the interpretation of the American past than Harry Jaffa. He spent his career attaching the conservative movement to Abraham Lincoln and more importantly to a distorted version of the Declaration of Independence. Modern conservatism relies on Jaffa's version of the Declaration, and with the 250th anniversary of the adoption of Jefferson's work this…
Abbeville Institute
April 7, 2026
Blog

Cultural Reawakening is Not Impossible

Powerful people have conspired to erase Southern culture over the last several decades, many, but not all, of them of Northern extraction.  George Orwell would recognize the methods used.  Many historical truths have been thrown down the Memory Hole, while the honorable men of Dixie – Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, John C. Calhoun, and many others – are subjected…
Walt Garlington
April 6, 2026
Blog

The Sound of Southern Easter

The South has produced many distinctive musical traditions, but few are as recognizable or as beloved as the Southern gospel quartet. I’ve written many essays about Sacred Harp and gospel, but I have inexcusably written very little about the Southern gospel quartet. And what better time of year than Easter to celebrate one of the most iconic sounds of the…
Tom Daniel
April 3, 2026
Blog

What Can We Learn From the Confederacy?

April is Confederate History or Heritage Month in six States. Virginia used to recognize the month as well, but no longer. Many Americans tend to believe that "Southern history" is nothing more than "Confederate history." That would relegate the history of the region to a failed four year attempt at independence. Drew Gilpiln Faust, former President of Harvard University and…
Brion McClanahan
April 2, 2026
Blog

Melungeons

What is a Melungeon? Deep in southern Appalachia, there is a people whose history is clouded with ambiguity, but also intense distinction. Their exact origin is relatively unknown, but they have called these particular mountains home since well before the American War for Independence. The Melungeon (pronounced Meh-Lun-Jin) people are a historically distinct group whose roots lie in the rugged…
Cole Branham
April 1, 2026