Monthly Archives

July 2026

Blog

Emy-Lou Biedenharn: International Singing Sensation

In the world today, there are well-known singing competitions on major television stations that help launch singers to national and international fame. For the sweet Southern gal Emy-Lou Biendenharn, born in 1902 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, those were not options.  She had a more difficult path to travel.  Yet walk it she did, and with the typical strength and grace of…
Walt Garlington
July 24, 2026
Blog

Franklin and Jefferson

When Thomas Jefferson submitted his fair copy of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress, he was unnerved at the prospect of members of the Congress, scrutinizing his document and suggesting changes. While the Congress was mulling over Jefferson’s Fair Copy of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)—who himself was part of the Congress-appointed, five-member committee to…
M. Andrew Holowchak
July 22, 2026
Blog

Music in the House of Davis

There is a rosewood Knabe piano at Beauvoir, the Jefferson Davis home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, that has survived more than most Americans could bear. Hurricane Katrina lifted it from the front parlor and deposited it in the limbs of an oak tree on the grounds. Restorers could not save it. But there it sits still, in the presidential…
Tom Daniel
July 21, 2026
Blog

The “Slave Power” You Say?

Old myths die hard. One of the oldest with its roots firmly in the sectional crisis of the nineteenth century is the belief in the existence of the "Slave Power." This uniquely American conspiracy theory, found mostly among the folks of the Midwest, posited that Southern slaveholders were bent on spreading the institution of slavery into the territories and even…
John Devanny
July 20, 2026
Blog

The Anti-Federalists, America’s Unsung Heroes, Predicted Evil Empire & The Imperial Presidency

On the eve of the federal convention, and following its adjournment in September of 1787, the Anti-Federalists made the case that the Constitution makers in Philadelphia had exceeded the mandate they were given to amend the Articles of Confederation, and nothing more. The Federal Constitution augured ill for freedom, argued the Anti-Federalists. These unsung heroes had warned early Americans of…
Ilana Mercer
July 17, 2026
Blog

Young Washington

The movie covers George Washington’s life from the death of his father at age 11 through The Battle of Monongahela and its aftermath. Having read the 7-volume George Washington Pulitzer Prize book by Douglas Southall Freeman I will review the events depicted in the movie. The movie was enjoyable, but liberties were taken with the dates of some events, and…
Jeff Wolverton
July 16, 2026
Blog

Calhoun’s Answer to the Abolition Petitions

Originally published at Mises.org The historian Clyde Wilson has observed that John C. Calhoun’s congressional speeches are “always dealing with a real and known audience and with a subject requiring decision.” Calhoun was not merely expounding on theoretical or abstract points. This is important in understanding his response to the abolition petitions, including the one colloquially described as the “positive…
Wanjiru Njoya
July 15, 2026
Blog

Where Were Your People in 1776?

"If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree." -Michael Crichton, Timeline The quote attributed to Karl Marx, “If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded,” also applies. As does Orwell’s “Who controls the past controls the future.…
Matthew Conard
July 14, 2026
Blog

The Meaning of the South in History Transcends 250

The number 250 is an arbitrary number for a Southerner.  The life of our people did not begin in 1776, but in 1607.  Dixie celebrated her 250th anniversary in 1857, though few probably paid it the attention it deserved due to the violence being threatened against Southrons by the Yankees at the time.  We are now in our 419th year…
Walt Garlington
July 13, 2026
Blog

French Huguenots in Dixie

The colonial South was a stronghold of traditional Protestantism. Although religiously diverse and generally tolerant by the standards of the era, its culture was largely shaped by a distinctly Protestant worldview. Among these Protestant settlers were the French Huguenots, whose presence in the Southeast, though aggregately relatively small, left a notable imprint between 1660 and 1800. The French Huguenots were…
Cole Branham
July 10, 2026
Blog

Dabney Was Right About Music, Too

Robert Lewis Dabney stood before the graduating class of Hampden-Sydney College in June of 1882 and told them, with the measured certainty of a man who had already watched one civilization end, that another was ending around them. He was sixty-two years old, a Presbyterian theologian, Stonewall Jackson's chief of staff and biographer, and one of the most unsparing critics…
Tom Daniel
July 9, 2026
Blog

Rawlins Lowndes and His Prophetic Warning Against the Constitution

Rawlins Lowndes was one of the most significant and yet least remembered figures of the American founding era, a South Carolina lawyer, planter, jurist, and governor who became his state's most forceful opponent of the U.S. Constitution during the ratification debates of 1788. He is best remembered for his prophetic warning that if the Constitution were adopted, "the sun, of…
Jose Nino
July 8, 2026
Blog

Fox in the Dixie House

Laura Ingraham, one of Fox’s pseudo-conservative “Republican” (not republican) taxers of bygone days who collects information the way so (too) many do: from silliness distilled from artless rumor, especially from Southern history, where Yankees design “historical” Ponzi schemes that Bernie Madoff would admire i.e it is meant to sound good but is always a lie! In a typical feeble attempt…
Paul H. Yarbrough
July 7, 2026
Blog

Who’s Affraid of the Dunning School?

Reflections on The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction (University Press of Kentucky, 2013) edited by John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery It is said that history is written by the victors. This assertion is certainly borne out by the current teaching and interpretation of American history. The Reconstruction period is a particular example of the…
Karol Mazur
July 6, 2026
Blog

America: Made in Virginia

Virginia was the first, the largest, and the most populous of the original thirteen British colonies in North America. Even before 1776, Virginia was moving toward republican institutions. During the period from the 1730s through the 1750s, power there shifted from the appointed Council to the elected House of Burgesses. As well as the large planters, the small farmers were…
Timothy A. Duskin
July 2, 2026
Blog

Is Jefferson “The Most Overrated Person in American History”?

In American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997), Pauline Maier takes herself to advance the points that Karl Becker wanted to advance in his book on the Declaration, some 70 years earlier, but was prohibited from advancing, because of the conservative time in which he lived. She begins with astonishment that the Declaration of Independence is today treated as…
M. Andrew Holowchak
July 1, 2026