Monthly Archives

August 2026

Blog

From Founders to Politicians

A review of From Union to Empire: Essays in the Jeffersonian Tradition (Shotwell Publishing, 2026) by Clyde Wilson From Union to Empire, originally published in 2003 by The Foundation for American Education and more recently issued in a new edition by Shotwell Publishing is one of those rare books which does not disappoint the reader who is drawn by the…
Brett Moffatt
August 31, 2026
Blog

The Forgotten Czech Founders of Central Texas

Drive the 90 minutes between Houston and Austin and the land begins to whisper in another language. A road sign reads Praha. Another reads Moravia, then Dubina, then Hostyn. The cotton gins have gone quiet and the dance halls sag at the corners, but the names hold. They belong to people who crossed an ocean, buried half their company along…
Jose Nino
August 28, 2026
Blog

Whose Portrait on Your Wall?

I’m wearing a shirt with Francis Marion displayed proudly on the back. I have portraits of our region and nation’s folklore and heroes hanging on my walls. I have lapel pins of the same. Other shirts have their quotes on them. Without a concerted effort in doing so, I accumulated images and the words of our region’s mythos. I do…
Matthew Conard
August 27, 2026
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Poplar Forest: Thomas Jefferson’s Architectural Play-toy

Granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge writes to early biographer Henry S. Randall in 1856, in the latter’s The Life of Thomas Jefferson, of Poplar Forest: The house at Poplar Forest was very pretty and pleasant. It was of brick, one story in front, and, owing to the falling of the ground, two in the rear. It was an exact octagon, with…
M. Andrew Holowchak
August 26, 2026
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Jefferson Davis As Master of Brierfield

Some months ago, I was busy defending Jefferson Davis on X, which we all know is filled with the most knowledgeable historians the country has to offer, when one extremist proceeded to tell me that Davis raped and lynched blacks. When asked for evidence of such rubbish, I was truly shocked and astounded that he could provide none. Sarcasm aside,…
Ryan Walters
August 25, 2026
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Sacred Steel and Southern Rock

I came to Sacred Steel late, and I came to it by accident. I'd been going back through my list of American musical traditions that are actually Southern, checking for anything I'd left out, and Sacred Steel was one of the names that turned up as a gap. I didn't know the tradition at all going in, so I did…
Tom Daniel
August 24, 2026
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The Myth of the Righteous Cause

History is the propaganda of the victorious. - Voltaire The ubiquitous claim that the so-called “Civil War” (which it was not), was “about” slavery (which it was not), and the “righteous” North went to war against the “traitorous” South to free the slaves (which it did not) is the most bald-faced lie of American history, and, as Thomas Carlyle stated…
H.V. Traywick, Jr.
August 21, 2026
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Carpetbaggers Seeks to Help Mississippi Deal with the Past

“A meddling Yankee is God’s worst creation; he cannot run his own affairs correctly, but is constantly interfering in the affairs of others, and he is always ready to repent of everyone’s sins, but his own.” So opined a North Carolina newspaper in 1854, a quote also attributed to Confederate general Daniel Harvey Hill. And yet, 172 years later, Southerners…
Ryan Walters
August 20, 2026
Blog

Stop with the Drive By History

Originally published at Ms. Esposito's Substack. At best, you were not told the whole story. At worst, you were deliberately lied to. Either way, you have it wrong. Nashville, Tennessee For more than a century and a half, Americans have been trained to repeat one sentence. One slogan. One simplified conclusion. “The war was only about slavery.” Say it enough…
Mindy Esposito
August 19, 2026
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Dixie in Decay

The following is an abridged summary of the first three chapters of Dixie in Decay (and How to Heal Her) by Elias John Ryan Dixie is in decay. Our tradition of self governance is being flattened by an overreaching federal government. A once vibrant culture is being overridden by technology and mass immigration. Our economy is being corrupted by crony…
Elias Ryan
August 18, 2026
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B.F. White and the Sacred Harp

History tends to remember songs, and is considerably less interested in the people who made sure there was somewhere to sing them. Benjamin Franklin White is one of those people. Born in Union County, South Carolina, in 1800, he spent the better part of his adult life in Hamilton, Georgia, where he taught singing schools, compiled tunebooks, presided over conventions,…
Tom Daniel
August 17, 2026
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Yankee Way of War

About this time every year, cruise ship historians like to trot out articles justifying the mass slaughter of innocents in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. America had no choice but to drop the atom bombs, the basic argument goes. Mainstream media coverage in Japan tends to leave the subject, “America,” out altogether. It was war in the abstract that is to blame,…
Jason Morgan
August 14, 2026
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If Jefferson’s Paternity of Sally’s Kids Is So Very Well Supported by Evidence, Why Won’t the Pro-Paternity People Debate the Issue?

Some two months ago, I asked historian Courtney Crowley, who has become a member of our team at “Thomas Jefferson Lives” (aka, The Real Thomas Jefferson), if she could email four persons in the “Onufian Family”—Annette Gordon-Reed, Andrew Burstein, Kevin Gutzman, and of course “dude” himself, Peter Onuf—and ask whether any would participate in a debate on Jefferson’s avowed paternity.…
M. Andrew Holowchak
August 13, 2026
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Inheriting Gold

Many years ago, I asked myself, “Who am I” then “what do I know about myself?”  That turned into exploration about “who I am,” which in turn, evolved into “where do I come from” and finally “who did I come from?”  I think today people are caught up so much on the first question, that the development of the idea…
Harvey Lee Nix
August 12, 2026
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Moses Waddel: The Teacher of the South

If anyone in Dixie is worthy of the title ‘Teacher of the South’, it is Reverend Moses Waddel.  A summary of the major Southern figures who attended the academy he established at Willington, South Carolina, as students would be convincing enough: ‘Among the names are William H. Crawford, a pupil in the Appling school and an assistant at Willington; John…
Walt Garlington
August 11, 2026
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Jefferson Davis as President

If we could travel back to the summer of 1860, a time when the two political parties were busy lining up acceptable candidates, preparing for national conventions to nominate someone for President, and trying to hold their fragile components together, little did people know the political chaos that was about to unfold throughout the year, and little did they know…
Ryan Walters
August 10, 2026
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What if South Carolina Really Seceded to Protect Slavery?

From the Jefferson Davis X Account. (Let’s Play Devil’s Advocate and Watch the Whole Argument Collapse Anyway) Look, I’ll bite. Let’s pretend—just for the sheer entertainment value—that South Carolina’s secession in December 1860 was nothing but a cold-blooded plot to safeguard the institution of slavery. No states’-rights talk. No tariff gripes. No constitutional compact theory. Just pure, unadulterated slave-power paranoia.…
Abbeville Institute
August 7, 2026
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The Sacred Ordinary

There is a habit in modern life of searching for meaning only in the dramatic and flamboyant. We are told to look for fulfillment in great achievements, grand adventures, public recognition, and constant reinvention. The ordinary day, by contrast, is treated as something to escape. Routine is drudgery. Repetition is boredom. Domestic life is confinement. Work is merely transactional. The…
Tom Daniel
August 6, 2026
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States Rights and Federal Powers

When debating the causes of the War to Prevent Southern Independence, sometimes a Southern partisan will argue the Confederacy fought for "States’ Rights." Partisans on the other side will almost always respond that it was states' rights to own slaves. An immediate objection to this was that States did not own slaves, people did. The second and more substantive objection…
Jonathan White
August 5, 2026
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The Nashville Prodigy Who Tried to Conquer Latin America

Long before the world knew him as a conqueror, William Walker was a small, quiet, almost bookish boy on the streets of Nashville. He entered the world on May 8, 1824, the son of a Scottish immigrant merchant, and grew up inside a prosperous and politically connected Tennessee family. His mind raced far ahead of his years. According to The…
Jose Nino
August 4, 2026
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Can We Trust Madison Hemings’ Testimony in the Putative Jefferson-Hemings Affair?

Harvard professor Annette Gordon-Reed—who has won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, for her book The Hemingses of Monticello (2009)—is widely acknowledged to be the world’s foremost authority on the nature of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his toothsome slave, Sally Hemings. In chapters 13 through 16 of that book and in several subsequent interviews and talks, she goes…
M. Andrew Holowchak
August 3, 2026