Monthly Archives

September 2026

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Lincoln and Total War

Who has not heard of Wounded Knee? Most know at least the general facts surrounding what is acknowledged as an atrocity committed by the army of the United States. On December 29th, 1890, the 7th Cavalry surrounded a band of Ghost Dancers—a spiritual movement of the Lakota Sioux under a Chief named Big Foot—near Wounded Knee Creek. The soldiers demanded…
Valerie Protopapas
September 30, 2026
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History by Hair?

Finally, it is out! The much-ballyhooed book History by a Hair! The book is motivated by a 15-year DNA study by Richard Green, Samuel Vohr, and 12 others, including the Smithsonian’s own Richard Kurin, who prompted the study and wrote the book. The book, published by Crown, has the following write-up: The definitive account of how a discarded strand of…
M. Andrew Holowchak
September 29, 2026
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The Alabama Heathens

The Alabama Heathens are a Southern rock band from North Alabama in the least marketable sense of the term. They didn’t assemble in a conference room somewhere to look like a region. They formed because some boys from Huntsville, Priceville, and Muscle Shoals kept ending up in the same joints with guitars, and then decided the joints were the whole…
Tom Daniel
September 28, 2026
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Saving the Living South

Debating 19th-century history, constitutional theory, and the causes of the War Between the States remains a central focus for many Southern commentators. Unpacking the complexities of the 1860s and challenging popular historical myths is a long-standing intellectual endeavor. However, an overwhelming focus on the past has created a dangerous blind spot: while activists spend their energy arguing over historical narratives…
Joshua Gilmer
September 25, 2026
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A Criticism Wrought with Praise: Southern Backwardness in the Age of Progress

“There are great defects in that character—peculiar defects of accident; but there is also the sum of many virtues. The people of the South are brave to a fault; they are generous to credulity, polite, hospitable, cherishing many noble virtues which the commercial spirit of the age has elsewhere outgrown; but they have all the peculiar faults of an untraveled…
Ian Richardson
September 24, 2026
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Distorted History Courtesy of “Taliban” Ty

The PragerU video “Was the Civil War About Slavery?”  has floated around for a few years. The speaker is a bald-headed individual reminiscent of the character in The Outer Limits episode entitled “The Sixth Finger”; however, the advanced intelligence level of the character in the show is not a factor in this comparison.  This individual -- Ty Seidule -- is…
John M. Taylor
September 23, 2026
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Cultural Heritage and Collective Memory

I grew up going to Civil War reenactments and commemoration events. As far back as I can remember, I always had an interest in the solemn pageantry of it all and loved talking with the men who were honoring their own ancestors in uniform. Having ancestors on both sides of the conflict myself, I had a sincere respect for what…
Cole Branham
September 22, 2026
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Thomas Jordan

Research and Writing Needed for Southern History, Part 2 Of many interesting Confederate characters one of the most colorful was Brig. Gen. Thomas Jordan, a brilliant and multi-talented soldier who deserves a full biography.  Since some of his career was in military intelligence (then known as “secret service”), in the nature of the case research might present some problems. Born…
Clyde Wilson
September 21, 2026
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Yankee Antinomianism at Work Again in Massachusetts

Yankees have an inverted sense of justice in which the victim is blameworthy and guilty of wrong and the perpetrator is innocent.  The Lindsay Clancy murder trial in Massachusetts, which has captured the attention of so many people, is an excellent example of this. Most media outlets have tried to generalize this trial as a part of ‘American culture’, just…
Walt Garlington
September 18, 2026
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What Was the Lost Cause?

Originally posted at Mindy Esposito's Substack. “That’s just the Lost Cause Myth.” But when I ask someone to tell me what the “Lost Cause Myth” actually was, all I hear is crickets… Still, I get some version of that sentence hurled as an accusation all the time. Sometimes it lands on me. Sometimes I watch it thrown at someone else.…
Mindy Esposito
September 17, 2026
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Being Andrew Burstein

A review of Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026) by Andrew Burstein “It is a truism that every attempt at history writing and biography is an improvisation, including this one.” ~Andrew Burstein “Improvising” is equivalent to “winging it.” I cannot agree that all history is improvisation. I cannot even concede that improvisation ought to be acceptable in any part…
M. Andrew Holowchak
September 16, 2026
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Omnipotent Moral Busybodies

C. S. Lewis wrote that "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own…
Tom Daniel
September 15, 2026
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Northern Men of Southern Principles

Research and Writing Needed for Southern History, Part 1 The standard interpretation of the War between the States is that the North was righteously united in Lincoln’s war on the South except for a few sneaky “Copperheads,” a tiny minority of disreputable conspirators. Like most prevalent Union assumptions about the war, this is false, a belief made   acceptable only in…
Clyde Wilson
September 14, 2026
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The Training Ground for the War Between the States

In his last essay, the writer described the military campaigns of the War with Mexico in Texas, New Mexico, and California. In the present essay, he will describe the military campaigns of that war in Mexico. The description of these campaigns will include an emphasis on that war as a training ground for the War Between the States. Just as…
Timothy A. Duskin
September 11, 2026
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Reconstruction and the Limits of Federal Power

When Americans recall Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, they often recall a decisive battlefield victory followed by a harder contest over political authority, public trust, and safety. The United States can remove a regime, finance institutions, and deploy soldiers. It cannot simply decree a durable political order. Long before these foreign wars, the United States faced that problem at home. Reconstruction…
Jose Nino
September 10, 2026
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A More Perfect Slaveholders’ Union?

A review of  Creating a More Perfect Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, the Constitution, and Secession in Antebellum America (University of Kansas Press, 2023) by Peter Radan As with all creditable works of scholarship, Peter Radan begins with a question, why was a war required to end slavery in the United States when it was ended by legal means elsewhere? The answer…
John Devanny
September 9, 2026
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Southern Music is Not a Purity Test

When a life as public as Dolly Parton's closes, the temptation is to sort the woman by the last arguments attached to her name. The internet-fueled predictable reaction is to give her a cultural Judgment Day based on cherry-picked items of discontent while ignoring her contributions to both music and the South as a whole. That is a poor way…
Tom Daniel
September 8, 2026
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Two Southerners Who Stayed Southern

Originally published at From The Desk of Jon Harris On August 25, 2026, Dolly Parton passed away. Six days later, so did Wendell Berry. Both were known for different things. Dolly was an entertainer. Berry was a novelist and activist. But their deaths represent the closing of a chapter for the American South. During their lifetimes, the Kentucky farmer and…
Jonathan Harris
September 7, 2026
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Donald Davidson and the Ballad Tradition

Donald Davidson is remembered as a poet and a polemicist. He was a founding member of the Fugitive poets at Vanderbilt, a contributor to I'll Take My Stand, and one of the most uncompromising voices of twentieth-century Southern Agrarianism. That reputation is accurate as far as it goes, but it leaves out something that ran through nearly the whole of…
Tom Daniel
September 4, 2026
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A Walk to the Park

The evening sun was flooding in through the two big windows that my feet were pointed towards as I lay on the couch for a nap. I must have fallen asleep around five o’ clock, shortly after getting home from work. I assume it was then since the sun was still high enough to not make closing the blinds necessary…
Ian Richardson
September 3, 2026
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The War with Mexico

There were five wars for independence in the history of North America (i.e., Anglo America). The first was the American Revolutionary War, or War for American Independence (1775-1783). In that war, the United States of America won their independence from Great Britain. The second was the War of 1812 (1812-1815), also known as the Second War for Independence, because the…
Timothy A. Duskin
September 2, 2026
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Faking the Lost Cause Before It’s Lost

A Review of Kate: The Journal of a Confederate Nurse (LSU Press, 1998) edited by Richard Barksdale Harwell Kate Cumming was born in Scotland in 1835. She was very young when her family immigrated to Canada and then moved to the prosperous port of Mobile, Alabama, where she grew up. In April of 1862, she volunteered to join a group…
Karen Stokes
September 1, 2026