Monthly Archives

October 2026

Blog

The Poles Who Quietly Helped Build the American South

Ask most Americans who built the South and the answer drifts toward the British Isles. English planters claimed the Tidewater, Scots-Irish settlers cleared the backcountry, and Irish laborers dug the canals. Tucked inside that familiar story runs a quieter thread spun by people from the lands of modern Poland, and it stretches from Jamestown to Texas, New Orleans, Baltimore, and…
Jose Nino
October 23, 2026
Blog

The Devil’s Box

Do you have a piano in your church? An organ? A guitar? A bass and drum set? A pedal steel? I’ve visited a lot of churches all over the South covering more denominations than I can count, but I have never once encountered a fiddle in any of them. The fiddle has probably acquired more theological baggage than any other…
Tom Daniel
October 22, 2026
Blog

The Border States in The War and Reconstruction

Research and Writing Needed for Southern History, Part 3. Mainstream history tells us that the Border Southern States were “Unionist” during the great conflict.  It is not true in the sense that is meant. The main factor in the matter was coercion by the U.S. Army. After the North won The War, it was easy to accept the idea of…
Clyde Wilson
October 21, 2026
Blog

Timeless

A review of Time Will Tell: Collected Poems (The University Press of SHSU, 2025) by David Middleton The deaths of Fred Chappell in 2024 and of Wendell Berry this past summer have left a gaping hole not only in Southern letters but in American prosody as a whole.  Their poems, seemingly confined to the hills and hollers and valleys of southwestern North…
Randall Ivey
October 20, 2026
Blog

The State that Seceded After the War was Over

Kentucky never voted to leave the Union, yet it produced an entire rival government, thousands of Confederate soldiers, and a star on the Confederate battle flag. That contradiction makes it one of the strangest states during the Civil War—a place where roughly 25,000 to 40,000 men fought for the Confederacy while somewhere between 74,000 and 125,000, including approximately 24,000 to…
Jose Nino
October 16, 2026
Blog

Jefferson and the Barbary Wars

Thomas Jefferson today is often castigated by “manly” scholars for not being more like George Washington or his aide-de-camp Alexander Hamilton. Though an excellent horseman, those skills were never on display during the American Revolution—especially during the British assault on Virginia during Jefferson’s tenure as governor (1779–1781). Yet that is like criticizing a puffin for being a puffin. Jefferson was…
M. Andrew Holowchak
October 15, 2026
Blog

A Question of Skulls

Even here in Charleston, the city celebrated so lovingly in its pages, Owen Wister’s Lady Baltimore (1906) seems to be the subject of a discreet silence. For some time I was puzzled by this, for the novel has lost little if any of its original charm. While DuBose Heyward's sentimental Porgy is daily fodder for every horse-and-buggy tour guide on…
Jack Trotter
October 14, 2026
Blog

Appalachian Murder Ballads

October is a time when folks put a skeleton on the porch and call it a personality. Plastic gravestones, jack-o-lanterns, spider webs, fog machines, and a playlist that treats death like a party favor. However, the Southern mountains don’t need October for that, because they’ve already got the murder ballads. There are songs about a girl who walked into the…
Tom Daniel
October 13, 2026
Blog

Lincoln and the Constitution

This is how most Americans see America’s 16th President. But, in reality, so much of what most of us “know” about Abraham Lincoln is not only untrue, but a mockery of the truth. Why does this matter? It matters because much of what is wrong with America today—and especially our out-of-control central government—can be traced back to Lincoln’s time and…
Valerie Protopapas
October 12, 2026
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I Came South, but the South Was Receding

I am not a Southerner. Born and raised in northern Illinois, I enjoy crisp autumn weather, pristine blankets of snow, and I hate to sweat. I’m impatient, and small talk annoys me. Yet there are things about Southern culture that appeal to me. Southern Gothic literature, Edgar Allan Poe, the sway of Spanish moss and willows, and the way time…
M.A. Kleen
October 9, 2026
Blog

The Melancholy Conclusion

On March 1, 1836, the delegates at Washington-on-the-Brazos met in an unfinished building in near-freezing weather, and they appointed a committee of five to write a declaration of independence. The committee, chaired by George Childress, brought back a finished draft within a day. Historians suspect Childress had written much of it before he arrived. The convention adopted it on March…
Daniel Miller
October 8, 2026
Blog

Music in the House of Lee

Robert E. Lee did not play an instrument. That single fact, set beside the musical lives of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Jefferson Davis, requires a moment of careful consideration, because it does not mean what it first appears to mean. Jefferson submitted himself to decades of violin practice, treating musical discipline as inseparable from intellectual formation, and understanding that…
Tom Daniel
October 7, 2026
Blog

The Monroe Doctrine

In his lengthy Seventh Annual Address to the US Congress—6354 words—President James Monroe offers an assessment of the state of the United States during the latter stages of his second term in office. The address—written by John Quincy Adams who often shows that he has his father’s DNA by wordiness, infelicity of grammar, and lack of clarity of expression in…
M. Andrew Holowchak
October 6, 2026
Blog

The Defamation of Thomas Jefferson

The piece was originally published at the Washington Examiner. All should be laid open to you without reserve, for there is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world. Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, May 15, 1826 (fifty days prior to Jefferson’s death) Thomas Jefferson is either the most prolific, hypocritical liar in…
William G. Hyland, Jr.
October 5, 2026
Blog

Grandma’s Provincialism

When my paternal grandmother passed away; her departure left me reflecting on her legacy and impact on my cultural understanding of who I am. Grandma was what many call a “Heritage American”. Every branch of her family had resided in the country before many of the Founders were born and were representative of colonial Virginia and the Middle Atlantic. However,…
Cole Branham
October 2, 2026
Blog

The Hidden Origins of Mardi Gras

On the evening of March 2, 1699—Fat Monday, the night before Mardi Gras—two brothers from the French colony of New France steered a small boat into the muddy mouth of the Mississippi River, hunting for a waterway that earlier expeditions had failed to find and hold. Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville and his younger brother Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville were…
Jose Nino
October 1, 2026