From the 2004 Abbeville Institute Summer School. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson have dinner. It…
John DevannySeptember 16, 2022
From our 2008 Summer School, Northern Anti-Slavery Rhetoric In some respects, the title of…
John DevannyMarch 31, 2022
A review of How Radical Republican Antislavery Rhetoric and Violence Precipitated Secession, October 1859 -…
John DevannyFebruary 15, 2022
Though John C. Calhoun was a distinguished American statesman and thinker, he is little appreciated…
John DevannyOctober 26, 2021
The year 2020 was brutal for the friends of the South. Monuments and statues of…
John DevannyFebruary 3, 2021
From the 2020 Abbeville Institute conference on "Who Owns America?" October 16-17, 2020 in Charleston,…
John DevannyDecember 28, 2020
From the 2020 Abbeville Institute conference on "Who Owns America?" October 16-17, 2020 in Charleston,…
John DevannyDecember 28, 2020
Crises of legitimacy are rarely resolved without some resort to violence. The European experience in…
John DevannyDecember 18, 2020
The chief conflict in American history was and remains the conflict between the center and…
John DevannyNovember 23, 2020
Pietas, the most Roman of virtues, referred to the duty owed to one’s country, parents,…
John DevannyJuly 13, 2020
The American story is a story of secession, or better still secessions. The first permanent…
John DevannyFebruary 12, 2020
A review of Maxcy Gregg’s Sporting Journals, 1842-1858 (Green Altar Books, 2019) Suzanne Parfitt Johnson,…
John DevannyDecember 10, 2019
The beginning of the American political order goes much further back than the Philadelphia Convention…
John DevannyNovember 20, 2019
In what passes for political and cultural discourse today, the term “populist” is something of…
John DevannySeptember 2, 2019
This essay was presented at our 2019 Summer School on the New South. Fundamentalism is…
John DevannyAugust 14, 2019
Secession, nullification, and interposition, like the poor, we shall always have with us. These are…
John DevannyJune 10, 2019
One of the great issues of American political history is whether an authentic American conservatism…
John DevannyMay 13, 2019
The chattering class’ newest obsession, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has seized the policy initiative from the Democratic…
John DevannyMarch 4, 2019
In the popular imagination the South is viewed as a region typified by racism, poverty,…
John DevannyFebruary 18, 2019
“The revenue of the state is the state.” Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution…
John DevannyFebruary 7, 2019
A review of Catholics’ Lost Cause: South Carolina Catholics and the American South, 1820-1861 (University…
John DevannyJanuary 15, 2019
“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” – H. L. Mencken “Let…
John DevannyDecember 19, 2018
A review of From Founding Fathers to Fire-Eaters: The Constitutional Doctrine of States’ Rights in…
John DevannyOctober 30, 2018
“History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Attributed to Mark Twain Americans at…
John DevannyOctober 17, 2018
The 1850s is viewed by most scholars as the crucial decade of the sectional crisis…
John DevannySeptember 24, 2018
A review Slave and Free on Virginia’s Eastern Shore by Kirk Mariner (Onancok, VA: Miona Publications, 2014).…
John DevannyAugust 21, 2018
The War Between the States is called by many names, the most genteel being “The…
John DevannyJuly 27, 2018
A review of Nullification and Secession in Modern Constitutional Thought. Sanford Levinson, ed. Lawrence, KS:…
John DevannyApril 17, 2018
Recently Michael S. Greve of George Mason University Law School wrote an insightful article which…
John DevannyJanuary 29, 2018
A review of Brian R. Dirck, Lincoln and Davis: Imagining America, 1809-1865 (Lawrence, KS: University…
John DevannyOctober 31, 2017
Back in my days as a graduate student at the University of South Carolina, I…
John DevannyOctober 13, 2017
In the popular imagination the South is viewed as a region typified by racism, poverty,…
John DevannyJuly 5, 2017
The endurance of the system of Jeffersonian finance based upon the Independent Treasury system was…
John DevannyJune 16, 2017
“The revenue of the state is the state.” Edmund Burke The rise of the modern…
John DevannyJune 9, 2017
Part One: Definitions and Origins Money is a great mystery. In my years of teaching…
John DevannyJune 2, 2017
Thomas Jefferson, Revolutionary: A Radical’s Struggle to Remake America. Kevin R. C. Gutzman (New York:…
John DevannyMarch 20, 2017
An honest man can never be outdone in courtesy. A sensual life is a miserable…
John DevannyFebruary 6, 2017
The one consolation of the Antifederalist persuasion is telling everyone you meet “I told you…
John DevannyJuly 8, 2016
The South in the twentieth century has embraced any number of northern athletic imports and…
John DevannyJuly 1, 2016
Once again, it is politicking time in the good ol’ US of A. The Democrats,…
John DevannyMarch 24, 2016
Harper Lee betrayed the literary establishment and many of her readers with the recent publication…
John DevannyJanuary 11, 2016
“Daddy was a veteran, a southern democrat, They oughta get a rich man to vote…
John DevannyOctober 19, 2015
Years ago I was introduced to my wife’s grandmother. This small but formidable woman lived…
John DevannySeptember 7, 2015
Who looks at Lee must think of Washington; In pain must think, and hide the…
John DevannyJune 26, 2015
There is no more singular statesman or person in the history of American politics than…
John DevannyJune 2, 2015
The recent riots in Baltimore gave most Americans pause as they struggled to make sense…
John DevannyMay 15, 2015
Mr. Jefferson is quite passé these days, but ‘twas not always so. When I was…
John DevannyApril 16, 2015
The antipathy of many urbanites who reside in Greater New England (think Old New England…
John DevannyMarch 6, 2015
What exactly makes the South, the South? Hosts of scholars have puzzled mightily over this…
John DevannyFebruary 26, 2015
Coal miners have their canaries; we have colinus virginiánus, the bobwhite quail. Like the canary…
John DevannyFebruary 9, 2015
*Apologies to Jon White from whom I sole the title for this piece. Invariably, any…
John DevannyNovember 12, 2014
Are you ready? Hell yea! Damn right! Hotty Toddy, gosh almighty, Who the hell are…
John DevannyOctober 20, 2014
The fall vegetable garden is a delight in the Mid-South. The greens and reds are…
John DevannySeptember 5, 2014
Dislocation brings with it a multiplicity of dissonance. Moving disrupts the consonance of time and…
John DevannyJuly 17, 2014
“…the borrower is servant to him that lendeth” (Proverbs 22:7) “There is an elegant memorial…
John DevannyApril 6, 2014
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