Pietas in the Era of Revolution
Pietas, the most Roman of virtues, referred to the duty owed to one’s country, parents, kin, and ancestors. It is from pietas that patriotism, not nationalism, springs forth. It is a virtue once esteemed by… »
Secession and Its Discontents
The American story is a story of secession, or better still secessions. The first permanent settlements of Europeans in North America were the result of a series of secessions from primarily the British Isles. Religious… »
Real Southern Sport
A review of Maxcy Gregg’s Sporting Journals, 1842-1858 (Green Altar Books, 2019) Suzanne Parfitt Johnson, Editor. Foreword by James Everett Kibler, Jr. The exploration of everyday life in a given historical period is often based… »
Poison Under the Wings
The beginning of the American political order goes much further back than the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. Political scientists and political theorists are understandably fixated on the Constitution and the convention that produced it. Eric… »
Southern Populism and the South’s Agrarian Identity
In what passes for political and cultural discourse today, the term “populist” is something of a pejorative, conjuring up images in the mind of the cultural and academic elite of dangerous folks with pitchforks and… »
Where the Grapes of Wrath are Stored
This essay was presented at our 2019 Summer School on the New South. Fundamentalism is often viewed as the most Southern of religions. Yet this is not so. It was an alien seed planted in… »
The Limits of a Politics of Tolerance
Secession, nullification, and interposition, like the poor, we shall always have with us. These are as American, indeed more American, than apple pie and baseball. Our new federal union, outlined in the Constitution written at… »
John Randolph of Roanoke and the Formation of a Southern Conservatism
One of the great issues of American political history is whether an authentic American conservatism exists. This is a crucial question for Southerners, as the South is historically viewed as the most conservative of the… »
