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Revisiting Black Labor in Confederate Virginia Blog

Revisiting Black Labor in Confederate Virginia

Originally published at Mises.org In his book, The Confederate Negro: Virginia’s Craftsmen and Military Laborers, 1861-1865, the historian James H. Brewer describes the black Confederate as “a historical enigma,” ignored by historians who are uncertain what to make of him. Black Southerners did not fare well in what Brewer calls “the rugged contest for meaningful identification in a nation’s history.”…
Wanjiru Njoya
November 10, 2026
Southern Cultural Literacy for America Blog

Southern Cultural Literacy for America

What are some songs or books that you think all Southerners should know? Cultural literacy is the ordinary process by which a population acquires a language of thought through the forms already belonging to it. Those forms are the songs, stories, images, and phrases that circulate in the ordinary life of a place. Everybody knows the Mona Lisa. Everybody knows…
Tom Daniel
November 6, 2026
Howard Ray White: Southern Historian Blog

Howard Ray White: Southern Historian

In recent decades Howard White has been an outstanding Southern writer in quantity and quality.  His work of  great and often unique contributions to Southern history has been insufficiently recognised-- perhaps because he was never a begowned academic.  He was a very successful chemical engineer who turned to history on retirement.  Perhaps lack of sufficient recognition is also somewhat due…
Clyde Wilson
November 5, 2026
Was the War About Slavery? Blog

Was the War About Slavery?

The Abbeville Institute has partnered with the social media account "Jefferson Davis" to make short, informative, primary source driven videos about the War and secession. The first video in the partnership is published below. If you enjoy it, please share it. https://youtu.be/sgfqvoUJJ2Q
Abbeville Institute
November 3, 2026
Texas’ Declaration of Independence Blog

Texas’ Declaration of Independence

On March 2, 1836, Texas formally proclaimed its independence from Mexico with a declaration of independence at a convention at Washington-on-the Brazos. The event leading to that declaration was a revolution of Mexicans against the increasingly tyrannical governing of Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. In 1824, Santa Anna dissolved the Mexican constitution with publication of his Seven Laws, which in…
M. Andrew Holowchak
November 2, 2026
A Principled Defense of Confederate Memorials Blog

A Principled Defense of Confederate Memorials

The recent decapitation of a World War II memorial in Virginia provoked widespread outrage. Even CNN, the notorious liberal rag, disapproved, reporting that, The Battle of Iwo Jima monument in Quantico, Virginia, has suffered hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage after a man beheaded one of the statues Wednesday evening, police said. Officers responding to a report of destruction…
Wanjiru Njoya
October 30, 2026
The South as a Christian Civilization Blog

The South as a Christian Civilization

Let me begin by quoting from a book entitled, The Attitude of the Northern Clergy Toward the South, published in 1942. Its author, Chester F. Dunham, wrote: Southern Christianity, or the theological position of Southern Christian Churches, was thoroughly orthodox. Religion in the South, by and large, supported the civilization, culture, and social order south of the Mason Dixon line.…
Karen Stokes
October 29, 2026
The Hand on the Throttle Blog

The Hand on the Throttle

Southern railroad songs are often treated as a musical celebration of trains: their speed, their whistles, and the power of a locomotive moving through the landscape. The cultural connection is in the songs and in the life the songs come from. The South had more single-track, light-rail, and newly built lines than the Northeast in the decades after the Civil…
Tom Daniel
October 28, 2026
Good Southern Reading Blog

Good Southern Reading

Originally published at Reckonin.com Here are some good books published in fairly recent years that you may not have encountered. Perrin Lovett, The Substitute and Aurelius and Other Tom Ironsides Adventures. I am tempted to call Tom Ironsides a Southern James Bond, but he is a much better man and more relevant to our times than Bond. Once a CIA…
Clyde Wilson
October 27, 2026
Our Heritage is Our Haven Blog

Our Heritage is Our Haven

We hear it from the haters of our heritage all the time. Old times in Dixie must be forgotten and never remembered. We’re not in sync with modern America, or to a large extent with the modern American South. Yet we must ask why this modernity deserves our allegiance. It is crucial today, more than ever, for Southerners to embrace…
John Vinson
October 26, 2026
The Poles Who Quietly Helped Build the American South 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
The Devil’s Box 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
Timeless 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
The Southern Tradition, Techno-Totalitarianism, and Our Temu-Faustian Bargain Blog

The Southern Tradition, Techno-Totalitarianism, and Our Temu-Faustian Bargain

“My wish is simply to live my life as fully as I can…And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.” —Wendell Berry, What Are People For? (1990) “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world…
James Rutledge Roesch
October 19, 2026
The State that Seceded After the War was Over 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
Jefferson and the Barbary Wars 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
A Question of Skulls 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
Appalachian Murder Ballads 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
Lincoln and the Constitution 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
The Melancholy Conclusion 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
Music in the House of Lee 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
The Monroe Doctrine 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
Grandma’s Provincialism 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
The Hidden Origins of Mardi Gras 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
Lincoln and Total War Blog

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
History by Hair? Blog

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
The Alabama Heathens Blog

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
Saving the Living South Blog

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
A Criticism Wrought with Praise: Southern Backwardness in the Age of Progress Blog

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
Distorted History Courtesy of “Taliban” Ty Blog

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
Thomas Jordan Blog

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
Yankee Antinomianism at Work Again in Massachusetts Blog

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
What Was the Lost Cause? Blog

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
Being Andrew Burstein Blog

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
Omnipotent Moral Busybodies Blog

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
Northern Men of Southern Principles Blog

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
Reconstruction and the Limits of Federal Power Blog

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
A More Perfect Slaveholders’ Union? Blog

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
Southern Music is Not a Purity Test Blog

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
Two Southerners Who Stayed Southern Blog

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
A Walk to the Park Blog

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
The War with Mexico Blog

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
From Founders to Politicians 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
Whose Portrait on Your Wall? 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
Sacred Steel and Southern Rock Blog

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
The Myth of the Righteous Cause Blog

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
Carpetbaggers Seeks to Help Mississippi Deal with the Past Blog

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
Stop with the Drive By History 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
Dixie in Decay Blog

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
B.F. White and the Sacred Harp Blog

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
Yankee Way of War Blog

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
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? Blog

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
Inheriting Gold Blog

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
Moses Waddel: The Teacher of the South Blog

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
Jefferson Davis as President Blog

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
What if South Carolina Really Seceded to Protect Slavery? Blog

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
The Sacred Ordinary Blog

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
States Rights and Federal Powers Blog

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
Can We Trust Madison Hemings’ Testimony in the Putative Jefferson-Hemings Affair? Blog

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
Patrick Henry
Give Me Fiddle Blog

Give Me Fiddle

Patrick Henry, otherwise known as Mister Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death, was a pretty good musician, much like his contemporary, Thomas Jefferson. But Henry did not practice scales. He did not copy violin pieces by hand into notebooks, did not build a personal library of Italian Baroque composers, and did not submit himself to the long discipline of…
Tom Daniel
July 31, 2026
85 Blog

85

Originally published at Reckonin.com I recently turned 85. I really did not expect to last this long. When I turned 70, I wrote a contemplative essay that attracted some attention. For 85, I mostly have only an old man’s boring reflections on how much has changed. I was a teenager before I saw a television and a college student before…
Clyde Wilson
July 30, 2026
Maryland, My Maryland Blog

Maryland, My Maryland

I enjoy studying maps. I especially enjoy maps of the ‘what-if’ scenarios if certain courses in history played out differently, but also the constant debate regarding cultural borders within the US. I frequently analyze the border of the cultural South, as I have cause to believe the South is shrinking faster than most would want to accept. This turf war…
Matthew Conard
July 29, 2026
Jefferson and the Constitution in 1787 Blog

Jefferson and the Constitution in 1787

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were not in the Constitutional Convention, nor did they participate in any of the ratification debates in their respective States.  John Adams served as U.S. Minister to Great Britain from 1785 until June of 1788. Jefferson served as U.S. Minister to France from 1784 until late 1789. They expressed views about the process and Constitution…
Garrick Sapp
July 28, 2026
NASCAR and the Spirit of the South Blog

NASCAR and the Spirit of the South

There is no sport more shaped entirely by its origin in the South than NASCAR. A sport built on southern tradition, southern rebellion, and the spirit of the southern common man. That “spirit” was driven by moonshiners, who were transporting moonshine during the prohibition era. These Appalachian moonshiners were not just driven by rebellion, but by survival. Moonshine was the…
Samuel Gutierrez
July 27, 2026
Emy-Lou Biedenharn: International Singing Sensation Blog

Emy-Lou Biedenharn: International Singing Sensation

In the world today, there are well-known singing competitions on major television stations that help launch singers to national and international fame. For the sweet Southern gal Emy-Lou Biendenharn, born in 1902 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, those were not options.  She had a more difficult path to travel.  Yet walk it she did, and with the typical strength and grace of…
Walt Garlington
July 24, 2026
Franklin and Jefferson Blog

Franklin and Jefferson

When Thomas Jefferson submitted his fair copy of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress, he was unnerved at the prospect of members of the Congress, scrutinizing his document and suggesting changes. While the Congress was mulling over Jefferson’s Fair Copy of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)—who himself was part of the Congress-appointed, five-member committee to…
M. Andrew Holowchak
July 22, 2026
Music in the House of Davis Blog

Music in the House of Davis

There is a rosewood Knabe piano at Beauvoir, the Jefferson Davis home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, that has survived more than most Americans could bear. Hurricane Katrina lifted it from the front parlor and deposited it in the limbs of an oak tree on the grounds. Restorers could not save it. But there it sits still, in the presidential…
Tom Daniel
July 21, 2026
The “Slave Power” You Say? Blog

The “Slave Power” You Say?

Old myths die hard. One of the oldest with its roots firmly in the sectional crisis of the nineteenth century is the belief in the existence of the "Slave Power." This uniquely American conspiracy theory, found mostly among the folks of the Midwest, posited that Southern slaveholders were bent on spreading the institution of slavery into the territories and even…
John Devanny
July 20, 2026
Patrick Henry
The Anti-Federalists, America’s Unsung Heroes, Predicted Evil Empire & The Imperial Presidency Blog

The Anti-Federalists, America’s Unsung Heroes, Predicted Evil Empire & The Imperial Presidency

On the eve of the federal convention, and following its adjournment in September of 1787, the Anti-Federalists made the case that the Constitution makers in Philadelphia had exceeded the mandate they were given to amend the Articles of Confederation, and nothing more. The Federal Constitution augured ill for freedom, argued the Anti-Federalists. These unsung heroes had warned early Americans of…
Ilana Mercer
July 17, 2026
Young Washington Blog

Young Washington

The movie covers George Washington’s life from the death of his father at age 11 through The Battle of Monongahela and its aftermath. Having read the 7-volume George Washington Pulitzer Prize book by Douglas Southall Freeman I will review the events depicted in the movie. The movie was enjoyable, but liberties were taken with the dates of some events, and…
Jeff Wolverton
July 16, 2026
Calhoun’s Answer to the Abolition Petitions Blog

Calhoun’s Answer to the Abolition Petitions

Originally published at Mises.org The historian Clyde Wilson has observed that John C. Calhoun’s congressional speeches are “always dealing with a real and known audience and with a subject requiring decision.” Calhoun was not merely expounding on theoretical or abstract points. This is important in understanding his response to the abolition petitions, including the one colloquially described as the “positive…
Wanjiru Njoya
July 15, 2026
Where Were Your People in 1776? Blog

Where Were Your People in 1776?

"If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree." -Michael Crichton, Timeline The quote attributed to Karl Marx, “If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded,” also applies. As does Orwell’s “Who controls the past controls the future.…
Matthew Conard
July 14, 2026
French Huguenots in Dixie Blog

French Huguenots in Dixie

The colonial South was a stronghold of traditional Protestantism. Although religiously diverse and generally tolerant by the standards of the era, its culture was largely shaped by a distinctly Protestant worldview. Among these Protestant settlers were the French Huguenots, whose presence in the Southeast, though aggregately relatively small, left a notable imprint between 1660 and 1800. The French Huguenots were…
Cole Branham
July 10, 2026
Dabney Was Right About Music, Too Blog

Dabney Was Right About Music, Too

Robert Lewis Dabney stood before the graduating class of Hampden-Sydney College in June of 1882 and told them, with the measured certainty of a man who had already watched one civilization end, that another was ending around them. He was sixty-two years old, a Presbyterian theologian, Stonewall Jackson's chief of staff and biographer, and one of the most unsparing critics…
Tom Daniel
July 9, 2026
Rawlins Lowndes and His Prophetic Warning Against the Constitution Blog

Rawlins Lowndes and His Prophetic Warning Against the Constitution

Rawlins Lowndes was one of the most significant and yet least remembered figures of the American founding era, a South Carolina lawyer, planter, jurist, and governor who became his state's most forceful opponent of the U.S. Constitution during the ratification debates of 1788. He is best remembered for his prophetic warning that if the Constitution were adopted, "the sun, of…
Jose Nino
July 8, 2026
Fox in the Dixie House Blog

Fox in the Dixie House

Laura Ingraham, one of Fox’s pseudo-conservative “Republican” (not republican) taxers of bygone days who collects information the way so (too) many do: from silliness distilled from artless rumor, especially from Southern history, where Yankees design “historical” Ponzi schemes that Bernie Madoff would admire i.e it is meant to sound good but is always a lie! In a typical feeble attempt…
Paul H. Yarbrough
July 7, 2026
Who’s Affraid of the Dunning School? Blog

Who’s Affraid of the Dunning School?

Reflections on The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction (University Press of Kentucky, 2013) edited by John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery It is said that history is written by the victors. This assertion is certainly borne out by the current teaching and interpretation of American history. The Reconstruction period is a particular example of the…
Karol Mazur
July 6, 2026
America: Made in Virginia Blog

America: Made in Virginia

Virginia was the first, the largest, and the most populous of the original thirteen British colonies in North America. Even before 1776, Virginia was moving toward republican institutions. During the period from the 1730s through the 1750s, power there shifted from the appointed Council to the elected House of Burgesses. As well as the large planters, the small farmers were…
Timothy A. Duskin
July 2, 2026
Is Jefferson “The Most Overrated Person in American History”? Blog

Is Jefferson “The Most Overrated Person in American History”?

In American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997), Pauline Maier takes herself to advance the points that Karl Becker wanted to advance in his book on the Declaration, some 70 years earlier, but was prohibited from advancing, because of the conservative time in which he lived. She begins with astonishment that the Declaration of Independence is today treated as…
M. Andrew Holowchak
July 1, 2026
The Peoples’ Songs Blog

The Peoples’ Songs

A review of Confederate Poets and Poems, Volume II and III (Shotwell Publishing) edited by Clyde N. Wilson. For anyone who might say I do not have a spine, I would refute him or her by saying, “I most certainly do.  It’s been damaged twice.  And I have the walker, cane, and wheelchair to prove it.” My first bout with spinal…
Randall Ivey
June 30, 2026
Declarations of Independence: Meanings and Memory Blog

Declarations of Independence: Meanings and Memory

The two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence is an appropriate moment to reflect upon how far Americans, both elites and regular people, have strayed from the principles of the movement for American independence from Britain. At its worst, the popular culture will celebrate the country’s “birthday” with celebrity entertainers performing in “kitschy” Hollywood…
John Devanny
June 29, 2026
Willie Jones and the Fight Against Federal Power Blog

Willie Jones and the Fight Against Federal Power

When the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787, North Carolina elected Willie Jones as a delegate, but he declined to accept his seat, recognizing that the gathering intended to create a centralized government that would diminish state sovereignty. A wealthy planter, radical Jeffersonian, and the foremost Anti-Federalist leader in North Carolina, Jones is remembered chiefly for blocking his state's…
Jose Nino
June 26, 2026
The Paradox of the Lomax Recordings Blog

The Paradox of the Lomax Recordings

Every folk song collector runs into the same problem the moment the recording machine actually starts turning: the song they are capturing has never had one fixed shape, and the machine is about to give it one anyway. A ballad sung on a porch in Kentucky on a Tuesday might run six verses. Sung again on Thursday by the same…
Tom Daniel
June 25, 2026
Whither Leviathan Blog

Whither Leviathan

This is part 2 of my economic lamentations of 21st century America, continuing from my May 18th article ‘Modern Industrialism Is Betraying Us’. On the subject of a nation, I ask myself: what is the purpose of a nation? Is it security, economy, control, binding of a people, or some form of all these things? When so many elements of…
Matthew Conard
June 24, 2026
Southern Writers in the Modern World Blog

Southern Writers in the Modern World

Eugenia Dorothy “Dolly” Blount Lamar was born in Jones County, Georgia in 1867 and spent most of her life in Macon, where Mercer’s spires stood across Tattnall Square from her childhood home. She was Historian-General and President-General of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, helped get Sidney Lanier into the Hall of Fame, worked for the preservation of Stratford, and…
Chase Steely
June 23, 2026
Fabricating “History” Blog

Fabricating “History”

Joe Ellis, of Mount Holyoke College, has made a career of being controversial. At one point, his tenureship was in jeopardy, as he claimed falsely to his students at Mt. Holyoke College to have fought in the Vietnam War. He did not. Ellis has also been unfriendly to Thomas Jefferson. Yet that, Jefferson-unfriendliness, has been happening at least since the…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 22, 2026
Context Matters Blog

Context Matters

In February 1837 the Senate took up abolition petitions. Senator William C. Rives of Virginia called slavery a misfortune and an evil in all circumstances, though perhaps the lesser evil in some places. He wanted it both ways. Whine about it but do nothing. Just keep everyone calm and get along. No plan. No action. Pure hedging to preserve the…
Garrick Sapp
June 19, 2026
Across the Rappahannock Blog

Across the Rappahannock

The Confederate Army of 1861 went to war with music built into its structure. Every regiment was required by regulation to maintain a brass band — typically eight to twelve musicians, but authorized up to sixteen — whose duties were not ornamental. They beat the drum calls that moved men out of sleep and into formation before dawn. They played…
Tom Daniel
June 18, 2026
Can Gen Z Save the Southern Tradition? Blog

Can Gen Z Save the Southern Tradition?

Gen Z? Those insane young people on Tik Tok? The ones who are all addicted to the internet and pornography? The overmedicated ones? The ones who talk funny? The ones who embrace far left idiots as heroes and manipulative villains as role models? The generation that never received a biblical education? (Was St Luke on X?) Yes. Those people. My…
Elias Ryan
June 17, 2026
Thomas Burke: The Architect of States’ Rights in the Federal Constitutions Blog

Thomas Burke: The Architect of States’ Rights in the Federal Constitutions

Edmund Burke is rightly revered in English politics as one who nearly single-handedly steered the government of Great Britain away from friendship or compromise with the atheistic Revolutionaries in France and preserved the ancient, salutary traditions of England when it appeared that nothing would be able to withstand the crushing waves of the diabolical doctrine of the Rights of Man.…
Walt Garlington
June 16, 2026
A Welcome Elixir Blog

A Welcome Elixir

Sometimes we need someone else’s eyes to see our blessings. Most of us view the world thru distorted filters. Everyone reading this has a digital colander that sifts facts to console preconceptions. Images from across the country or around the world form or reinforce certitude about ambiguous (and mostly irrelevant) events. Having been manipulated by scenes on our screens that…
JD Breen
June 15, 2026
Justice Clarence Thomas, Harry Jaffa, and the Declaration of Independence Blog

Justice Clarence Thomas, Harry Jaffa, and the Declaration of Independence

In a speech given on April 15, at the University of Texas, to celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Justice Clarence Thomas explained the meaning of formal equality before the law, saying: Despite the multiplicity of laws and customs that reeked of bigotry, it was universally believed among those blacks with whom I lived and who had…
Wanjiru Njoya
June 12, 2026
Forward the Colors! Blog

Forward the Colors!

From the beginning of my brief tenure I have tried to focus on the fact that the Confederate soldier, whose name we are to protect and whose cause we are to vindicate were and are family members. The word “Sons” in our organisation's name means something. It does not mean the offspring of a ancient “birthing parent” or progeny of…
Paul C. Graham
June 11, 2026
Patrick Henry
The Prophetic Southern Voices Who Opposed Federal Overreach Blog

The Prophetic Southern Voices Who Opposed Federal Overreach

Some of the most forceful warnings against political centralization during the founding era came from a handful of figures rooted in the southern states. Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina produced voices who saw the proposed Constitution as a blueprint for consolidated, potentially tyrannical national power. With the benefit of hindsight, their warnings about the dangers of moving authority from…
Jose Nino
June 10, 2026
After the Cannons Have Cooled Blog

After the Cannons Have Cooled

Southern music is not a single thing. It never has been. What we casually call Southern music is in reality a family of related musical responses to history — responses that look and sound similar on the surface but serve entirely different human purposes. A song written to send men to war is doing something fundamentally different from a song…
Tom Daniel
June 9, 2026
Was Jefferson Wrong? TEXIT Argues No Blog

Was Jefferson Wrong? TEXIT Argues No

The republicanism that Thomas Jefferson envisaged has never enrooted in America. Over its many decades, it has moved increasingly away from a model of thin, decentralized government, where the states are sovereign—a model at least that Jefferson hoped would slowly emerge, beginning with his two terms as president—to thick, centralized government where the federal government is sovereign and economic measures…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 8, 2026
The South Needs a Good French Translator Blog

The South Needs a Good French Translator

A good number of European historians have had interesting views on the War for Southern Independence. They are not born with Yankee self-righteousness or raised with pious Lincoln propaganda. With some cultural distance from the matter, they display fair understanding for the Confederate cause. Many British writers during the war of 1861-65 saw it for what it was---the federal government’s…
Clyde Wilson
June 5, 2026
Lincoln as a Monster in the Press Blog

Lincoln as a Monster in the Press

Above is a political cartoon of the “civil war” era. (And you thought that today’s political cartoonists were savage!) The cartoonist has managed to place in his work, a very clear, accurate and comprehensive image of Lincoln and his administration as the artist – and the publication – saw the matter at that time. Obviously, neither were devotees of the…
Valerie Protopapas
June 4, 2026
Gen. Julius Franklin Howell and The Respect that Once Was Blog

Gen. Julius Franklin Howell and The Respect that Once Was

Dedication: to the memory of my cousin, Tony – U.S.M.C. Sergeant Dale Anthony Marion (Dec. 10, 1938-May 15, 2026), who was like a second father to me after the loss of my Dad, Dr. Jerry B. Marion (Dec. 10, 1929-Aug. 3, 1981). On June 3rd, 1944—Confederate Memorial Day and the birthday of Jefferson Davis—a former Confederate enlisted man, Julius Franklin…
Forrest L. Marion
June 3, 2026
Strike the Tent Blog

Strike the Tent

Phil Leigh passed away April 9, 2026. Fitting. Leigh spent much of his retirement writing about Robert E. Lee and the South and fending off attacks from the woke mob. I met Leigh over a decade ago when we redesigned the website and had a soft relaunch in April 2014. Our website designer told me that he knew a man…
Brion McClanahan
June 2, 2026
Donald Trump, Thomas Massie, and the Tale of Two Primaries Blog

Donald Trump, Thomas Massie, and the Tale of Two Primaries

President Donald J. Trump’s use of the primary to remove his opponents from political office was singularly successful this past primary season.  In the past, the tactic was not always successful. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, much to his later chagrin, attempted the same tactic in 1938 to remove conservative Southern Democrats who began to oppose what they viewed as the…
John Devanny
June 1, 2026
Dixie Book of Days Blog

Dixie Book of Days

The Dixie Book of Days by Matthew Page Andrews, 1912 Like many of us today I receive the most interesting news and event notifications through group chats. In one of such group chats a friend sent a picture of a book with a succinct and articulate paragraph of one of the kindest epitaphs to receive: bravery, honesty, love of truth.…
Matthew Conard
May 29, 2026
Remembering Martin Dies, Jr. Blog

Remembering Martin Dies, Jr.

Few political figures in the 20th century confronted communist subversion and federal overreach as aggressively as Martin Dies Jr. of Texas. Born in Colorado City, Texas on November 5, 1900, Dies emerged from the Lone Star State's conservative Democratic tradition to become one of the century's most consequential congressional investigators. His father, Martin Dies Sr., served as a Democratic congressman…
Jose Nino
May 28, 2026
Native American Music and the South Blog

Native American Music and the South

Frequently, I have described Southern music as a blending of influences. The interaction between Scots-Irish settlers and enslaved Africans produced a musical synthesis that is audible, traceable, and well documented. One can easily point to specific features to prove it. There are ballad forms, fiddle repertory, banjo construction, and rhythmic sensibility to reasonably identify their origins in Southern music. The…
Tom Daniel
May 27, 2026
What Did Jefferson Mean by “Empire of Liberty”? Blog

What Did Jefferson Mean by “Empire of Liberty”?

The American Revolution, those who were the major movers in it recognized, was an event singular in the history of the world. That the colonies could have both come together in unanimity to uprise against England and win its independence from their mother country through a sanguinary war were sufficiently singular happenings. After winning the war, the problem the Colonists…
M. Andrew Holowchak
May 26, 2026
‘Tis Not Our War Blog

‘Tis Not Our War

A review of 'Tis Not Our War: Avoiding Military Service in the Civil War North (Stackpole Books, 2024) by Paul Taylor Since the infamous 2020 "Summer of Love" riots and political escapades that resulted in a new wave of Confederate iconoclasm, Americans have reconsidered including Confederate heroes as worthy company in Memorial Day celebrations. This is ironic because without the…
Brion McClanahan
May 25, 2026
No One is Coming to Save You Blog

No One is Coming to Save You

Social media has exploded in recent weeks with outrage over the approval of massive corporate data centers. While local residents have overwhelmingly opposed these projects, county commissioners and state legislators have turned a blind eye. Incidents like this fuel a growing sensation that events and institutions are accelerating completely beyond the control of ordinary citizens. The convergence of rapid technological…
Nicole Williams
May 22, 2026
Daniel Donato and Cosmic Country Blog

Daniel Donato and Cosmic Country

What would you call it if you created a band with Buck Owens, Don Rich, Duane Allman, Gram Parsons, Clarence White of The Byrds, and Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead? Daniel Donato of Nashville calls it Cosmic Country, and it might be the most intriguing thing you’ve heard in a long time. Daniel Donato is one of the more…
Tom Daniel
May 20, 2026
Farewell! Blog

Farewell!

A Review of Wendell Berry’s Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story by Randall Ivey I have never worked on a farm.  My paternal grandparents did.  They were cotton farmers and dabbled some in tobacco, although their chief means of subsistence was work in the textile plants that used to occupy the South Carolina upcountry like kudzu.  I have gotten…
Randall Ivey
May 19, 2026
Modern Industrialism Is Betraying Us Blog

Modern Industrialism Is Betraying Us

We are near 100 years after I'll Take My Stand emerged into the zeitgeist – a salvo at the leviathan hyper industrial economic system rapidly encroaching into all regions of the United States. The 12 Southern authors could perhaps divine what level of societal destabilization would happen by the year 2030 at the trajectory in 1930, but I'd wager modern…
Matthew Conard
May 18, 2026
Calculating the Value of Union Blog

Calculating the Value of Union

At our March 2026 conference on the Declaration of Independence, Daniel Miller, President of the Texas Nationalist Movement, explained how he asks one simple question when confronted by doubters and naysayers on secession: If your State was currently independent and with all that you know about the current government in Washington D.C., would you join the Union today? He said…
Brion McClanahan
May 15, 2026
The Rebel Outlaw Blog

The Rebel Outlaw

There’s much more to the story of Josey Wales than what you saw in the hit movie starring Clint Eastwood. The novel is an underrated gold mine of adventure, Southern history, and human pathos. The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales by Forrest Carter was published in 1972, and later republished as Gone to Texas. The movie The Outlaw Josey Wales was…
Mike C. Tuggle
May 14, 2026
David Allan Coe Blog

David Allan Coe

David Allan Coe died. If you’re looking for a clean, agreeable tribute, this ain’t it. Those are easy to find, and they all follow the same predictable pattern of dates, albums, controversies, and a polite nod about his influences. That kind of writing treats a musician like a museum exhibit: labeled, contained, and ultimately harmless. David Allan Coe was a…
Tom Daniel
May 13, 2026
A Government of Kudzu Blog

A Government of Kudzu

One of my favorite writers, who has long passed, Charley Reese, wrote an editorial for the Orlando Sentinel 25 years ago. I believe it was his final effort for the O.S. It is in no way dated. It could have been written yesterday, and it would fit perfectly with the current horrid simulation in Washington, D.C of the so-called government…
Paul H. Yarbrough
May 12, 2026
A Model of Government Stewardship Blog

A Model of Government Stewardship

Thomas Jefferson had, in his first term as US president, one of the most successful presidencies in US history. Knowing the pricelessness of books, he sanctioned the Library of Congress and helped to build it. He purchased the Louisiana territories for 10 million dollars—a pittance—and doubled the size of the country. He began a course to reduce the US debt, and despite purchasing the Louisiana lands, the…
M. Andrew Holowchak
May 11, 2026
The Contrarian Mind of Zora Neale Hurston Blog

The Contrarian Mind of Zora Neale Hurston

She was the most celebrated Black woman novelist of her generation and died penniless in a Florida welfare home, buried in an unmarked grave. She trained in anthropology at Columbia under Franz Boas and defended voluntary segregation in the pages of the Orlando Sentinel. Zora Neale Hurston spent her life refusing the categories others tried to impose on her. Hurston…
Jose Nino
May 8, 2026
Lessons on Liberty from the States’ Rights Democrats Blog

Lessons on Liberty from the States’ Rights Democrats

In the 1940s, the Democratic Party was fractured by a dispute that eventually split the party into factions. On the surface, as described by the New York Times in 1939, the issue concerned the specifics of the New Deal. The moderates or “conservatives” supported limited federal interventions, while the “liberals” were pushing for a much more expansive interventionist program. The…
Wanjiru Njoya
May 7, 2026
The Good President Blog

The Good President

Walk through the biography or history section of any bookstore and you will likely see many works on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a man with a severe handicap who overcame the odds to serve as the nation’s chief executive for more than a dozen years, a president who saved American democracy, as well as capitalism, the leader who, during a major…
Ryan Walters
May 6, 2026
Crying Out in the Wilderness Blog

Crying Out in the Wilderness

A review of Joseph Scotchie, Samuel T. Francis and the Revolution from the Middle (Shotwell, 2025) by Jack Trotter In the Old Testament, the prophet Samuel is called three times by God to “listen to the voice of the people.” In these latter days, his namesake, Samuel Francis (1947-2005), is often described as a “prophet,” even by some of those who reviled…
Jack Trotter
May 5, 2026
Contrasting Unionists Blog

Contrasting Unionists

A Brief Look at Samuel Mitcham’s The Encyclopedia of Union Generals Once upon a time, the American Civil War was widely regarded as a national epic.  Not a divinely-mandated Unionist crusade against wicked slavedrivers, but something akin to the terrible Trojan War as recounted by Homer. Under this tragic perspective, a special place might be accorded to figures such as…
Jerry Salyer
May 4, 2026
The South Will Always Do It Again Blog

The South Will Always Do It Again

I live in Alabama, and I see what’s happening to the South with my own eyes. Through the Abbeville Institute, I also stay connected with fellow Southern thinkers, so I read about the same things happening elsewhere. We are not experiencing cultural mass hysteria, because what’s happening is real. Institutional erosion, demographic churn, homogenized media, and the steady replacement of…
Tom Daniel
May 1, 2026
Lee Returns to Richmond Blog

Lee Returns to Richmond

Originally published at A Memoir of the Occupation Richmond, Virginia April 15, 1985 It was raining again. Grey clouds scudding the city’s ruins standing in stark silhouette against the colorless sky. Jagged shards of warehouse riding from the ruined James River waterfront; the business and residential districts block after block of fire-blackened brick, the Tredegar Iron Works no more than…
Enoch Cade
April 30, 2026
Reluctant Secessionist Blog

Reluctant Secessionist

Secession, grasped in its political sense, is typically defined as a formal withdrawal of one body, qua political state or qua a nascent political state, from another political state of which it is a member. The reason for withdrawal is customarily that what bound the lesser body to the larger political state is no longer binding or that the relationship has become parasitic or toxic. The paradigmatic illustration is the secession of 11…
M. Andrew Holowchak
April 28, 2026
The Lost Cause Blog

The Lost Cause

Originally published at From the Desk of Jon Harris Upon the Soviet Union’s dismissal of 146 historians from Czech universities, Milan Hübl, among those dismissed, is said to have observed, “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory.” Hübl went on to predict that after a “new history” takes the place of the old “the nation…
Jonathan Harris
April 27, 2026
The Sons of Erin and the Sons of Dixie Blog

The Sons of Erin and the Sons of Dixie

It’s not unusual for music to preserve historical memory, but it is surprising sometimes where that memory ends up surfacing. One such instance appears in the work of Irish balladeer Derek Warfield, whose songs normally focus on Dublin and Belfast, but in this particular instance, he turns his attention to Dixie. This might seem like a head-scratcher of an unlikely…
Tom Daniel
April 24, 2026
Here Lie Your Brethren Blog

Here Lie Your Brethren

Reflections on the Alamo and Texas Independence, Part I In March of 1930, the former President of the United States, Calvin Coolidge, and his wife Grace had occasion to travel through the State of Texas during a leisurely train trip. During an excursion to San Antonio, they were treated to a private tour of the Alamo. It was here that…
Miles Foltermann
April 22, 2026
What Makes A Historian? Blog

What Makes A Historian?

Some readers have encouraged me to identify as a historian, despite my not having a degree in history. For a long time, I have been reluctant to do so, thinking it would be both presumptuous and misleading, but I have recently changed my mind. Here is why. I think the very first seed was planted when I was interviewed by…
Jeb Smith
April 21, 2026
Gone With The Wind Blog

Gone With The Wind

Originally published at Reckonin.com At the University of South Carolina is a striking classical Greek building known as the South Caroliniana Library. It was built in 1840 by the outstanding architect Robert Mills and was said to be the first American college building for a separate library. The building anchors one side of the open end of a “horseshoe” of…
Clyde Wilson
April 20, 2026
Southerners for the King Blog

Southerners for the King

Never has history been so perverted, never did misrepresentations so effectively deceive. Lewis L. Bogart, United Empire Loyalists (UEL) descendant, Adolphustown, Upper Canada, 1884 The American Revolution in the southern colonies was a ferocious civil war, particularly in the back county.  The 250-year anniversary of the 1776 Declaration of Independence falls on the present year, 2026.  Contemporaries estimated that the…
Charles Roberts, MD
April 17, 2026
Constitutional Government and the Tenth Amendment Blog

Constitutional Government and the Tenth Amendment

Originally published at Mises.org In their book Who Killed the Constitution, Thomas E. Woods and Kevin C.R. Gutzman argue that the demise of constitutionalism—the principle of limited government—is by no means a recent development. It can be traced back several decades, “close to a century.” It is not the work of just one political party or another, but an assault…
Wanjiru Njoya
April 15, 2026
Jefferson Could Play Blog

Jefferson Could Play

We love to affectionately remember Thomas Jefferson as a mind detached from the body. Many accounts present him as a man of paper, of correspondence, of carefully arranged ideas set down in elegant prose. The familiar image is that of the “Sage of Monticello,” seated at a writing desk, producing language that would echo across the centuries. That image is…
Tom Daniel
April 14, 2026
The Tempo of a Civilization Blog

The Tempo of a Civilization

Why does Southern music move the way it does? I’m not talking about a particular instrument it favors or a particular chord progression it follows. I’m talking about why Southern music leans into such a smooth shuffle groove instead of velocity, why it settles back instead of lunging forward, and why it stretches instead of snaps. And why, if one…
Tom Daniel
April 10, 2026
A Southern Future? Blog

A Southern Future?

This piece was originally published at Reckonin.com Rather than continuing my detailed history of the Southern people I wish to comment on our situation at the moment, 2026, and prospects for the future. We have never been in greater danger of losing our identity as of the South. The population has changed. There are rust belt refugees. Some of these…
Clyde Wilson
April 9, 2026
Distorting the Declaration Blog

Distorting the Declaration

No "conservative" has done more damage to the interpretation of the American past than Harry Jaffa. He spent his career attaching the conservative movement to Abraham Lincoln and more importantly to a distorted version of the Declaration of Independence. Modern conservatism relies on Jaffa's version of the Declaration, and with the 250th anniversary of the adoption of Jefferson's work this…
Abbeville Institute
April 7, 2026
Cultural Reawakening is Not Impossible Blog

Cultural Reawakening is Not Impossible

Powerful people have conspired to erase Southern culture over the last several decades, many, but not all, of them of Northern extraction.  George Orwell would recognize the methods used.  Many historical truths have been thrown down the Memory Hole, while the honorable men of Dixie – Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, John C. Calhoun, and many others – are subjected…
Walt Garlington
April 6, 2026
The Sound of Southern Easter Blog

The Sound of Southern Easter

The South has produced many distinctive musical traditions, but few are as recognizable or as beloved as the Southern gospel quartet. I’ve written many essays about Sacred Harp and gospel, but I have inexcusably written very little about the Southern gospel quartet. And what better time of year than Easter to celebrate one of the most iconic sounds of the…
Tom Daniel
April 3, 2026
What Can We Learn From the Confederacy? Blog

What Can We Learn From the Confederacy?

April is Confederate History or Heritage Month in six States. Virginia used to recognize the month as well, but no longer. Many Americans tend to believe that "Southern history" is nothing more than "Confederate history." That would relegate the history of the region to a failed four year attempt at independence. Drew Gilpiln Faust, former President of Harvard University and…
Brion McClanahan
April 2, 2026
Melungeons Blog

Melungeons

What is a Melungeon? Deep in southern Appalachia, there is a people whose history is clouded with ambiguity, but also intense distinction. Their exact origin is relatively unknown, but they have called these particular mountains home since well before the American War for Independence. The Melungeon (pronounced Meh-Lun-Jin) people are a historically distinct group whose roots lie in the rugged…
Cole Branham
April 1, 2026
Moses Ezekiel Returns Home Blog

Moses Ezekiel Returns Home

Military pomp and Masonic ceremonies combined to make noteworthy the internment of the late Sir Moses Ezekiel in Arlington National Cemetery on March 30, 1921.   The American sculptor, musician and soldier, died in Rome, Italy, in 1917 but the homecoming was deferred on account of World War 1. Permission was granted by Secretary of War Baker to bury Ezekiel’s mortal…
Lola Sanchez
March 30, 2026
The Hidden Players in the War for Southern Independence Blog

The Hidden Players in the War for Southern Independence

The War Between the States conjures images of Union blue and Confederate gray clashing across rolling farmland and forested ridges. Yet beyond those storied battlefields, another war unfolded in the marble halls and counting houses of Europe. There, empires maneuvered in the shadows, weighing whether to shatter the American experiment forever or stand aside and watch it consume itself. No…
Jose Nino
March 27, 2026
WIRED’s Hit Piece on Secession Left Out Everything That Matters Blog

WIRED’s Hit Piece on Secession Left Out Everything That Matters

Originally published at TexianPartisan.com. This morning, WIRED published “Don’t Listen to Anyone Who Thinks Secession Will Solve Anything” by Ryan D. Griffiths, a political science professor at Syracuse University hawking his new book The Disunited States. The article is a greatest-hits compilation of every lazy argument against self-determination — the Russia smear, the India/Pakistan analogy, the Texas v. White citation,…
Daniel Miller
March 25, 2026
American History in Full Blog

American History in Full

Early on one frosty morning in February I found myself driving down a country road in east central North Carolina, looking for the other half of American history. It had rained the night before and snowed hard a few days before that. As I pulled into a gravel parking lot the trees all around stood out sharp against the clear,…
Jason Morgan
March 24, 2026
Cultural Marxism Masquerading as True History Blog

Cultural Marxism Masquerading as True History

Originally published at Mises.org Ever since people began warning about the threat from Cultural Marxism, the Marxists’ main line of defense has been to deny everything. They claim that their critics are hallucinating and fighting with shadows. The Marxists in control of universities insist that academic freedom is alive and well. No one has been excluded from the academy for…
Wanjiru Njoya
March 23, 2026
The Era of Good Feelings–1920-1970 Blog

The Era of Good Feelings–1920-1970

Originally published at Reckonin.com My synopsis of the history of the Southern people will henceforward be speculative. We may not have sufficient perspective now on the more recent past. There may be important undercurrents that are not noticed yet. I have called the half century after World War I an era of good feelings because, despite “Civil Rights” and other…
Clyde Wilson
March 20, 2026
The Heroic Fr. Mullon Blog

The Heroic Fr. Mullon

Originally published at MostCertainlyBeane. I’ve lived in the New Orleans area now for 21 years, and I have been to many of the area’s beautiful churches. But I had not been to historic St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church on Camp Street until yesterday. It is the congregation (and burial place) of a personal hero: the Rev. Fr. James Ignatius Mullon…
Rev. Larry Beane
March 18, 2026
From Ulster to Appalachia Blog

From Ulster to Appalachia

Every March, America goes nuts about green, and becomes briefly and theatrically Irish. Rivers turn green. Beer turns greener. Bagpipes appear in places that have not known sheep in living memory. Plastic bowler hats appear, and suddenly everybody sounds like a Frosted Lucky Charms commercial. An impressive number of folks discover that their great-great-great-grandmother’s second cousin once spelled her name…
Tom Daniel
March 17, 2026
Victory Blog

Victory

The regime occupying Washington, D. C., having launched its latest war of conquest, where may a Southerner look for consolation in a world gone insane?  The Psalmist answers: ‘From whence shall my help come? My help comes from the LORD, Who made heaven and earth’ (Psalm 121:1, 2). So has it often been in the South, that our people seek…
Walt Garlington
March 13, 2026
The Case for Christian Localism Blog

The Case for Christian Localism

Originally published at From the Desk of Jon Harris. The reason for favoring the proximate, or local, over the national and international stems from the nature of society itself. Robert Lewis Dabney said that “Government is not the creator but the creature of human society.”1 Instead, society preexists government, and communities make up society. It is on the community level…
Jonathan Harris
March 12, 2026
The Carried Song Blog

The Carried Song

If I were a Yankee, I could likely make an outrageous claim and expect it to be believed on the strength of its articulation alone. Yankees, of course, possess the advantage of literacy, and literacy, in modern cultural shorthand, is synonymous with intelligence. As a Southerner, I don’t enjoy that rhetorical luxury. Everything I say must be prefaced, situated, and…
Tom Daniel
March 11, 2026
Confederate Sister Spies Blog

Confederate Sister Spies

The story of Maria Dolores "Lola" Sánchez reveals a forgotten chapter in American Civil War history, another one that illuminates the substantial yet underappreciated contributions of Hispanic Americans to the Confederate cause. Born in 1844 to Cuban parents who had settled in Florida during the mid 1840s, Lola descended from one of Florida's oldest and most distinguished families of Spanish…
Jose Nino
March 10, 2026
Spencer Roane and the Richmond Junto Blog

Spencer Roane and the Richmond Junto

The party of Washington, Adams, and Hamilton were swept out of power. The election of 1800 saw the triumph of Jefferson’s Republicans and the complete decimation of the Federalists, a party that would never again control the White House, or either house of Congress, and would cease to exist after the 1816 presidential election. After a contentious battle in the…
Ryan Walters
March 9, 2026
Townes Van Zandt Blog

Townes Van Zandt

Townes Van Zandt was an American singer-songwriter born in 1944 in Fort Worth, Texas, whose work occupies a quiet but enduring place in Southern music. His songs sit at the crossroads of folk, country, and blues without ever settling comfortably into any of them, largely because he showed little interest in belonging to pre-set categories. Born of Dutch ancestry and…
Tom Daniel
March 6, 2026
Should We Despise Lincoln? Blog

Should We Despise Lincoln?

From what has been shown throughout this book, it would seem obvious that we should. No single man in American history has done more to abolish liberty than him. Yet Lincoln was not the real issue; he was one person, powerless unless backed by voters and wealthy interests. If we imagine the political decay instituted by the war and his…
Jeb Smith
March 5, 2026
Kin & Covenant: America’s Clan Culture Blog

Kin & Covenant: America’s Clan Culture

The American South has always been a collection of tight-knit communities rooted in family. The earliest settlers were often relatives or from neighboring European villages.  From the very beginning, this was the case almost unilaterally in America. Families immigrated together and moved in unified collectives across desired locales across the colonies. The first families of Virginia were mostly descended from…
Cole Branham
March 4, 2026
How They Canceled the Dunning School Blog

How They Canceled the Dunning School

Readers will be aware that the Dunning School was cancelled by the Marxist historian Eric Foner, but it is worth revisiting the details of exactly how Foner achieved this momentous feat. The reference to “Dunning” usually refers to the distinguished historian William A. Dunning, but it is also used more broadly as a label for his PhD students and the…
Wanjiru Njoya
March 3, 2026
The South and the American Empire Blog

The South and the American Empire

A Review of Joseph R. Stromberg, The South and the American Empire: Essays (Shotwell Publishing, 2026) Those familiar with the work of Joseph Stromberg know the mastery Stromberg has over the secondary literature in a diversity of academic fields. In the preface, Clyde Wilson states, “Joseph Stromberg is the consummate scholar for all seasons.  . . . is many essays…
John Devanny
March 2, 2026
Thank You For Your Service Blog

Thank You For Your Service

This proposal by an outgoing homosexual Democratic Party Virginia legislator to remove three statues - one of which is of a former governor (two times over!) of the Commonwealth - from the State Capitol grounds, is hardly surprising. Both Republicans and Democrats are guilty of historical cleansing, but Democrats are certainly worse in terms of Orwellian historical revisionism - and…
Rev. Larry Beane
February 27, 2026
49 Winchester Blog

49 Winchester

49 Winchester are a Southern band in the oldest, least marketable sense of the term. They are a group that formed because some guys in the same place played music together before they’d ever heard of tours and contracts. They come from Castlewood, Virginia, in the far southwestern corner of the state, an Appalachian region closer in spirit and history…
Tom Daniel
February 26, 2026
The Merchant Prince of the Rio Grande Who Chose the Confederate Cause Blog

The Merchant Prince of the Rio Grande Who Chose the Confederate Cause

When 200 Union cavalrymen rode toward Laredo on March 18, 1864, their mission seemed straightforward. Destroy 5,000 bales of Confederate cotton stacked at San Agustín Plaza, worth millions of dollars at wartime prices, and cripple the South's economic lifeline to Mexico. What stood between them and their objective was a garrison of just 42 men commanded by a Mexican American…
Jose Nino
February 25, 2026
Quantrill: The Truth at Last Blog

Quantrill: The Truth at Last

If you have seen the 1976 Clint Eastwood film “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” you may remember that it opens when the hero, a peaceful Missouri farmer, has his home destroyed and his wife killed by Kansas Jayhawkers.  He then joins the Southern guerilla fighters. This was the reality for thousands of Southerners living in western Missouri. An even better film,…
Clyde Wilson
February 24, 2026
The Wrong Conclusions Blog

The Wrong Conclusions

This article addresses the actions of eleven Southern States in the middle of the 19th Century vis a vis the actions presently taking place in and by a number of States and urban areas including the motives and legality of such actions by both groups involved. This small study is being done in order to address what has become a…
Valerie Protopapas
February 23, 2026
A New Edition of a Southern Classic Blog

A New Edition of a Southern Classic

According to everyone’s favorite font of leftist wisdom, Wikipedia, “it is not clear which side caused the fires” which consumed Columbia, South Carolina, on February 17, 1865. You get a similar answer from AI on Google. However, anyone who cares to read the voluminous eyewitness testimony (from both Southern and Northern sources) will be left in no doubt about who…
Karen Stokes
February 20, 2026
Liars and/or Fools (and Fires) Blog

Liars and/or Fools (and Fires)

Democrats have essentially degenerated into liars and/or fools. There is no third choice. If third graders spoke the way Demos do and of the things they advocate, they would be sent back to kindergarten, en masse. Republicans haven’t degenerated to anything-- they are the same nationalists (neo-socialist- seedlings, as are all nationalists) they have always been. However, Republicans now claim…
Paul H. Yarbrough
February 19, 2026
Songs of Lament Blog

Songs of Lament

There is a particular kind of song that only appears after history has already banged its gavel and rendered its verdict. While some songs are intended to rally the faithful or stiffen resolve, this is not that kind of song. This song arrives later, once the cannons have cooled, the banners have been folded away, and the surviving population has…
Tom Daniel
February 18, 2026
Minnesota Confederates? Blog

Minnesota Confederates?

Originally published at Reckonin.com Public officials in Minnesota - governor, attorney general, and mayor - are resisting enforcement of legitimate immigration law and encouraging their citizens to physically interfere with federal law enforcement. They have absurdly and perversely used States’ Rights arguments to justify their actions. There has even been ridiculous mention of the 10th Amendment which has been a…
Clyde Wilson
February 17, 2026
The “National Republicans” Blog

The “National Republicans”

Were the American Whigs the natural extension of the Federalists? This is a complicated question and one that creates a simplistic understanding of the American past. It also removes both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison from any complicity in the intellectual origins of the Whig Party. The Federalists as a "national" political faction died in 1815, tarnished by their war…
Brion McClanahan
February 16, 2026
Jefferson’s True Love Blog

Jefferson’s True Love

On January 1, 1772, Jefferson took as his wife the widow of Bathurst Skelton, Martha Wayles Skelton, at The Forest—the residence of John Wayles, father of Jefferson’s wife. Once married, the two set out for the long ride to Monticello. They drove their carriage in a light snow which became denser as they entered the Virginian countryside of Albemarle County.…
M. Andrew Holowchak
February 15, 2026
It Really Is Blue Blog

It Really Is Blue

Originally published at Reckonin.com If you spend any time at all online, you're aware of the proliferation of artificial intelligence-created content. Tools exist which have made AI now easily accessible, free or cheap to use. This powerful tool is in the hands of the general public with virtually no oversight in place, and as you might imagine, the content being…
Anne Wilson Smith
February 13, 2026
Lincoln’s Mercenaries Blog

Lincoln’s Mercenaries

A review of William Marvel, Lincoln’s Merenaries: Economic Motivation Among Union Soldiers During the Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 2018) As the eminent historian John Lukacs observed, causation and motivation are the two most difficult historical phenomena to prove and explain. In part, this is due to the complexities of human nature; men and women are rarely, if ever,…
John Devanny
February 11, 2026
Bookmen South of Richmond Blog

Bookmen South of Richmond

In October of 1949, Bernard Mannes Baruch walked into the Virginia State Library in Richmond with letters. One hundred fifty-two of them, written in a hand any student of the War would recognize, the neat, right-sloping script of Robert E. Lee. They were addressed to Jefferson Davis between 1862 and 1865, dispatched from field tents and hurried through the lines.…
Chase Steely
February 10, 2026
Harry Byrd, Carter Glass, and Opposition to the New Deal Blog

Harry Byrd, Carter Glass, and Opposition to the New Deal

In the words of one scholar, “the years from Reconstruction to the late 1950s witnessed Virginia’s fall from prominence.” This statement is true in many respects, as the South suffered greatly after the war and Reconstruction, not only in an economic sense but a political one as well. No Southerner could hope to win the presidency or vice presidency in…
Ryan Walters
February 9, 2026
“Our Confederacy” Blog

“Our Confederacy”

The socialist-democrat party’s leaders—particularly Rep. Pelosi—have taken to referring to “our democracy.” The term serves as a cudgel against political opponents in the de-civilizers’ attempts to justify or garner support for whatever unethical, unlawful, or unhelpful activities they seek to advance. How many of them—or even ordinary American citizens—realize that in the antebellum period it was not uncommon to encounter…
Forrest L. Marion
February 5, 2026
Front Porches Blog

Front Porches

When people talk about the history of American music, they almost always picture a stage, with a spotlight and a performer separated from an audience by footlights and distance. We imagine these grand, almost sacred spaces designed for reverence and applause. Of course, those places definitely matter, but they come late in the story. Southern music did not begin on…
Tom Daniel
February 3, 2026
Two Secessionists Blog

Two Secessionists

Most Americans continue to believe that Southerners invented secession (and nullification) as a defensive tactic to preserve slavery, and by "most Americans" I include so-called "conservatives" like Francis Sempa at The American Spectator and Hayden Daniel at The Federalist. According to this narrative, secession and nullification were little more than treasonous and petulant responses to justifiable federal laws. Both Sempa…
Brion McClanahan
February 2, 2026
The Mystery of the Beale Treasure Blog

The Mystery of the Beale Treasure

In 1885, there was published in Lynchburg by James B. Ward a small manuscript, titled The Beale Papers, Containing Authentic Statements Regarding the Treasure Buried in 1819 and 1821 near Bufords, in Bedford County, Virginia, and Which Has Never Been Recovered. The pamphlet, which sold for 50 cents, contained three ciphertexts. A ciphertext is a matter of encrypting or encoding…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 30, 2026
How a Spanish Officer Became the South’s Most Celebrated Filibuster Blog

How a Spanish Officer Became the South’s Most Celebrated Filibuster

Narciso López de Urriola entered the world on November 2, 1797, in Caracas, Venezuela, born to a family of prosperous Basque merchants who enjoyed considerable colonial privilege. His relatives navigated the turbulent Venezuelan Wars of Independence by pledging allegiance to the Spanish crown. History would deliver a bitter irony when this young man, who would eventually epitomize Caribbean liberation movements,…
Jose Nino
January 29, 2026
Dolly Parton and Southern Endurance Blog

Dolly Parton and Southern Endurance

Greatness. In Southern music, “greatness” is rarely the result of innovation alone. More often, it emerges from endurance—specifically, the capacity to move through cultural, commercial, and institutional pressure without surrendering. The South has produced countless musicians whose work crossed boundaries of region, genre, race, and class, but far fewer who managed to do so while retaining control over their voice,…
Tom Daniel
January 28, 2026
Why Forrest Encouraged an End to Racial Conflict Blog

Why Forrest Encouraged an End to Racial Conflict

There is no better place to begin understanding the party politics of the post-reconstruction South than with the Fourth of July celebrations organized by the Independent Order of Pole-Bearers in Memphis, Tennessee, 1875. The Pole-Bearers were a “fraternal society,” or mutual aid society, for the welfare and defense of black people. In attendance at this event were various former Confederate…
Wanjiru Njoya
January 27, 2026
Remarks Intended for a Gathering of Descendants of Confederate Soldiers on the 219th Birthday of General Robert E. Lee Blog

Remarks Intended for a Gathering of Descendants of Confederate Soldiers on the 219th Birthday of General Robert E. Lee

The piece was originally published at A Memoir of the Occupation. (In the old days, my grandfather said, the birthday of General Lee was commemorated with solemn ceremonials and a speech. The Sons of Confederate Veterans, of which I am a member, maintains this tradition. Were it ever my honor to do so, I’d deliver a speech along the lines…
Enoch Cade
January 26, 2026
Southern Conservatism vs. Ideology Blog

Southern Conservatism vs. Ideology

American conservatism and Southern conservatism are different. This statement may seem a little confusing since the South is part of America and, besides a brief period in the 1860s, has never existed separately from the United States. However, the society which developed south of Mason and Dixon’s line has a history and tradition stretching far back into the colonial days…
A.A. Wayne
January 23, 2026
Conflicting Visions of America Blog

Conflicting Visions of America

Originally published at the Alabama Gazette. “The contest is really for empire on the side of the North, and for independence on that of the South, and in this respect we recognize an exact analogy between the North and the Government of George III, and the South and the Thirteen Revolted Provinces. These opinions may be wrong but they are…
John M. Taylor
January 22, 2026
The New South, 1877-1919 Blog

The New South, 1877-1919

Originally published at Reckonin.com Historians have found as a useful periodisation “the New South,” beginning with the withdrawal of the last federal occupation troops and the end of Reconstruction and ending with World War I and the election as President Woodrow Wilson, Southern-born and bred, although not very Southern in most of his thinking. Speaking broadly of this period we…
Clyde Wilson
January 21, 2026
I Don’t Want Christmas to End Blog

I Don’t Want Christmas to End

I Don’t Want Christmas to End, the 2021 Christmas album by Zach Williams, doesn’t feel as much seasonal as it feels Southern. Recorded at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Zach Williams’ first full-length holiday record does a lot more than borrow the iconography of classic American music as it absorbs the essence of the iconic studio that shaped American…
Tom Daniel
January 20, 2026
Remembering Robert E. Lee Blog

Remembering Robert E. Lee

When Yale history professor David Blight wrote Race and Reunion in 2001, he argued that his attempt to discuss how Americans “remembered” the Civil War offered a new interpretation of the conflict. He termed it “memory studies.” Blight thought that Southerners—and for a time Northerners as well—remembered it wrong, and they did so consciously: Reconciliation joined arms with white supremacy…
Brion McClanahan
January 19, 2026
Regional Roots in a Global Age Blog

Regional Roots in a Global Age

In the twenty-first century, global interconnectedness has become the dominant paradigm of social, economic, and political life. Cosmopolitan ideals, such as global citizenship, transnational governance, and the celebration of universal human rights, have been championed as markers of progress and modernity. Yet, this enthusiasm for a borderless world often comes at the expense of local and regional identities, which are…
Clifford A. Bates, Jr.
January 16, 2026
A Venezuelan on Southern Soil Blog

A Venezuelan on Southern Soil

In the tangled web of modern geopolitics, where Venezuela and the United States circle each other with increasing hostility, a forgotten chapter whispers of a time when a Venezuelan patriot walked the American South soil not as an adversary but as an admirer, a student, and ultimately a brother in revolution. His name was Francisco de Miranda, and his story…
Jose Nino
January 14, 2026
Calhoun’s Doctrine of the Concurrent Majority Blog

Calhoun’s Doctrine of the Concurrent Majority

Originally published at Mises.org In the absence of effective checks on government power, all governments tend towards tyranny. This explains why John C. Calhoun defended the constitutional principle of limited government, emphasizing the importance of restraining the power of the majority. Calhoun argued that the aim of a constitution is not merely to confer power, but also to restrain it,…
Wanjiru Njoya
January 13, 2026
Economic Problems of the Southeast Blog

Economic Problems of the Southeast

Originally published at Folkchain.org The remains of the Dutch-owned American ENKA plant cover the land in Lowland, Tennessee, like a steel skeleton picked clean. The smokestacks rise red against the sky, two of them, maybe a hundred fifty feet high. The parking lot has cracked enough to let a little wilderness in, an archipelago of grass and weeds pushing up…
Chase Steely
January 12, 2026
Uncomfortable Truths for the Righteous Cause Myth Blog

Uncomfortable Truths for the Righteous Cause Myth

The following are uncomfortable truths for "Righteous Cause Mythologists:" 1. Africans created, organized, and supplied the international slave trade without any European involvement or direction, and Northers profited heavily from the institution. 2. Southerners established most of the early abolition societies in the United States. 3. "Jim Crow" segregation developed in Connecticut and was pervasive in New England in the…
Brion McClanahan
January 9, 2026
The Mysterious Relationship Between Thomas Jefferson and Black Mathematician Benjamin Banneker Blog

The Mysterious Relationship Between Thomas Jefferson and Black Mathematician Benjamin Banneker

Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806), the son of freed slaves, was a natural scientist and mathematician. Born in Baltimore County, Maryland, little is known of the exact course of his life. He appears to have been mostly self-educated. His early years of manhood were spent mostly on his 100-acre tobacco farm, owned by his parents, freed slaves. He was, however, a tinkerer…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 7, 2026
An Open Letter to the University of the South Blog

An Open Letter to the University of the South

The University of the South appears poised to remove many, if not all, Confederate names and images from its campus and memory because they may smack of Southern treason/secession and slavery. Such removal is a poorly conceived idea. First, secession (i.e., "independence") is probably the one, true and great gift that America has offered Mankind. Second, slavery is an American,…
W.E. Shofner
January 6, 2026
The Foreign Policy Wisdom America Ignored from John C. Calhoun Blog

The Foreign Policy Wisdom America Ignored from John C. Calhoun

Few American statesmen traveled a more remarkable foreign policy journey than South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun (1782-1850). The young War Hawk who promised to conquer Canada in four weeks became the elder statesman warning that conquest would destroy the republic itself. Such a foreign policy transformation would seem foreign to present-day public officials, who are completely enthralled by the…
Jose Nino
January 5, 2026
What Does it Mean to be “Southern”? Blog

What Does it Mean to be “Southern”?

What does it mean to be “Southern”? This question has vexed Americans since the founding. Every American knew that sectional differences existed. George Mason, for example, worried that the “Eastern States” would plunder the agricultural States further south. He drafted an amendment that would have prevented “navigation laws,” i.e. protective tariffs, for that reason. Gouverneur Morris openly suggested that if…
Brion McClanahan
December 30, 2025
Eggnog Nationalism Blog

Eggnog Nationalism

Originally published at Folk Chain of Memory. Winter often brought reprieve in the wars of the past, but not in the Eggnog War. Unlike the fashionable moral ambiguities peddled by our gender-ambiguous storytellers, this war permits no compromise. Here we find no fashionable shades of gray. We’re not flipping houses. The Eggnog Question divides as clearly as foundations, rock against…
Chase Steely
December 24, 2025
Liberty and the Plow: Defending Our Rights Against Federal Overreach Blog

Liberty and the Plow: Defending Our Rights Against Federal Overreach

Originally published at Medium.com By Agricola, a Freeholder of the Republic “Liberty is preserved not by distant power, but by limits placed upon it.” As a third generation agrarian in the Western United States, I inherit not only the soil worked by my family but also the principles they instilled in me — chief among them, the sanctity of private…
Darcy Lammers
December 23, 2025
A Vaudeville of Devils Blog

A Vaudeville of Devils

This piece was originally published at A Memoir of the Occupation. (Wars in the age of mass democracy are waged over ideas, a wise man once said (maybe Collingwood, though I can’t find the quote). So, yes: I’m happy to grant that slavery was a cause of the War Between the States. Or, rather, the portrait of slavery conjured by…
Enoch Cade
December 22, 2025
The Matrix, MAGA, and the Southern Tradition Blog

The Matrix, MAGA, and the Southern Tradition

As with many technological developments in American history, such as the internet itself, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being introduced with little occasion for the populace to be informed as to its potential impact or any opportunity for them to weigh in with their concerns.  Such is life in the Republic of Technology, aka The Machine.  Rather, the entire debate is…
Mike Goodloe
December 19, 2025
The Forgotten Voyagers Blog

The Forgotten Voyagers

In the shadowed corners of American history lies a story rarely told, a narrative of colonists who crossed an ocean twice to forge communities in the swamps and plains of the Deep South. These were the Isleños, a people whose very name whispers of distant shores and forgotten tongues. The Spanish word for "Islander" would come to identify an entire…
Jose Nino
December 18, 2025
Same Old, Same Old Blog

Same Old, Same Old

A review of Against the Machine: on the Unmaking of Humanity (Thesis, 2025) by Paul Kingsnorth In an interview included in the press handout for Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth is asked why he wrote this book now.  Good question. “The rise and triumph of the Machine,” he says, “is becoming increasingly obvious in the 2020s, so the moment seems…
Kirkpatrick Sale
December 16, 2025
Modern Yankees Use the Historical Propaganda Model Created by the Soviet Communists Blog

Modern Yankees Use the Historical Propaganda Model Created by the Soviet Communists

It is verboten in most places across the United States to say anything favorable about Southerner leaders who either personally embodied or fought to defend – with pen, sword, or by political means – authentic Southern tradition.  The institutions of the Left (media, academy, Hollywood) and the Right (talk radio, governments of Red States and counties/parishes, Fox News) seem to…
Walt Garlington
December 15, 2025
Crossing the Rubicon Blog

Crossing the Rubicon

Originally published at the Alabama Gazette. Crossing the Rubicon, a common phrase used to describe a point of no return, is typically traced back to Julius Caesar’s crossing of the river Rubicon in January 49 BC, initiating the Roman Civil War. An analogy can be drawn between the actions of Caesar and those of Lincoln in his call for 75,000…
John M. Taylor
December 12, 2025
A Few Southern Reflections Blog

A Few Southern Reflections

Originally published at Reckonin.com. Before the War for Southern Independence the main theme of American government was republican virtue and honour. The defeat of the Confederacy established a new main theme - making money. That was the most important result of the War. Compare Lee and Grant. Or the real characters of Jeff Davis and the corporate lawyer and tricky…
Clyde Wilson
December 11, 2025
The Confederates Who Chose Brazil Blog

The Confederates Who Chose Brazil

They sailed into Brazil more through memory than fact now, not as tourists or traders but as refugees from a vanquished republic. Between 1865 and 1875, an estimated 2,000 to 4,000 former Confederates left the wreckage of the American South and started over in the Empire of Brazil. Their exodus counted among the largest political departures of United States citizens…
Jose Nino
December 10, 2025
History Is Not a Science Blog

History Is Not a Science

Originally published at Mises.org. The court historians, who insist that they have the only “correct” view of history, like to claim that theirs is the only true version of history because it is based on primary sources. But they fail to distinguish between what the primary sources state, and their own interpretation of the significance to be attached to those…
Wanjiru Njoya
December 9, 2025
The Conspiracy No One is Talking About Blog

The Conspiracy No One is Talking About

Originally published at From the Desk of Jon Harris. I recently recorded a podcast on John Taylor of Caroline’s important but often neglected book New Views of the Constitution (1823). I initially believed that the most compelling way to introduce this work to modern audiences would be to highlight how Taylor, writing from a federalist perspective, disagreed with Joseph Story’s…
Jonathan Harris
December 8, 2025
Jefferson and the Indians Blog

Jefferson and the Indians

Jefferson’s views on Indians were characterized by ambivalence. Jefferson both loved and hated Native Americans at times because he de profundis animi (from the depths of his soul) loved Native Americans. That is not posited as a thesis, for it should be obvious to anyone who examines Jefferson’s presidential writings on Native Americans, but as an observation. Jefferson was, through…
M. Andrew Holowchak
December 5, 2025
Weaver’s Lessons for the Modern Right Blog

Weaver’s Lessons for the Modern Right

First published at The Daily Economy. The modern American right could stand to gain from the insight of Richard M. Weaver. Weaver, a twentieth-century conservative of the Southern tradition, perceived the dangers of radical ideologies as well as the extent to which American thinking offered the viable alternative. Amid the disagreements and controversies of our present moment, today’s various libertarians,…
Justin Madura
December 4, 2025
Commander-in-Chief and Journalistic “Wisdom” Blog

Commander-in-Chief and Journalistic “Wisdom”

I feel saddened (actually just mystified) at the accepted notion that the president is elected as commander-in-chief of the country. Somehow the sages of journalism have interpreted, as a result of some extracurricular activities of various presidents over the years, that because the term CIC is present in Article 2 and since the president’s duties fall under this same article,…
Paul H. Yarbrough
December 3, 2025
Rethinking the Southern Tradition Blog

Rethinking the Southern Tradition

Nullification is in the news, but not because the American right considers it to be a viable response to federal overreach. Mainstream conservatives have decided that classifying their leftist opponents as “neo-Confederates” interested in nullification will win political points at the next election. Victor Davis Hanson makes this a central theme of his ongoing attack on the Democratic Party. You…
Abbeville Institute
December 2, 2025
A Short History of the South, Part 4 Blog

A Short History of the South, Part 4

Originally published at Reckonin.com “Reconstruction,” 1865-1877 Through most of the 20th century, American historians of every stripe (except Communists) agreed that “Reconstruction” was an ugly period in our history - a regime of corruption, tyranny, bad leadership, and dangerous deviation from American principles. Honest historians found a vast treasury of evidence for this interpretation that is available but now ignored.…
Clyde Wilson
December 1, 2025