Fear not. Dixie lights are merely hiding under a bushel, as it says in the song we teach our children in Sunday School. Grass roots are sprouting. “Woke” tries to…
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11. Post-bellum and Westerns There are two interesting, important, and little noticed features of films about the South in the period after the War for Southern Independence. First, until recent…
The American story is a story of secession, or better still secessions. The first permanent settlements of Europeans in North America were the result of a series of secessions from…
A review of Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered (ISI Books, 2006) by Joseph Pearce. There’s not too much that’s actually wrong about this book, other than…
On January 21st Washington Post reporter Courtland Milloy wrote an article about my “Defending Confederate Monuments” speech at the January18th Lee-Jackson Day in Lexington, Virginia. His “Lee-Jackson Day with a bit of history and context” article portrays…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Feb 3-7, 2020 Topics: Two Americas, Southern tradition, Secession
10. Spielberg’s Lincoln (X) Spielberg’s Lincoln. Life is short. Although I am a devoted if amateur student of Hollywood’s treatment of the great American War of 1861-65, I intended to…
American political theater has become the most entertaining show in town. Trump refuses to shake hands and Pelosi rips up his script. This is red meat for the duly indoctrinated…
Progressive California lawmakers have decided to create their own Green New Deal in order to combat both climate change and statewide problems like poverty. The best way to accomplish this,…
A review of Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story (Encounter Books, 2019) by Wilfred M. McClay. Two Visions of America What is America? If America is…
All across the Southland today efforts have been mounted by “woke” social justice warriors—in most cases spearheaded by violent and destructive mobs composed of radicalized Millennials—to tear down or at…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute Jan 27-31, 2020 Topics: Robert E. Lee, Southern Tradition, Southern Culture, the War, Reconstruction
The Harvard Law Review has published a proposal for supposedly enhancing a better democracy than that which the Federal (not really) government now oversees. The proposal has no official name…
9. Confederate Hollywood From the beginnings to rather recent times portrayals of Confederates have been a mainstay of American cinema. After all, the Confederacy is a rather large and interesting…
‘ . . . you know only A heap of broken images . . .’ –T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land I. Destruction The description of the South as a…
A review of It Wasn’t About Slavery: Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Regnery History, 2020) by Samuel Mitcham On a huge hill, Cragged and steep, Truth stands,…
The novelist Walker Percy was inescapably Southern by virtually any measure. Born May 28, 1916 in Birmingham, he lived briefly in Athens, Georgia following the death of this father, grew…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute Jan 20-24, 2020 Topics: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Political Correctness, the War, Reconstruction
Caught a tweet tonight from Professor Henry Louis Gates, the Executive Producer of this PBS mini-series on “Reconstruction.” He was jubilant that the series had won a Columbia/Dupont Award for…
8. The War for Southern Independence (continued): Fantasy and Fraud Scorcese’s Gangs of New York (2002) Martin Scorcese, in an interview, candidly described his Gangsof New York, as an “opera.” …
Lieutenant-General Thomas Jonathan ‘Stonewall’ Jackson was the greatest martyr of our Cause, the first icon of the War for Southern Independence. He was the archetypal Christian soldier; there is infinite…
“If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the pompous ‘wisdom’of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error.” Mark Twain “The…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Jan 13-17, 2020 Topics: Southern culture, Southern history, Southern tradition, Southern literature
William Gibson surprises people when they meet him. The writer who coined the terms “cyberspace” and “megacorp,” whose dystopian novels re-invented science fiction in the 80s, and was lauded in…
Symbols Used ** Indicates one of the more than 100 most recommended films. The order in which they appear does not reflect any ranking, only the convenience of discussion (T) …
Theories of education in any land are never easily divorced from the prevailing ideas regarding civics and economics. Education’s function, particularly toward the young, will become merely to render them…
A review of An Aesthetic Education and Other Stories (Green Altar Books, 2019) by Catharine Savage Brosman One of the most felicitous occurrences in literature is when a first-rate poet…
As 2020 commences it is perhaps appropriate that we take stock—that we take a look globally at just where we are, politically, culturally, religiously. All our basic and fundamental social…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute Jan 6-10, 2020 Topics: Political Correctness, Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, Impeachment
Not that long ago, it seems, Congressional Democrats were calling the Constitution an outdated impediment to “smart,” progressive government, but lately they are professing their high regard for the founding…
Symbols Used ** Indicates one of the more than 100 most recommended films. The order in which they appear does not reflect any ranking, only the convenience of discussion (T) …
If one bothered to turn back the pages of history it should become quite evident that the 1868 impeachment of President Andrew Johnson bears a most eerie resemblance to the…
A review of Lee vs. McClellan, The First Campaign (Regnery Publishing, 2010) by Clayton R. Newell. The title of this work is misleading, since Robert E. Lee never fielded troops…
A photograph of the University of Mississippi Majorettes graced the cover of the September 24, 1962, issue of the popular national magazine, Sports Illustrated. This national magazine thought nothing of…
The culture war rages on. And what a war! There seems to be a new outrage almost every day. “Make it Right,” a New York organization dedicated to hunting down…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Dec 16-23, 2019 Topics: Southern tradition, Southern symbols, Year in Review
The impeachment hearings are good for humor if for nothing else. They bring out the so-called experts who demonstrate that they are anything but experts. Law professor Pamela Karlan, Standford…
5. Spielberg’s Amistad (1997) If Amistad is not yet a household word like ET or Jurassic Park, it soon will be with the power of Steven Spielberg behind it. (When…
Back in 2015 when Dylan Roof shot those black folks in their church in Charleston, South Carolina no one was quicker to denounce the Confederate flag than the governor of…
A review of Burden of Dependency: Colonial Themes in Southern Economic Thought (Johns Hopkins, 1992) by Joseph Persky An Under-Appreciated Book In 1973, the young economist Joseph J. Persky wrote…
I just finished seeing the movie trailer for the upcoming Warner Bros. Pictures film Richard Jewell produced and directed by Clint Eastwood and scheduled for US release on Friday, December…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Dec 9-13, 2019 Topics: Southern music, Southern literature, Southern film, Southern culture
There are few Southern hearts that still fail to skip a beat or two when a military band strikes up “Dixie,” the de facto national anthem of the Confederacy and…
Symbols Used ** Indicates one of the more than 100 most recommended films. The order in which they appear does not reflect any ranking, only the convenience of discussion (T) …
There’s a Southern accentWhere I come from.The young un’s call it country,And the Yankees call it dumb. Tom Petty, “Southern Accents” (Covered by The Steel Woods) Southern rock and “outlaw…
A review of Maxcy Gregg’s Sporting Journals, 1842-1858 (Green Altar Books, 2019) Suzanne Parfitt Johnson, Editor. Foreword by James Everett Kibler, Jr. The exploration of everyday life in a given…
My new neighbor Ozzie, who grew up in the Bronx, thinks that the South is a place “without much culture.” Ozzie acts as if he is an expert on the…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Dec 2-6, 2019 Topics: Political Correctness, Southern Tradition, Southern Culture, Robert E. Lee
Bevin Alexander’s “How Great Generals Win” was an intellectual watershed in my life. By applying the wisdom of Sun Tzu to famous Generals throughout history Alexander makes clear that battlefield…
A man only has room for one oath at a time. I took an oath to the Confederate States of America.” John Wayne, The Searchers “We are going to hit…
An excerpt from North Carolina author Robert Ruark’s best known novel reads: “If a man does away with his traditional way of living and throws away his good customs, he…
A review of Erasing America: Losing our Future by Destroying our Past (Regnery Publishing, 2018) by James S. Robbins James Robbins’ book, Erasing America, targets the most egregious enemies of…
Early this past summer the historic Steele Creek Presbyterian Church, near the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, closed its doors for good. The church, the second oldest in Mecklenburg County,…
Driving thru Southern Maryland’s rural scenery- farms, woods, and villages, history greets you around every curve. Strong traditions in the heart of the people make it easy to appreciate the…
Despite his unrivaled popularity after the Civil War, Republcan Ulysses Grant won the presidency merely three years later in 1868 by a popular vote margin of only 53%-to-47%. In fact,…
Some wear the color of the sky in the winter Some were as blue as the night They came like a storm with the light of the morn And they…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Nov 18-22, 2019 Topics: Nationalism, Southern Tradition, Southern Culture
The role of religion, specifically evangelical protestant religion in the North, is frequently emphasized by gatekeeper historians in framing the causes and consequences of the War Between the States. This…
It is disturbing when you see a man like Tucker Carlson, who seems a reasonably objective fellow, painted with the brush of authority by the likes of Virginian Rich Lowry….
The beginning of the American political order goes much further back than the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. Political scientists and political theorists are understandably fixated on the Constitution and the…
A Review of The Idea of The American South, 1920-1941, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) by Michael O’Brien. I have an invitation to extend to Michael O’Brien, the British author…
With the recent triumph of the Democrat Party in the 2019 statewide elections in Virginia, it will only be a matter of time before an effort is made to rewrite…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Nov 11-15, 2019 Topics: Secession, Southern Tradition, Slavery, Political Correctness, the War
Mike Hudson was an investigative journalist for the now-defunct Niagara Falls Reporter in 2014, and looked deeply into city plans to erect a monument to the largely mythological “underground railroad”…
Many present-day Southerners—indeed, many of those Americans who call themselves “conservatives”—find it difficult to envisage a time when Southern and Confederate traditions (not to mention noble Confederate veterans like “Stonewall”…
Confederate statue critics increasingly argue that the monuments should be torn down because they honor traitors. Among such advocates is Christy Coleman, CEO of the Richmond’s American Civil War Museum. While the…
A review of None Shall Look Back (J.S. Sanders, 1992) by Caroline Gordon Thus far the War Between the States has failed to produce an epic like The Iliad, a…
There are really only two basic opinions when it comes to the world’s largest carving on the face of the fifteen million year old granite monolith just outside Atlanta, Georgia…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Nov 4-8, 2019 Topics: Southern tradition, Confederate monuments, Secession, the War
One of the two commandments the Lord Jesus Christ gave to His disciples to follow was to love our neighbor as ourselves. However, in the modern United States of America,…
In 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) released the “Whose Heritage?” report on the Confederate symbols in the United States. This report had one thesis: The Confederate monuments, memorials,…
One of the most enduring myths of American history centers on the “compact theory” of the Constitution. According to the standard interpretation, Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Republicans invented the…
A Review of The Everlasting Circle: Letters of the Haskell Family of Abbeville, South Carolina, 1861—1865. (Mercer University Press, 2019) Edited by Karen Stokes. Participants in the Old South and…
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” George Orwell “Sure I am this day we are masters…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Oct 28 – Nov 1, 2019 Topics: Secession, the War for Southern Independence, Copperheads, United States Constitution, Jefferson Davis
The Chesapeake Bay is the heart of Maryland. Except for a couple of remote areas, all of Maryland drains into the Chesapeake or its tributaries. Most of Maryland’s population is…
In August of 1862, two years before his infamous ‘March to the Sea’, General William T. Sherman declared, “Salt is eminently contraband.” The Southern leaders’ positioning of the South’s economy…
J.P. Morgan, tycoon banker and a close friend to President Stephen Grover Cleveland, observed that “a man always has two reasons for the things he does a good one and…
A review of The Secession Movement in the Middle Atlantic States (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973) by William C. Wright (WCW) “Historical writing during the Civil War and immediately after…
In our turbulent times it is increasingly evident that our government is disconnected to the citizens of the republic. Rather, what we behold is a zealous managerial class, an elite…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Oct 21-25, 2019 Topics: Political Correctness, Reconstruction, Southern History
When I See That Flag Flying by John Parker When I see that flag flying I see my people dying Defending their land From its invasion. When I see that…
Heartbroken, I have learned that my beloved Bentonville, Arkansas, has been attacked. The Confederate monument that rests in the center of our town square has been defaced. The carpetbaggers that…
Just before Christmas of 1860, the chain of events that was to soon to lead the nation into four bloody years of undeclared war began with South Carolina exercising its…
A review of The Lytle-Tate Letters: The Correspondence of Andrew Lytle and Allen Tate (University of Mississippi Press, 1987), Thomas Daniel Young and Elizabeth Sarcone, eds. Considering Allen Tate’s well-documented…
You know, as a kid who grew up without electricity, a telephone or indoor plumbing, it continues to amaze me that I posted a picture of a sign in front…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Oct 14-18, 2019 Topics: Southern tradition, Thomas Jefferson, Agrarianism, Reconciliation
Charles Francis Adams was the grandson and son of former-Presidents John and John Quincy Adams. It is therefore of little surprise he himself embarked on career and life of public…
In 1993 the Washington Post published an article on research being conducted by an accomplished Richmond lawyer named Robert Cooley. According to this article, among many additional details in regard…
The news media rarely, if ever, focuses on the impact on society and culture the price of economic growth. Nor do politicians. This begs the question, what price is extracted…
A review of Wendell Berry: Port William Novels and Stories (Library of America, 2018), Jack Shoemaker, ed. The long shelf of fiction by Wendell Berry—overshadowed by the colossal green canopy…
I recently relocated–with any luck, temporarily–to a sprawling metroplex of a city of almost seven million, within an even more massive state. I’d believed I understood globalism and loss of identity….
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Oct 7-11, 2019 Topics: Jeffersonian Tradition, United States Constitution, Black Confederates
One could argue that there are two basic visions for America: the Hamiltonian and the Jeffersonian. The former is nationalist, calling for centralized power and an industrial, mercantilist society characterized…
A recent National Review column in the silly Northern War over 1619 contained this unfortunate paragraph: “In fact, Adams suggested, if there ever were a civil war, the president would…
Where did the belief in the “black Confederate soldier” originate? Did it begin in 1977, after the success of the television mini-series Roots caused people to reevaluate race and slavery…
A review of Lincoln (Simon and Schuster, 1995) by David Herbert Donald Professor David Herbert Donald of Harvard University, a son of Mississippi and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, is one…
Those of us whose experience goes back a way into the last century, can remember when “democracy” was the main theme of American discourse. A million tongues proudly and repeatedly…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Sept 30 – Oct 4, 2019 Topics: Southern Tradition, Political Correctness, Neoconservatives, United States Constitution, Federalism
Every now and then an acquaintance who reads what I write will ask me: “Boyd, why are you so critical of writers and commentators—Neoconservatives—like Victor Davis Hanson, Ben Shapiro, Brian…
These days, we see many politicians pushing relentlessly for gun control. In the wake of recent mass shootings, several so-called “conservatives” have shown their true colors by demonizing gun owners…
The 150th season of college football serves as a reminder of the intersection between sports and local communities. While the nationalization of sports media outlets brings games and analysis to…
A review of Faith and Fury: The Rise of Catholicism During the Civil War (Ewtn Publishing, 2019) by Fr. Charles Connor The abolitionists are wrong as to their point of…
George Mason, like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, was happiest at home, either in the fields and woods, with a good book by the hearth, or entertaining neighbors and family. …
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Sept 23-27, 2019 Topics: Reconstruction, Establishment History, Southern Tradition
Conservative talk radio host Dennis Prager has become a YouTube success with his five-minute videos on politics, history, religion and culture. They’ve been viewed 2.5 billion times and he gets…
A book condemning the left-wing bias of one of the most widely read and educationally used histories of the United States was recently written by Mary Grabar who received her…
What does the South have to offer that is valuable to humanity, to civilization? In 1939, the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Douglas Southall Freeman proposed an answer to this question in…
A review of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2014) by Edward Baptist Recent polling of the millennials’ attitudes toward socialism…
I recently read a report of a professor who declared that he had come sadly to the conclusion that the Founding Fathers had been all wrong in the government they…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Sep 16-20, 2019 Topics: Southern tradition, Southern history, Southern identity
Southerners love home. This is true of many people throughout history, but place has, in part, defined the South. The earliest settlers to what became the South championed its Utopian…
This article originally appeared on www.TheAmericanConservative.com. Copyright 2019 From the colonial era well into the 20th century, large public barbecues were an institution across the South, from the Chesapeake eventually…
From late 1983 until its fitful demise in the early 2000s, I served as a contributing editor, adviser, or just simply a contributor to the old Southern Partisan magazine. Although…
A review of American Empire: A Global History (Princeton, 2018) by A.G. Hopkins From the beginning, America has been a house divided. As Andrés Reséndez details in The Other Slavery:…
Increasingly, America’s past is becoming a lightning rod for contemporary ideological struggles. Colleges, highways and Democratic Party fundraising dinners are being renamed, monuments destroyed or desecrated, and a general suspicion…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Sept 9-13, 20-19 Topics: Reconstruction, Political Correctness, Southern Tradition
Prager U and the American Battlefield Trust recently teamed-up to sponsor this six minute video by Princeton University’s Dr. Allen Guelzo who claims that “the North won the Civil War but the…
Professor Allen Guelzo has a new video at Prager U “explaining” the “good, bad, and ugly” of Reconstruction. Anyone that has watched a Prager U video knows where this is…
In his recent book, Call Sign Chaos : Learning To Lead, former Secretary of Defense James Mattis cited what he termed the current “tribalism” in America as the greatest threat…
A review of To Die in Chicago: Confederate Prisoners at Camp Douglas (Pelican, 1999) by George Levy The dead are buried somewhere in Chicago and there are over 4,000 of…
Southerners, of all Americans, have been the most acute and the most persistent in their analyses of what has ailed and threatened our culture, certainly since the end of the…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute Sept 2-6, 2019 Topics: Southern tradition, Southern conservatism, populism, secession
The Colonial Parkway connects Jamestowne and WIlliamsburg with the third leg of Virginia’s HIstoric Triangle-Yorktown. The colonial period of history had its beginning at Jamestown, its maturity at Williamsburg, and…
Leaders of every nation do what they think is in their countries’ immediate best interest and explain their actions with words that seem relevant at that moment. If future actions…
Old slave and planter graves a flight apart For thrushes eating seeds of grass and yew, The unmarked plots and plots with dates and names Too weatherworn to trace and…
A review of The Southern Tradition: The Achievements and Limitations of Southern Conservatism (Harvard, 1994) by Eugene Genovese The notion of a Southern political tradition can be understood as conservative,…
In what passes for political and cultural discourse today, the term “populist” is something of a pejorative, conjuring up images in the mind of the cultural and academic elite of…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Aug 26-30, 2019 Topics: Southern culture, Southern tradition, Southern heritage
This essay was presented at the 2019 Abbeville Institute Summer School on the New South. In 1965 Texas novelist William Humphrey wrote: If the Civil War is more alive to…
On May 17, 2019, the United States House of Representatives passed H.R. 5: Equality Act—better known as the Trans-Gender Equality Act. The “peoples” House thus spoke on behalf of the…
Lack of attachment to culture, heritage, and tradition is the death of a nation. As a child, I had very little in-depth knowledge of my family’s history. Most of my…
A review of The C.S.A. Trilogy (Independent, 2018) by Howard Ray White. A beautiful thought experiment for Southerners. The year is 2011, the 150th anniversary of the founding of the…
Louisiana is a state accustomed to incredibly incompetent and corrupt public officials, especially in the governor’s office. Some of my fellow Louisianans will be surprised to know that one of…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Aug 19-23, 2019 Topics: Secession, Political Correctness, Slavery, Strom Thurmond, Reconciliation
In 1866, a year after taking the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox, Ulysses S. Grant had reason to consider and comment on the political landscape. At…
When most Americans hear the word slavery today, their minds instantly conjure up only images of either a black African in chains or a group of such people toiling away…
This essay was presented at our 2019 Summer School on The New South. James Strom Thurmond, or Strom, was born on December 5, 1902 in Edgefield, South Carolina. This historic…
A review of U.S. Grant’s Failed Presidency (Shotwell Publishing, 2019) by Philip Leigh There was a time in recent memory when thoughtful people consistently ranked U.S. Grant’s presidency as one…
In a recent column, “Nationalism vs. Secession: Should America Break Up? (July 27), I included references to an essay I had published at THE UNZ REVIEW (July 26), and then…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute Aug 12-16, 2019 Topics: Reconstruction, Monuments, Southern Religion, New South, G.K. Chesterton
A semantic technique that has worked well for political types is renaming things to make them more acceptable to the public. This has occurred countless times in our society. Here…
Before there was any New England in the North, there was something very like Old England in the South. Relatively speaking, there is still – G. K. Chesterton Within Christian…
This essay was presented at our 2019 Summer School on the New South. Fundamentalism is often viewed as the most Southern of religions. Yet this is not so. It was…
A review of Punished with Poverty: The Suffering South-Prosperity to Poverty & the Continuing Struggle (Shotwell, 2016) by James Ronald and Walter Donald Kennedy This is one of the most…
Does anyone remember United States Congressman Jesse L. Jackson, Jr.? I mean, for something other than being the son of The Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. and for being sentenced…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Aug 5-9, 2019 Topics: Land, Southern Tradition, United States Constitution, Southern History
I don’t like the thing. I hate what it stands for, and I respect the givers even less than I respect the gift. Most of the problems we face today…
In I Kings 21, we see that Naboth did not feel that he had the right to sell the family land no matter how much money King Ahab offered. The…
This essay was originally published in The Lasting South (Regnery, 1957). Recently when Bertrand Russell was a speaking-guest of the Richmond Area University Center, its director, Colonel Herbert Fitzroy, drove…
A Review of A Historical and Constitutional Defense of the South (1914) by Captain John Anderson Richardson Captain Richardson was a member of the 19th Georgia, experienced the war and…
Mr. Leigh presented this paper at the 2019 Abbeville Institute Summer School on The New South. Historians have reinterpreted Civil War Reconstruction over the past fifty years. Shortly before the…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, July 29 – Aug 2, 2019 Topics: Federalism, Nationalism, Decentralization, Southern history, Virginia, Anti-imperialism
There is a question that increasingly arises, uncomfortably, in our conversations…from brief exchanges at work at the water cooler, at home with family, after church on Sunday, with our email…
Earlier this month, prominent names in the conservative movement gathered in Washington, DC, for a conference on “National Conservatism.” Speakers included such luminaries as Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance,…
In 1715, Colonial Governor Charles Craven remarked that his front line troops in the fight against a hostile American Indian tribe comprised “two hundred stout negro men.” Just five years…
J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power, 1966 and The Price of Empire, 1967 Robert C. Byrd, Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency, 2004 Known and celebrated as…
George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson trod the roads of this area as the colony of Virginia grew. George Mason, James Madison and Richard Henry Lee sat in the…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute July 22-26, 2019 Topics: Southern history, African-American Southern history, Monuments, Southern literature
As noted in earlier posts, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and many academic historians are promoting a false narrative that the Confederate statues erected between 1900 and 1920 were…
Most of us, even the youngest, have heard of the magnificent Disney film, “Song of the South,” originally released in 1946. And certainly we are familiar with its hit song,…
Then Lytle asked: Who are the dead? Who are the living and the dead? Allen Tate, “The Oath” Over the decades since its first publication in 1927 Allen Tate’s “Ode…
Review of The Barber of Natchez (LSU, 1954, 1973) edited by Edwin Adams Davis and William Ransom Hogan. Author’s Note: In 1938 a trove of documents dating from 1793 -1937, “over…
Sooner or later any student of the War for Southern Independence will run across discussion of “black Confederates,” which may well be the most controversial topic related to the war….
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, July 15-19, 2019 Topics: Southern symbols, Northern hypocrisy, Jim Kibler
On February 4, 2002, a current member of the United States Supreme Court gave the following remarks at Loyola University, in New Orleans: a tribute to Judah P. Benjamin, a former…
I had some correspondence with an editor of the Post and Courier this week when I sent them a letter for publication in response to their July 6, 2019 editorial…
Illinois’ Governor J.B. Pritzer has banned the Southern rock band Confederate Railroad from the Illinois State Fair because of the band’s name and Confederate flag on their logo. He said…
A retrospective review of Our Fathers’ Fields: A Southern Story (University of South Carolina Press, 1998) by James Everett Kibler, Jr. On June 7, 1998, I opened a copy of…
I am always annoyed when a conservative political leader attacks Southern heritage. I don’t know why because with the present-day crop of cowardly politicians, it is becoming routine, but I…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, July 8-12, 2019. Topics: Republican Party, Southern tradition, Southern conservatism
Robert Lewis Dabney (1820–1898) defended the South both during and after the War Between the States. During the war, this professor of theology left his work at Union Theological Seminary…
A bill to establish a Bureau of Freedmen’s Affairs was introduced in the House of Representatives on February 17, 1864, by Massachusetts Republican Rep. Thomas D. Eliot. Democrat Rep. Samuel…
There is a modern notion among the Republicans and their most vocal acolytes such as Dinesh D’Souza and Mark Levin that the Republicans are the healers and the Democrats are…
A review of Conserving America (St. Augustine Press, 2016) by Patrick J. Deneen Man has been created by God in such a way that the larger the object of his…
As someone who grew up during the decade of the 1960’s, I am paying attention when I hear those on the Left talking of the events which took place 50…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, July 1-5, 2019 Topics: Southern culture, Southern tradition
“Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of. And unto this, Conan, destined to bear the…
Each of us tends to be a prisoner of our own experience. In a World with billions of people, we experience only a tiny part. Thus, we rely upon our…
The poem was written shortly after Mr. Lytle’s death in 1995. I intended it to be part of an expanded edition of Poems from Scorched Earth, thus continuing the meditation…
A review of How To Be a Conservative (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2015), by Sir Roger Scruton. It is highly unusual for any political leader to articulate any sort of learned political…
Joe Biden is at it again. The longtime senator from Delaware, former Vice President of the United States, and current Democratic presidential nomination front-runner recently confirmed his reputation as a…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, June 24-28, 2019 Topics: Southern history, Southern statesmen
Virginia’s Historic Triangle: Jamestowne, Williamsburg and Yorktowne encompasses the first permanent English settlement in America, the most important colonial capital, and the last major military engagement of the American War…
Many who are well acquainted with Southern history are almost entirely unfamiliar with the historical character of Nathaniel Macon. He is often mentioned by the best of authors as a…
Original material for Southern history has been so scarce at the centres where American historiographers have worked, that the general writers have had to substitute conjecture for understanding in many…
A review of Dabney on Fire: A Theology of Parenting, Education, Feminism, and Government (2019) by Zachary Garris, ed. During his lifetime, Southern theologian and writer Robert Lewis Dabney was…
Battle of Secessionville Commemoration Address by Gene Kizer, Jr. on the battle site at Fort Lamar Heritage Preserve on James Island in Charleston, South Carolina June 15, 2019. This was…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, June 17-21, 2019 Topics: Southern history, R.L. Dabney, Federalism
I am honored to speak at the graduation from high school of these young men and women who were once my students and who are now my friends. We’ve grown…
Congress has a far greater number of wealthy people than the general population. Consequently, the bureaucrats that Congress has created by their legislation also have brought unto themselves great wealth….
The writings of Robert Lewis Dabney (1820–1898) often read like prophecy. After the War Between the States, Dabney wrote essays on a variety of cultural and political issues, both in…
A review of American Diplomacy under Tyler and Polk (Johns Hopkins, 1907) by Jesse S. Reeves. Both as an interesting chapter in the history of the diplomacy of the United…
But Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge is a worshipper of Hamilton, whom Giles hated, and an exponent of broad construction, which Giles bitterly fought.
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, June 10-14, 2019 Topics: Democracy, Southern Political Tradition, Agrarianism, Robert E. Lee
There is in some of our libraries a certain book which the writer of this article ventures to believe is not generally as familiar as it should be to the…
To those Americans who revere him—sadly, a dwindling number these days—Robert E. Lee is still much a “Marble Man”: the noble face of the antebellum South, the tragic embodiment of…
Genetically engineered crops have been grown in large numbers across the States since 1996. These genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are created by taking a gene (or genes) from an unrelated…
A review of The First South (LSU Press, 1961) by John Richard Alden One of the things I’ve discovered since I began studying Civil War history is that the roots…
Secession, nullification, and interposition, like the poor, we shall always have with us. These are as American, indeed more American, than apple pie and baseball. Our new federal union, outlined…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, June 3-7 2019 Topics: Political Correctness, Secession, Abraham Lincoln, Southern Literature
Silent Sam was a Confederate statue that stood on the University of North Carolina campus at Chapel Hill for 104 years after its 1913 dedication. A student mob toppled it…
Abraham Lincoln is widely regarded as one of the nation’s greatest Presidents.[1] He is the subject of at least 15,000 books.[2] A popular poem (later set to music) responded to…
Over the years I have known a few—very few—politicians whom I have admired greatly. It seems that the age of those remarkable statesmen and political leaders who once gave substance…
A review of Louisiana Poets: A Literary Guide, (U. Press of Mississippi, 2019) by Catharine Savage Brosman and Olivia McNeely Pass. The poet and the scholar are reportedly different sorts…
I want to tell you a story that you won’t read in the mainstream news. It is a positive story, about people from different backgrounds, who have different cultures, coming…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, May 27-31, 2019 Topics: Memorial Day, Monuments, Political Correctness, Patrick Henry
One argument used by those wanting to remove Confederate statues is that contemporary blacks had little chance to oppose them when they were erected. Aside from anecdotal evidence that blacks joined white crowds…
Catholic and non-Catholic Southerners alike have reason to mourn the loss of Father James Schall, S.J., who passed away shortly before Easter at the age of 91. As an erudite…
It’s telling indeed that while everyone, irrespectively of political partisanship, can’t refer to “racism” enough, few people, if any, want to spend any time at all talking about “anti-Americanism.” The…
A Review of American Statesman. Patrick Henry (Houghton Mifflin, 1887) by Moses Coit Tyler Of all the figures of the Revolution, there is perhaps not one which the mists of…
Noblest of martyrs in a glorious fight! Ye died to save the cause of Truth and Right. And though your banner beams no more on high, Not vainly did it…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, May 20-24, 2019. Topics: Political Correctness, Fake News, Social Justice Warriors, Southern monuments.
“All we need to do is to tell the truth about the War.” I became actively involved in the “Southern” movement in the early 1960s. From that time up to…
I attended a protest to tear down the John C. Calhoun monument in Charleston on May 16, 2019. This event was being hosted by “The Independent Media Institute,” and consisted…
On August 22, 2018, Forbes Magazine published an article written by Kristina Killgrove entitled “Scholars Explain the Racist History of UNC’s Silent Sam Statue.” 1 Two days earlier, the statue…
A Review of Doniphan’s Expedition, Containing an Account of the Conquest of New Mexico . . . by John T. Hughes. Cincinnati, 1847 and Reid’s Tramp, or a Journal of…
We hear a lot about “fake news” these days. Until I was its victim, I was skeptical about the extent of its existence. Now I understand why trust in the…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, May 13-17, 2019 Topic: Southern conservatism
Prager University has a video presentation, “American values” which is no more than historical fiction. These values, Dennis Prager claims in the video, are a result of America’s unique position…
The Dr. Martin Luther King Memorial Commission of the Virginia General Assembly announced that it will spend taxpayer money to erect a statue honoring Nat Turner who was the leader of a drunken…
We have seen how Mississippi, with its campus free speech bill, totally ignored its own State constitution in favor of federal 1st Amendment arguments. Now Texas is doing likewise in…
A review of George Washington: A Biography in Seven Volumes (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948-54) by Douglas Southall Freeman This is the definitive George Washington biography and is for…
One of the great issues of American political history is whether an authentic American conservatism exists. This is a crucial question for Southerners, as the South is historically viewed as…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, May 6-9, 2019 Topics: Confederate symbols,Southern tradition, Mel Bradford, Southern history
The first English settlement in what is now Hampton was started in 1610, when Colonist under Governor Sir Thomas Gates captured a Native American village, Kecoughtan. Forts Henry and Charles…
Most people believe the novel 1984 by George Orwell was about some futuristic dystopia. Published in 1949, the story reflected the fear of what the world could be like under…
As a stalwart Southerner who came of age before the 1960s, its hard to believe how much that era has transformed our society. Unfortunately, the majority of today’s citizens were…
A review of A Defender of Southern Conservatism: M.E. Bradford and His Achievements (Missouri, 1999) by Clyde N. Wilson, ed. Clyde Wilson, Professor of History at the University of South…
Jabez Lafayette Monroe Curry was one of the major political figures of the Old South. In the Alabama Assembly and the United States Congress, he was a passionate and articulate…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institutes, Apr 29-May 3, 2019 Topics: the War, Southern Tradition, Political Correctness
The image of Richard Weaver that sticks in my memory is a disturbing one. He is standing before an audience in a conference room at Vanderbilt University, his gnome-like features…
Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were only the beginning. For anyone that believed American iconoclasm would stop once Confederate statues were removed or “contextualized,” they were rudely awakened last…
A week ago Sunday—Easter Sunday, April 21—Aaron D. Wolf, Executive Editor of Chronicles Magazine, passed away. After what had been for him, his wife Lorrie, and his family one of…
A review of For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (Oxford, 1997) by James McPherson Miss Emma Holmes of Charleston, SC, and a survivor of the…
Row after row with strict impunityThe headstones yield their names to the element,The wind whirrs without recollection;In the riven troughs the splayed leavesPile up, of nature the casual sacramentTo the…
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Apr 22-26, 2019. Topics: Southern tradition, Richard Weaver, Southern culture
History is remembered as a narrative, not facts and figures. If the story is told from the viewpoint of past sins, the rendering condemns our ancestors and makes us ashamed…
CONFEDERATE MEMORIAL DAY ADDRESS 22 April 2019 American by birth — Southern by the grace of God! I come from a true Southern state, South Dakota, and I am honored…
If you’ve come across some of the other things I’ve written for Abbeville, you might have been exposed to my assertion that almost all of American music is Southern music. …
A Review of Sacred Conviction: The South’s Stand for Biblical Authority (Shotwell Publishing, 2018) by Joseph Jay Shotwell Publishing and author Joseph Jay have produced a wonderful short study of…
Stretching from the Potomac River across the southeastern quarter of the United States in a broad arc into the plains of Texas is a region known geographically and politically as…
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