Blog

The Place of Nathaniel Macon in Southern History

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 North Carolinian, as a Georgian, or simply as a Southern Democrat. His share in the political development of the South is but vaguely known, yet every southern state has either…
William E. Dodd
June 27, 2019
Blog

The South Carolina Federalists

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 cases when attempting to interpret Southern developments. The Federalists of the South have suffered particularly from misrepresentation and neglect. Their Democratic-Republican contemporaries of course abused them; the American public at…
Ulrich B. Phillips
June 26, 2019
Review Posts

Dabney on Fire

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 most notably known for his 1866 biography of General “Stonewall” Jackson (The Life and Campaigns of Lieut.-Gen. Thomas J. Jackson) and for his post-war apologia for the Southern cause, A…
Boyd Cathey
June 25, 2019
Blog

Secessionville

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 a memorial service honoring the 157th anniversary of the brilliant Confederate victory of June 16, 1862. The Battle of Secessionville was an extremely important battle because, if the Confederates had…
Gene Kizer, Jr.
June 24, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 174

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, June 17-21, 2019 Topics: Southern history, R.L. Dabney, Federalism https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-174
Brion McClanahan
June 22, 2019
Blog

Make America States Again

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 so close, in fact, I’ve decided to graduate with them! Over the last few weeks, as the day of my departure grew near, many of these dear friends have thanked…
Joe Wolverton
June 21, 2019
Blog

Washington’s Money

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. Much of their wealth comes prior to serving in Congress it can be said. But much more from assets to the immediate temptation of graft and corruption euphemistically referred to…
Paul H. Yarbrough
June 20, 2019
Blog

Was Dabney a Prophet?

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 defense of the South and as an assault on progressivism. Along the way, he made predictions regarding the secularization of public schools, the future of feminism, and the decline of…
Zachary Garris
June 19, 2019
Review Posts

American Diplomacy Under Tyler and Polk

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 States, and as dealing with an important and but recently exploited period of our national politics, Dr. Jesse S. Reeves’s American Diplomacy under Tyler and Polk is a timely and…
St. George Sioussat
June 18, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 173

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, June 10-14, 2019 Topics: Democracy, Southern Political Tradition, Agrarianism, Robert E. Lee https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-173
Brion McClanahan
June 15, 2019
Blog

Democracy vs. Aristocracy in Virginia in 1830

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 student of politics. For himself, he chanced one day, several years ago, to blow the dust from off its time-worn binding and nine hun­dred dreary-looking pages of fine print, to…
Jeffrey R. Brackett
June 14, 2019
Blog

Ten Things You Don’t Know About Robert E. Lee

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 the Lost Cause, the “perfect” man, as a contemporary deemed him. Even his admirers are unaware of the some of the more interesting details of the life of this very…
Stephen M. Klugewicz
June 13, 2019
Blog

The GMO Threat

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 species like a bacterium and splicing it (them) into a crop like corn or cotton with the intention of improving some aspect of it (to protect against herbicides, drought, etc.). …
Walt Garlington
June 12, 2019
Review Posts

The First South

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 of that conflict go back to before the United States were declared "free, sovereign and independent", and so a knowledge of the history of the early South is very useful…
Shane Anderson
June 11, 2019
Blog

The Limits of a Politics of Tolerance

Secession, nullification, and interposition, like the poor, we shall always have with us. These are as American, indeed more American, than apple pie and baseball. Our new federal union, outlined in the Constitution written at the Philadelphia Convention and ratified by the independent states in their separate conventions, was barely out of the gate before the first constitutional crisis hit…
John Devanny
June 10, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 172

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, June 3-7 2019 Topics: Political Correctness, Secession, Abraham Lincoln, Southern Literature https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-172
Brion McClanahan
June 8, 2019
Blog

Carr Washing

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 in 2017 for being an allegedly racist symbol. Student hatred had been growing since 2011 when UNC graduate student Adam Domby discovered an outrageously racist incident described by one of…
Philip Leigh
June 7, 2019
Blog

Abraham Lincoln Crushes Civil Liberties in Maryland

Abraham Lincoln is widely regarded as one of the nation's greatest Presidents. He is the subject of at least 15,000 books. A popular poem (later set to music) responded to Lincoln's call for troops in biblical terms: "We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more.…" Upon Lincoln's death, Bishop Horatio Potter wrote that " glorious career of service and…
Michael Schearer
June 6, 2019
Blog

Remembering Real Southern Statesmen

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 and guidance to this nation and to our states has passed for good. Think of it: during the first half century of the existence of the old American Republic we…
Boyd Cathey
June 5, 2019
Review Posts

Loosiana Poets

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 of people. Rarely do you find high performance in both roles combined in one person. Catharine Brosman has done it. The only other example I can think of is the…
Clyde Wilson
June 4, 2019
Blog

The Southern Tradition Promotes Domestic Peace

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 together to work for a shared dream. It is a story of people who know they are different from each other, but recognize they can still respect each other and…
Marcus Ruiz Evans
June 3, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 171

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, May 27-31, 2019 Topics: Memorial Day, Monuments, Political Correctness, Patrick Henry https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-171
Brion McClanahan
June 1, 2019
Blog

What Did 19th Century Black Americans Think About Confederate Monuments?

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 to observe the dedication ceremonies, one example in Mississippi provides undeniable evidence of explicit high-level black support. In 1890 the Mississippi legislature voted on a bill to appropriate $10,000 for…
Philip Leigh
May 31, 2019
Blog

Dignity and Peace

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 representative of an older generation, Father Schall preserved for the benefit of the 21st-Century a perspective that has been largely swept away with the many communities and neighborhoods upon which…
Jerry Salyer
May 30, 2019
Blog

The Inescapable Anti-Americanism of the Left

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 remotely curious should want to know why the topic of anti-Americanism has seemed to have fallen into disrepute. I have a theory: Democrats and the left would prefer not to…
Jack Kerwick
May 29, 2019
Review Posts

American Statesman

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 a century have so enveloped in legend as that of Patrick Henry. A Patrick Henry myth has been formed, and has been fixed in literature by the uncritical character of…
Albert Bushnell Hart
May 28, 2019
Blog

Memorial Day

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 wave or did ye die! No blood for freedom shed is spent in vain; It is as fertile as the Summer rain; And the last tribute of heroic breath Is…
James Ryder Randall
May 27, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 170

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, May 20-24, 2019. Topics: Political Correctness, Fake News, Social Justice Warriors, Southern monuments. https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-170
Brion McClanahan
May 25, 2019
Blog

The Truth No Longer Matters

“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 the present I have often heard my fellow Southerners declare of our enemies, “They (our enemies) just do not understand the truth about the War. All we need to do…
James Ronald Kennedy
May 24, 2019
Blog

Show Me Where the Statue Hurt You

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 of “artists” explaining how the monument is a symbol of white supremacy to them. Almost two years ago, in August of 2017, I attended a similar protest put on by…
Michael Martin
May 23, 2019
Blog

“An Epic Poem in Bronze.”

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 had been pulled down by a crowd of students and activists, who saw it as a symbol of "white supremacy" that had no place on the campus of UNC Chapel…
Shane Anderson
May 22, 2019
Review Posts

Adventures in the Southwest

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 the Incidents of Ten Months Travel Through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Sonora, and California by John Coleman Reid.  Selma, Ala., 1858. The Mexican War and its aftermath turned American attention…
Clyde Wilson
May 21, 2019
Blog

Think Progress Publishes Fake News

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 media is so low and why news networks are associated with leftist bias. I have learned, as well, that fake news does not necessarily consist of flagrant, outright lying; it…
Allen Mendenhall
May 20, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 169

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, May 13-17, 2019 Topic: Southern conservatism https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-169/s-px7Cz
Brion McClanahan
May 18, 2019
Blog

A “Republic of American Values?”

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 as not being defined by race and ethnicity. He claims America is defined by three values: 1. E Pluribus Unum 2. Liberty 3. In God We Trust. Such claims redefine…
Paul H. Yarbrough
May 17, 2019
Blog

Nat Turner’s Massacre Apologists

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 slave rebellion that massacred fifty-five whites in the Southeastern part of the state in 1831. Most of the victims were women and children hacked to death with hatches and axes. Thirty-one…
Philip Leigh
May 16, 2019
Blog

The Procrustean Constitution

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 response to the San Antonio City Council’s decision to reject Chick-fil-A’s request to be a vendor in the San Antonio International Airport.  The opposition to this decision rests mostly on…
Walt Garlington
May 15, 2019
Review Posts

George Washington: A Biography

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 the serious reader. The life of Washington is in chronological order. Think of this book as reading, rather than watching, a TV series about Washington. If you decide to commit…
Jeff Wolverton
May 14, 2019
Blog

John Randolph of Roanoke and the Formation of a Southern Conservatism

One of the great issues of American political history is whether an authentic American conservatism exists.  This is a crucial question for Southerners, as the South is historically viewed as the most conservative of the regions of the United States. Louis Hartz, a prominent political theorist during the middle of the twentieth century, answered no, American conservatism does not exist. …
John Devanny
May 13, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 168

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, May 6-9, 2019 Topics: Confederate symbols,Southern tradition, Mel Bradford, Southern history https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-168
Brion McClanahan
May 11, 2019
Blog

Driving Through Virginia, Part II

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 were early defensive work in the area, but by 1637 were abandoned. Hampton is the oldest continually occupied English town in America since Jamestowne was later abandoned. Called Elizabeth Cittie…
Brett Moffatt
May 10, 2019
Blog

Truman and Treason?

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 totalitarian government. The main character in the story, Winston Smith, works in the Records Department of the “Ministry of Truth” as a reviser of historic records. Thought police, misleading language,…
Michael Martin
May 9, 2019
Blog

Are Confederate Memorials Preventing “Social Justice?”

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 born long after that decade, so what they know about decades prior to the 1960s comes from agenda-driven Leftist mainstream media. In previous articles, I have expressed my concern about…
Gail Jarvis
May 8, 2019
Review Posts

Remembering Mel Bradford

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 Carolina and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun, has assembled and introduced this collection about a man notable, among other things, for his own affinity with Calhoun and…
J.O. Tate
May 6, 2019
Blog

Guerilla War from the Pulpit

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 advocate for state sovereignty limited government and a strict construction of the Constitution. With the creation of the Confederacy, he helped draft its new constitution and design its “stars and…
John Chodes
May 6, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 167

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institutes, Apr 29-May 3, 2019 Topics: the War, Southern Tradition, Political Correctness https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-167
Brion McClanahan
May 4, 2019
Blog

The Southern Tradition: Twenty Years After Richard Weaver

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 barely rising above the tall, polished oak podium that holds his manuscript. He wears a brown, wrinkled suit, shiny at the elbows; and at midmorning he is already in need…
Thomas Landess
May 3, 2019
Blog

God Bless America

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 week after the Philadelphia Flyers decided to remove the Kate Smith statue in front of the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia due to her "racist" recording history. They first bagged…
Brion McClanahan
May 2, 2019
Blog

The Death of a Christian “Knight Without Fear”–RIP Aaron Wolf

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 the best weeks of his life, he was struck down on the Day of Resurrection by a sudden and massive heart attack: Our Lord had called Aaron unto Him. I…
Boyd Cathey
May 1, 2019
Review Posts

The Real Cause

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 War Between the States, has left us one of innumerable diaries from the South about the conflict of 1861-1865 (see The Diary of Miss Emma Holmes, 1861-1866 edited by John…
W. Kirk Wood
April 30, 2019
Blog

Ode to the Confederate Dead

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 seasonal eternity of death;Then driven by the fierce scrutinyOf heaven to their election in the vast breath,They sough the rumour of mortality. Autumn is desolation in the plotOf a thousand…
Allen Tate
April 29, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 166

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Apr 22-26, 2019. Topics: Southern tradition, Richard Weaver, Southern culture https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-166
Brion McClanahan
April 27, 2019
Blog

Sins and Virtues of “Civil War” History

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 of our legacy. If it is told from the viewpoint of ancestral virtues, it leaves us proud of our tradition and inspired to build upon the accomplishments of those who…
Philip Leigh
April 26, 2019
Blog

A Copperhead Loves the South

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 to be probably the first Dakotan to give the Memorial Day address at the capital of the Confederacy. Last week I had a conference call with a man from Michigan,…
John A. Eidsmoe
April 25, 2019
Blog

Bluegrass and Jazz: What Do They Have in Common?

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.  Therefore, an obvious answer to the question of what do Bluegrass and Jazz have in common would be geographic origin.  Yes, they definitely both come from Dixie, hallelujah.  And just…
Tom Daniel
April 24, 2019
Review Posts

A Tale of Two Churches

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 the theological divisions that existed between Northern and Southern churches in the antebellum period, and its contribution as a cause of the War Between the States. Many people are familiar…
Garrett Agajanian
April 23, 2019
Blog

The South and the American Union

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 “the South.” That this region has been distinctive by reason of its climate, type of produce, ethnic composition, culture, manners, and speech is known to every citizen of the country.…
Richard M. Weaver
April 22, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 165

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Apr 15-19, 2019. Topics: Southern tradition, Political Correctness, John C. Calhoun, Nationalism https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-165
Brion McClanahan
April 20, 2019
Blog

Don’t Get Conned by the Neocons on the Constitution

So, smart moms in two homeschool social-media groups of which I’m a member are super-excited about Hillsdale College’s free “Constitution 101” course. “Hillsdale’s conservative, so it must be teaching Christian-centered history,” they say. “Hillsdale doesn’t accept grants from the federal government or participate in federal financial-aid or student-loan programs. How principled,” they opine. “Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levine both endorse…
Dissident Mama
April 19, 2019
Blog

John C. Calhoun: American

Of all the American vice-presidents, none is more vilified than John C. Calhoun. Calhoun is known as the “defender of slavery,” the “cast iron man,” the “man who started the civil war.” His monument in Charleston has been vandalized, his name removed from Calhoun College at Yale, his Alma Mater, and now his home, Clemson University, is debating whether to…
Brion McClanahan
April 18, 2019
Blog

An Image of the South

“It is out of fashion these days to look backward rather than forward,” the poet John Crowe Ransom wrote almost thirty years ago. “About the only American given to it is some unreconstructed Southerner, who persists in his regard for a certain terrain, a certain history, and a certain inherited way of living.” Ransom made the remark in an essay…
Louis D. Rubin, Jr.
April 17, 2019
Review Posts

Recovering Authentic (Politically Incorrect) Conservatism

A review of Writing on the Southern Front: Authentic Conservatism For Our Times (Routledge, 2017) by Joseph Scotchie Joe Scotchie’s recently published anthology Writing on the Southern Front: Authentic Conservatism For Our Times made me aware of the task that confronts every serious student of the Right—recovering what otherwise might slip down the Memory Hole. Both the American media and,…
Paul Gottfried
April 16, 2019
Blog

Critical Race Theory and the Verdict of R.L. Dabney

Back last year an OpEd piece showed up in The News & Observer by one Professor John Biewen, who is Audio Program Director at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. In his essay Biewen explained: “White supremacy today is not mainly about the guys with Tiki torches. It’s about power, and systemic patterns of…
Boyd Cathey
April 15, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 164

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Apr 8-12, 2019 Topics: Thomas Jefferson, Reconstruction, Reconciliation, Political Correctness https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-164
Brion McClanahan
April 13, 2019
Blog

The Culture of Thomas Jefferson

To the student of the Classics the most interesting thing in the Library of Congress at Washington is the considerable remnant of the library of Thomas Jefferson. On October 6, 1820, Jefferson wrote to his young grandson, Francis Eppes, "I consider you as having made such proficiency in Latin and Greek that on your arrival at Columbia you may at…
Fred Irland
April 12, 2019
Blog

Respect Across the Bows

'The Journalist & The General' Thomas Morris Chester, the war correspondent in the Eastern Theater for the Philadelphia Press paid homage to General Robert E. Lee on his return from Appomattox and arrival in Richmond, Virginia in 1865. Chester was the only Black American figure to serve in this role for a major newspaper on either side. (1) Chester's account…
Gerald Lefurgy
April 11, 2019
Blog

The Crisis of the Electoral College

A decisive moment is coming for the peoples of the States, especially for those who consider themselves conservatives yet belong to the cult of Lincoln:  Will the Electoral College system for selecting the federal president continue on, or will it be scrapped for a purely national vote?  At the State and federal level, attempts to change it are ongoing: Calls…
Walt Garlington
April 10, 2019
Review Posts

Yankee Empire

A review of Yankee Empire: Aggressive Abroad and Despotic at Home (Shotwell Publishing, 2018) by James Ronald and Walter Donald Kennedy The Kennedys have fired a well placed shot across the bow of the Yankee Empire designed to illuminate the history of the past 150 years.  This book is a bonfire in the night, shedding light on some of the…
Brett Moffatt
April 9, 2019
Blog

Reconstruction and Recreation

2019 marks the 150th anniversary of U.S. Grant’s inauguration as President of the United States. It also has sparked a renewed interest in Reconstruction, particularly the notion that America failed to capitalize on an “unfinished revolution” as the communist historian Eric Foner describes the period. This general description of the 1860s has been used by both radical leftists like Foner…
Brion McClanahan
April 8, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 163

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, March 25-April 5, 2019 Topics: Political Correctness, the Southern Tradition, Robert E. Lee https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-163
Brion McClanahan
April 6, 2019
Blog

Strom’s Advice

Strom Thurmond was born in Edgefield, South Carolina, in 1902 and lived to be over 100 years old. He grew up in a time when the average person knew how to live off the land and he learned the values of health and fitness early on when he attended Clemson College, which was a military school at the time. Strom…
Michael Martin
April 5, 2019
Blog

Teach Your Children Well

Compatriots, how do y'all seek to maintain alive the Confederate heritage within your family & relatives? This would be a great discussion point for any Sons of Confederate Camp or United Daughters of the Confederacy Chapter. At the time of the Southern War For Independence, my ancestors were fighting my beloved French. It was a war that lasted 29 hard…
Alphonse-Louis Vinh
April 4, 2019
Blog

Reparations: Let’s Do It!

Reparations for the deserving.? Who gets the money? Who gives up the money?  Who owes the money? The idea for reparations for which many of the current political and /or media hacks call the “original sin” of “the country” is restitution. That is, a large number of thugs like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson or the usual peripheral suspects of…
Paul H. Yarbrough
April 3, 2019
Review Posts

The First Congress

A review of The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government (Simon and Schuster, 2016) by Fergus Bordewich Amateur historians usually write excellent histories. Left unshackled by the latest groupthink of the academy, these historians tend to be independent thinkers and more importantly better writers than their professional counterparts. Shelby Foote…
Brion McClanahan
April 2, 2019
Blog

The Leftist Long March, “Silent Sam,” and the REAL Question

Most every Thursday I gather with a group of friends for lunch at some restaurant in Raleigh. Among the group are three PhDs in history, and one who holds two masters degrees in history. All of us are former employees of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources (now Natural and Cultural Resources)…and we all share very similar points of…
Boyd Cathey
April 1, 2019
Blog

The American Taliban

You don’t see much on the continued attack and removal of war memorials in the news, but that’s the intent of the left isn’t it?  Do it quietly but totally. These monuments were dedicated by their loved ones not to the "cause" but rather to honor their loved ones who paid the ultimate price with their lives. The American Taliban…
Lee Congleton
March 29, 2019
Blog

The French Lady: A Most Agreeable Gentleman

“Fatti Maschii Parole Femine”1 In July of 1861, Union troops aboard the Chesapeake Bay steamer the Mary Washington found the “privateer” Colonel Richard Thomas Zarvona hiding in one of her cabins.  Aided by some sympathetic passengers, he had removed the bottom of each drawer of a dresser and had curled himself up inside of it.  Zarvona’s arrest brought to an…
J.L. Bennett
March 28, 2019
Blog

Lee, Virginia, and the Union

The Hall of Fame recently dedicated at New York Uni­versity was conceived from the Ruhmes Halle in Bavaria. This structure on University Heights, on the Harlem river, in the borough of the Bronx, New York City, has, or is in­tended to have, a panel of bronze with other mementos for each of one hundred and fifty native-born Americans who have…
Fred H. Cox
March 27, 2019
Review Posts

Two From Alabama Ladies

A review of John Gildart: An Heroic Poem. (H. Young & Co., 1901) by M. E. Henry-Ruffin and Plantation Songs: For My Lady’s Banjo, and Other Lyrics and Mono­logues (J.W. Otts, 1901) by “ Eli Shepperd.” The mental emancipation of the South is proved by noth­ing more clearly than by the work of her women. Prior to the war, we…
Thomas Cooper De Leon
March 26, 2019
Blog

The Challenge of the Southern Tradition

In 1966, Senator Jim Eastland of Mississippi walked into the Senate Judiciary Committee and asked, “Feel hot in heah?” A staffer replied: “Well Senator, the thermostat is set at 72 degrees, but we can make it colder.” Eastland, puzzled by the response, doubled down, “I said, Feel Hot in heah?” The staffer now was perplexed and fearing that he might…
Brion McClanahan
March 25, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 162

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, March 18-22, 2019 Topics: John C. Calhoun, Patrick Cleburne, the War, Political Correctness, Southern Music https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-162
Brion McClanahan
March 23, 2019
Blog

Scotch Snaps and Southern Music

I need to tell you one story in order to tell you another. The Czechoslovakian composer Antonin Dvorak moved to the United States in 1892, and immersed himself in American music while composing his New World Symphony.  Although he was fascinated, inspired, and moved by traditional Southern folk music, Dvorak complained that he simply couldn’t tell the difference between Scottish…
Tom Daniel
March 22, 2019
Blog

Silent Sam: A Personal Experience

Editor's Note: During the height of the Silent Sam protests in the Summer of 2017, Jonathan Harris went to the statue and talked with the people wishing to tear down the monument. This is his story. Maybe it was Southern heritage, the honor of a family name, or Christian conviction. Or perhaps I just needed to prove something to myself.…
Jonathan Harris
March 21, 2019
Blog

Mississippi’s Free Speech Confusion

Some lawmakers in Mississippi, obviously alarmed at the violent demonstrations and restrictive measures at college campuses intended to silence what passes for conservative viewpoints, have come up what they consider a fitting solution in their legislative kitchen, House Bill 1562, ‘Forming Open and Robust University Minds (FORUM) Act’.  But the result is far from enticing. The heart of the bill…
Walt Garlington
March 20, 2019
Review Posts

When Real Historians Understood Calhoun

A review of Correspondence of John C. Calhoun, Vol II. (Washington, 1900) edited by J. Franklin Jameson. It is a fitting crown to Professor Jameson’s efforts in promoting the estab­lishment and successful career of the manuscripts commission and a most substantial proof of the material services rendered to the advancement of the study of history in the United States by…
Edward G. Bourne
March 19, 2019
Blog

Patrick Cleburne

The sketch is necessarily imperfect, from the want of official records. Most of these were lost or destroyed by the casualties attending the close of the war, and those still in existence are difficult of access. Of Cleburne’s early life little is known. The record of his service in the Southern armies belongs to the yet unwritten history of the…
William J. Hardee
March 18, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 161

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Mar 11-15, 2019 Topics: Political Correctness, Confederate Symbols, Confederate Monuments, Southern History, Confederate Constitution https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-161
Brion McClanahan
March 17, 2019
Blog

Leave Confederate Statues Alone

In 1965 Texas novelist William Humphrey wrote: If the Civil War is more alive to the Southerner than the Northerner it is because all of the past is, and this is so because the Southerner has a sense of having been present there himself in the person of one or more of his ancestors. The war filled merely a chapter in his……
Philip Leigh
March 14, 2019
Blog

Athletes and Education: Mutually Exclusive

Athletes gain money when they gain attention. Just like Congressmen. Ole Miss basketball players kneel in deference to standing for the National Anthem. Again, athletes, many of whom have an academic pedigree from high school that suggests borderline literacy, have taken a stand –oops—a kneel for something or against something. Who the hell knows why these muscle-bound morons do what…
Paul H. Yarbrough
March 13, 2019
Review Posts

Many Thousands Gone

A review of Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Harvard, 1998) by Ira Berlin For an understanding of the Atlantic-African slave trades and the origins of the peculiar institution in North America, Prof. Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone is a must read (along with Hugh Thomas’ The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave…
W. Kirk Wood
March 12, 2019
Blog

Crazed Leftists Strike Again

For thirty-one years the North Carolina Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans has sponsored annually Confederate Flag Day, an event commemorating our state’s rich history and Southern heritage, held in the House of Representatives chamber of the historic 1840 Tar Heel State Capitol. First proclaimed by former Governor James G. Martin in 1988, the day has served as an…
Boyd Cathey
March 11, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 160

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, March 4-8, 2019 Topics: Jeffersonian tradition, economics, Southern symbols. https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-160
Brion McClanahan
March 9, 2019
Blog

Is Opposition to Trump “Satanic?”

On a February 2017 episode of televangelist Pat Robertson’s “The 700 club,” a viewer sent in the following question about dissent: “Why do so many hate President Trump and say everything he does is bad? I voted for him and believed he would make ‘America Great Again,’ and he has already in many ways. So what is your answer as…
Michael Martin
March 8, 2019
Blog

Rescuing Old Joe

Whoever weds himself to the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.    —   William Inge Few realize that Florida was so committed to The War Between the States that she gave more soldiers to repel Northern invaders than she had registered voters. Gainesville was among the towns that responded. As a result, the…
Philip Leigh
March 7, 2019
Review Posts

The True Heirs of the Founding Fathers’ Vision

A Review of Beyond Slavery: The Northern Romantic Nationalist Origins of America’s Civil War (Shotwell Publishing, 2019) by Walter Kirk Wood In the post-War between the States mythology supported by the victors, the Antebellum South was Satanic and subject to “slave power,” the alleged immense power of the plantation owners and their demonic desire to perpetuate slavery at all costs.…
Michael Potts
March 5, 2019
Blog

Modern Monetary Theory: A Jeffersonian Critique

The chattering class’ newest obsession, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has seized the policy initiative from the Democratic Party’s geriatrics by promoting a “Green New Deal.”  T’is clever branding to combine left-wing eco virtue signaling with FDR’s version of “down home” fascism. (If one doubts me on this last point, I refer you to John Garraty’s seminal article, “The New Deal, National Socialism,…
John Devanny
March 4, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 159

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institutes, Feb 25-Mar 1, 2019 Topics: Southern culture, Southern tradition, Jeffersonian tradition https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-159
Brion McClanahan
March 2, 2019
Blog

Driving Through Virginia

Southeast Virginia is a region rich in history, from the earliest colonial times to today’s modern military.  Cape Henry welcomes visitors today, just as it did the Virginia Company colonists in 1607, just before they settled at Jamestown.  First Landing State Park commemorates where the colonists first entered Chesapeake Bay, seeking a site for settlement. One of Virginia’s oldest and…
Brett Moffatt
March 1, 2019
Blog

First They Came for Southern Heritage

The so-called Civil Rights movement began in the mid-1950s with goals of ending segregation and discrimination. Over the decades it has evolved from “correcting” certain aspects of society, into a virtual restructure of society. What began as a movement became a revolution. Technological advances in communications made this revolution possible – a revolution similar to the Protestant Reformation. It is…
Gail Jarvis
February 28, 2019
Blog

Talk Radio vs. The South

Right wing radio personalities need no excuse to engage in South-bashing, but the recent events in the Old Dominion have given them free rein to indulge in their passion non-stop.  Governor Ralph Northam’s perceived hatred of “the other” quickly overshadowed his chilling, matter of fact endorsement of proposed legislation establishing new and ghoulish abortion protocols in his state, and with…
J.L. Bennett
February 27, 2019
Review Posts

Peter Onuf’s Jefferson

A review of Jefferson and the Virginians: Democracy, Constitutions, and Empire (LSU Press, 2018) by Peter Onuf Historian Peter S. Onuf first saw the light as a Connecticut Yankee. Powerful of intellect even in his teens, he met the American Revolution as the subject of serious study in a Johns Hopkins graduate seminar (in which he was the sole undergraduate)…
Kevin R.C. Gutzman
February 26, 2019
Blog

A Crisis of Confidence

Pat Caddell died on February 16. Several major news outlets ran stories about his influence in both the Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump campaigns. Everyone understood Caddell's role as the voice of the "outsider." A colleague at the College of Charleston, where Caddell served in the Political Science department for the last couple of years, said that Caddell hated everything…
Brion McClanahan
February 25, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 158

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institutes Feb 18-22, 2019 Topics: Southern tradition, New South, Southern politics, American presidents https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-158
Brion McClanahan
February 23, 2019
Blog

A Little Whiskey Rebellion

“I plainly perceive that the time will come when a shirt shall not be washed without an excise.”— Representative James Jackson of Georgia, speech against the Whiskey Tax delivered on January 5, 1791 in the House of Representatives As with so many other episodes in early American history, the true story of the so-called Whiskey Rebellion has been purposefully scrubbed…
Joe Wolverton
February 22, 2019
Blog

In Search of the Real Southern Democrat

It was an indelible moment, one that has resonated with me up to the present day. My father and I had gone to whatever permutation of Wal-Mart existed at that time in Union County in late 1982.  (Maybe it was still Edwards then, maybe Big K; the chronology is no longer clear so many years later.)  He was a supervisor…
Randall Ivey
February 21, 2019
Blog

Lord Acton: Confederate Sympathizer

“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Among Catholic students of political thought, few figures are more liable to provoke vigorous debate than does that famous dictum’s author, Cambridge history lecturer John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, a.k.a., the First Lord Acton, Catholic godfather of classical liberalism. Where Acton’s critics identify classical liberalism as a theory incompatible with the Catholic faith,…
Jerry Salyer
February 20, 2019
Review Posts

Recarving Rushmore

A review of Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty (The Independent Institute, 2014) by Ivan Eland The annual veneration of American monarchy--"Presidents Day"--has passed again. While still officially called "Washington's Birthday" by the general government, the American public has embraced the idea of honoring the executive branch by shopping for furniture, jewelry, or cars. George W.…
Brion McClanahan
February 19, 2019
Blog

Contested Ground: Southern Identity and the Southern Tradition

In the popular imagination the South is viewed as a region typified by racism, poverty, and ignorance save a few special islands, such as Chapel Hill and Charlotte, which lay in the archipelago of enlightenment.  There are some cracks in this edifice of Yankee bigotry, but when political and cultural wars become heated, the edifice is trotted out once more…
John Devanny
February 18, 2019
Blog

Podcast Episode 157

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institutes, Feb 11-15, 2019 Topics: Southern history, Political Correctness, Abraham Lincoln, Neoconservatives https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-157
Brion McClanahan
February 16, 2019
Blog

Pro-Confederate Television

In this age of political correctness it may surprise people that there were three TV series that portrayed Confederates in a good light. All three are very good and all the episodes of two of the series are available on DVD, and some of the episodes of the other series is available. The first series is Yancy Derringer. Yancy Derringer…
Jeff Wolverton
February 15, 2019
Blog

Why Are We Letting Them Push Our Buttons?

I usually don’t engage in online arguments and discussions because I know I’m not the smartest cookie in the jar, and I’m afraid that I might open my mouth and prove that point.  That being said, there comes a time when you see evidence of such full scale lunacy, you just can’t continue to remain silent.  The controversy over Virginia…
Barbara Marthal
February 14, 2019
Blog

The Idea of Equality in America

Given what is occurring in our society and culture, the ever increasing frenzy and hysteria associated with what is called “the women’s movement” and the ever-changing, always-increasing “racism test,” a review of the basics, a return to and familiarity with our history, is incumbent on us if we are to survive as a nation. Yet, the real problem is that…
Boyd Cathey
February 13, 2019
Review Posts

Historical Consciousness

A Review of Historical Consciousness, or The Remembered Past (Schocken Books, 1985) by John Lukacs In the introduction to the new edition of his Historical Consciousness (first published in 1968), Professor John Lukacs observes of the body of academic historians, circa 1960’s: “They were interested in their profession, without paying much, if any, interest to the nature of their profession.” If…
Clyde Wilson
February 12, 2019
Blog

Our Interesting Times

There is an old Chinese curse the English translation of which is “May you live in interesting times.”  The implication of the curse, of course, is that it is better to live in seemingly dull and tranquil times, times in which little occurs that would threaten to upset the peaceful daily rhythm of the accursed’s life.  Let us set aside…
Houston Middleton
February 11, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 156

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Feb 4-8, 2019. Topics: Secession, Southern History, Political Correctness, Alexander Hamilton https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-156
Brion McClanahan
February 9, 2019
Blog

Did Ulysses Grant Own and Rent Slaves?

Even among the most Grant-partial historians there’s no denying that Ulysses Grant and his wife owned slaves prior to the Civil War. In fact, “Ulysses Grant” is the correct answer to a crafty American history trivia question that asks: “Can you name the last slaveholding President?” As growing political correctness causes our culture to increasingly condemn historical figures connected with…
Philip Leigh
February 8, 2019
Blog

Hamilton on Steroids

“The revenue of the state is the state.”  Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution Washington D. C. finds itself in the midst of an entertaining, nay consuming, Kabuki theatre.  The federal government has “shut down” its non-essential functions, re-opened the same, and promised to do it all over again in a few weeks, raising the question as to why…
John Devanny
February 7, 2019
Blog

Confederaphobes

Presented at the Lee-Jackson Banquet, Finley’s Brigade Camp 1614 - Tallahassee, Florida, 19 January 2019 Prologue It seemed like just another day at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, for the vice chancellor of student affairs, Paula Knudson, until the phone calls, student visitors, and official “hate and bias” reports began to pour in. A truck—a semi-tractor trailer truck to…
Paul C. Graham
February 6, 2019
Review Posts

Stealing History

A Review of The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent (Knopf Publishing Company, 1990) by Robert Caro "I have read his bandit gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: 'As ye deal with my pretensions, so with you my wrath shall deal; Let the faithless son of Freedom crush the patriot with his heel; Lo, Greed is marching on.'"…
Charles Goolsby
February 5, 2019
Blog

Is Secession the Answer?

Watching NBC’s TODAY program on Tuesday, January 23, 2019, there was anchor Savannah Guthrie demanding to know if Covington, Kentucky, Catholic High School student, Nick Sandman, wished to “apologize” for his “actions” in front of the Lincoln Memorial when confronted by Indian activist, Nathan Phillips, on January 19. The scarcely-concealed bias that characterized Guthrie’s question and the continuing media narrative—proven…
Boyd Cathey
February 4, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 155

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Jan 25-Feb 1, 2019. Topics: Decentralization, Southern Tradition, Political Correctness https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-155
Brion McClanahan
February 2, 2019
Blog

Texas is Going to be Bluer Than Bluebonnets

Texas will turn blue before it’s over with its local Neocons in charge. Former sports announcer and Bankrupt, now Lt. Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick has decided that his historical acumen can bring Texas forward into the true modern way of thinking.  That is, the South is and always had been a bunch of ignorant savages. But no more. If…
Paul H. Yarbrough
February 1, 2019
Blog

Orwell’s America

In the ongoing war against Southern Confederate heritage, we need to be cognizant of the academic pressures against it. As y'all know, UNC Chapel Hill recently tore down Silent Sam. This is going on throughout all the great Southern schools. As a professional scholar, I was a member of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature; the Southern Historical…
Alphonse-Louis Vinh
January 31, 2019
Blog

Kentucky’s Confederate Sons

Suffering from a nasty bacterial infection, the insomnia induced by a lamp kept lit in his cell at all hours, and the very real possibility of being hanged by a kangaroo court, Jefferson Davis drew strength during his postbellum imprisonment from a certain slender little volume that was once renowned throughout Christendom – the The Imitation of Christ.  The Imitation…
Jerry Salyer
January 30, 2019
Review Posts

The Devil Hates Mockery

A review of Snowflake Buddies: ABC Leftism for Kids (Shotwell, 2018) by Lewis Liberman It is said that the one thing Satan cannot stand is mockery. The primal sin is pride, and a swollen ego can handle intellectual assaults; what evil cannot handle is someone making fun of it. Contemporary Leftism is an evil system, for it prides itself in…
Michael Potts
January 29, 2019
Blog

The Southern Critique of Centralization

The Southern political tradition, in practice and theory, is one of its most valuable contributions to America and the world. The one constant theme of that tradition from 1776–through Jefferson, Madison, John Taylor, St George Tucker, Abel Upshur, John C. Calhoun, the Nashville Agrarians, Richard Weaver, M. E. Bradford, down to the scholars of the Abbeville Institute–is a systematic critique…
Donald Livingston
January 28, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 154

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Jan 21-25, 2019 Topics: Reconciliation, Robert E. Lee, Political Correctness, John C. Calhoun, Confederate Symbols https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-154
Brion McClanahan
January 26, 2019
Blog

The South and Germany

I hope that no one who reads this paper will suppose that I have any feeling in the matter. I am only correcting errors in Northern writers, and I trust that, after more than half a century since the war between the States, this may be done without exciting any sectional bias. On the other hand, I have no idea…
Lyon G. Tyler
January 25, 2019
Blog

A Cautionary Tale on Monument Protection Laws

When Jefferson County Circuit Judge Michael Graffeo issued a ruling on the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act just minutes before his term expired last week, he upended the entire understanding and meaning of the original Constitution and the relationship between the States, the cities, and the general government. More importantly, though Graffeo's decision will probably--not definitely--be overturned, the ruling provides a…
Brion McClanahan
January 24, 2019
Blog

John C. Calhoun’s Foreign Policy: “A Wise and Masterly Inactivity”

The dominant powers in American discourse today have succeeded in confining the South to a dark little corner of history labeled “Slavery and Treason.” This is already governing the public sphere of the Civil War Sesquicentennial. Such an approach not only libels the South, it is a fatal distortion of American history in general, and, I dare say, even of…
Clyde Wilson
January 23, 2019
Review Posts

A Thousand Points of Truth

A review of A Thousand Points of Truth: The History and Humanity of Col. John Singleton Mosby in Newsprint (ExLibris, 2016) by V.P. Hughes Valerie Protopapas (who writes under her maiden name V.P. Hughes) has given us a massive work on Confederate guerilla fighter, Colonel John Singleton Mosby (1833-1916). Her tome, which reaches over eight-hundred pages, is made up of…
Paul Gottfried
January 22, 2019
Blog

Robert E. Lee and the Nation

The White House, Washington, January 16, 1907.  To the Hon. Hilary A. Herbert, Chairman, Chief Justice Seth Shepherd, President Edwin Alderman, Judge Charles B. Howry, General Marcus J. Wright, Mr. William A. Gordon, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, Mr. Joseph Wilmer, And others of the Committee of Arrangement for the Celebration of the Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of General Robert…
Theodore Roosevelt
January 21, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 153

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Jan 14-18, 2019 Topics: The Southern tradition, Neoconservatives, Yankees, the War https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-153
Brion McClanahan
January 19, 2019
Blog

Southern Conservatives

The South is and always been conservative. But with the constant hammer of political correctness and political falsehood (redundant?) pounded on it, it has waffled among many who brand it as evil. Punchy from the blows, it has sought to defend itself in the wrong places: In presentism and with Republicans. Republican and Air Force veteran Mike Hill, the first…
Paul H. Yarbrough
January 18, 2019
Blog

Franklin Pierce, Political Protest, & the Dilemmas of Democracy

On the stump in New Boston, New Hampshire in early January 1852, Franklin Pierce gave a long oration during which free-soil hecklers forced him to address his ideas on slavery. “He was not in favor of it,” the Concord Independent Democrat reported. “He had never seen a slave without being sick at heart. Slavery was contrary to the Constitution in some…
Michael J. Connolly
January 17, 2019
Blog

Trump Agonistes

The presidential election of 2016 gave promise to be a watershed in American politics. Donald Trump appeared, a non-politician and rich enough to support his own campaign without selling himself to the usual special interests. He collected all the right enemies. He deflated a whole platoon of Republican celebrities down to their actual pigmy size. He vanquished them by something…
Clyde Wilson
January 16, 2019
Review Posts

Catholics’ Lost Cause

A review of Catholics’ Lost Cause: South Carolina Catholics and the American South, 1820-1861 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2018) by Adam L. Tate Some thirty odd years ago, scholars began to peer into the world of immigrants in the South with not a little attention devoted to Catholics.  What they found surprised them.  Immigrants in the South adjusted to…
John Devanny
January 15, 2019
Blog

The Southern Tradition

Many years ago the historian Francis Parkman wrote a passage in one of his narratives which impresses me as full of wisdom and prophecy. After a brilliant characterization of the colonies as they existed on the eve of the Revolution, he said, “The essential antagonism of Virginia and New England was afterwards to become, and to remain, an element of…
Richard M. Weaver
January 14, 2019
Podcast

Podcast Episode 152

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Jan 7-11, 2019 Topics: The War, Political Correctness, Southern Art, Southern Literature https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-152
Brion McClanahan
January 12, 2019
Blog

Julian Green

One summer day in Paris, France, just a year after the Great War, a former French military officer, not yet nineteen years of age was invited by his father to have a chat. Slim, handsome, and gifted, the young man knew it was time for the big talk concerning his future now that peace had returned. To help him make…
Alphonse-Louis Vinh
January 11, 2019
Blog

To the Smithsonian…

When one grows old one tends to resent wasting time and there is nothing that wastes time quite so much as efforts to counter the claims and assertions surrounding the American “Civil War” Of course, the first of these is that the conflict was not a “civil war.” But those who insist upon that label continue to do so despite…
Valerie Protopapas
January 10, 2019
Blog

The Cost of Southern Cultural Genocide

The destruction of Confederate monuments and the slandering of all things Confederate is in vogue in contemporary mainline media, academia, and the political establishment. The destruction of Confederate monuments by radical mobs is similar to the radical Taliban’s destruction of Buddhist monuments and the Soviet Union’s denial of public expressions of native culture in the Baltic states—all are examples of…
James Ronald Kennedy
January 9, 2019
Review Posts

False Messiah

A review of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999) by Allen C. Guelzo. Presidential hopeful John McCain recently stated that he was of “the party of Lincoln, not Bob Jones.” This could be taken in ways the gentleman from Arizona never intended. For it was not Bob Jones who said “I am not nor ever have been in…
Samuel C. Smith
January 8, 2019
Blog

The Legacy of D.W. Griffith

None knew it then, but in 1915, Southern agrarian influence on the movies was at its height. The film trade had just left Fort Lee, New Jersey, only to land in the equally piously named Mount Lee, California. Of course, the latter’s new name was Hollywood, due to its Kansas prohibitionist developers, but it was also the same name as…
Norman Stewart
January 7, 2019
Blog

The Long Ago

Oh! a wonderful stream is the river of Time, As it runs through the realm of tears, With a faultless rhythm, and musical rhyme, And a broader sweep, and a surge sublime, And blends with the ocean of years! How the winters are drifting like flakes of snow, And summers like buds between, And the ears in the sheaf, —…
Philo Henderson
December 31, 2018
Blog

Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox Meet St. Nicholas

On one fine evening, in which winter’s chill hung in the air and the stars sparkled merrily in the heavens above, a happy song of the season could be heard faintly weaving it’s way through the trees and rolling hills surrounding the humble home of Uncle Remus. “Ho my Riley, in this happy Christmas time, the black folks shake their clothes,…
Lewis Liberman
December 25, 2018
Podcast

Podcast Episode 151

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Dec 17-21, 2018 Topics: Southern symbols, Political Correctness, Secession, Southern tradition https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-151
Brion McClanahan
December 22, 2018
Blog

What Are Symbols For?

In 1875, Rev. Moses Drury Hoge stood before 40,000 people in Richmond, Virginia, at the foot of the newly dedicated statue of Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, and delivered what one historian called the "noblest oration of his later life." He believed that in the future, the path to that statue would be "trodden" by the feet of travelers from "the…
Brion McClanahan
December 21, 2018
Blog

We the People of South Carolina….

William Plumer Jacobs (1842-1917), a native of Yorkville, South Carolina, was a Presbyterian minister and scholar whose entire life has been called “a singular consecration to work and service in behalf of his fellow men.” He is closely identified with the town of Clinton, where he pastored a church and founded the Thornwell Orphanage and the Presbyterian College of South…
Karen Stokes
December 20, 2018
Blog

The Neo-Puritan War on Christmas

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” – H. L. Mencken “Let any man of contrary opinion open his mouth to persuade them , they close up their ears, his reasons they weigh not . . . . They are impermeable to argument and have their answers well drilled.”  – Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical…
John Devanny
December 19, 2018
Review Posts

The Land We Love

A review of The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage (Scuppernong Press, 2018) by Boyd Cathey I must confess that I feel a bit awkward about reviewing Dr. Boyd Cathey’s outstanding anthology, The Land We Love: The South and its Heritage. I am, as the reader may notice, mentioned in the preface, along with Clyde Wilson, as one…
Paul Gottfried
December 18, 2018
Blog

What Does the Fracturing of the American Identity Mean for the Southern Tradition?

The Abbeville Institute conducted three conferences this year on the fracturing of American national identity and what means for the Southern tradition and the Southern people. The general public knows America is coming apart and that they're anxious about it, but most don't understand why because our political leaders and the national media generally suppress its origins. We wanted to…
Donald Livingston
December 17, 2018
Podcast

Podcast Episode 150

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Dec 10-14, 2018 Topics: Political Correctness, Southern History, Southern Culture, Southern Music, Southern Sport https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-150
Brion McClanahan
December 15, 2018
Blog

Southern Music is American Music

Why do Southerners continue to fall into that trap where we only talk about the years1861-1865?  There are almost 400 years of Southern culture to talk about, yet we keep limiting ourselves to just four of them.  And it doesn’t matter how much of an expert someone becomes about Fredericksburg, Yankees will always have that same ace-in-the-hole comeback, “You lost.” But…
Tom Daniel
December 14, 2018
Blog

Shoeless Joe

Two of the poems I most admire are very short. One is simply a name - Shoeless Joe Jackson. Read it aloud and feel the assonance and alliteration. The other is a phrase Say it ain't so, Joe, delivered sadly, with its final rhyme. There is a mythic quality in both of these poems. The name, Shoeless Joe Jackson; the…
Ray Merlock
December 13, 2018
Blog

Black Southerners in American Wars

President Trump recently used his executive powers to designate a national monument to honor African Americans’ role as soldiers during the War Between the States. The monument will be a 380-acre site in Kentucky to commemorate Camp Nelson, which was one of the largest recruitment stations for the United States Colored Troops. The unfortunate reality is that the monument will…
Michael Martin
December 12, 2018
Review Posts

Forrest McDonald and the Art of History

A review of Recovering the Past: A Historian's Memoir (University Press of Kansas, 2004) by Forrest McDonald “History is marble, and remains forever cold, even under the most artistic hand, unless life is breathed into it by the imagination. Then the marble becomes flesh and blood—then it feels, it thinks, it moves, and is immortal.” —Charles Gayarré (1805-1895) It is…
Stephen M. Klugewicz
December 11, 2018
Blog

Social Justice and Clemson University

In November 2018 Will Hiott, Director and Curator of Historic Properties at Clemson University, included a thinly disguised political paper from Clemson University History Professor Rhondda Robinson Thomas as part a packet distributed to Historic Properties Advisory Committee members. The essay has no relevance to ongoing volunteer efforts toward the Preservation of Historic campus buildings and is nothing more than…
Andrew P. Calhoun
December 10, 2018
Podcast

Podcast Episode 149

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Dec 3-7, 2018 Topics: Agrarianism, United States Constitution, John Marshall, Andrew Johnson, Thomas Johnson https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-149
Brion McClanahan
December 8, 2018
Blog

Steady Hand at the Wheel

Thomas Johnson was born in Calvert County, Maryland, on his father's lands near the mouth of St. Leonard's Creek. He was the son of Thomas and Dorcas Sedgwick Johnson and the grandson of Thomas Johnson, barrister, who was the first of the line to reside in Maryland, having fled there after running away with a chancery ward. All of these…
M.E. Bradford
December 7, 2018
Blog

Lessons in Conservatism from Andrew Johnson

Andrew Johnson was born into poverty in rural North Carolina. His father died after saving some town locals from drowning and left the family to fend for themselves in a two-room shack. A young Andrew began working as a tailor’s apprentice and developed an appreciation for the laboring class early on. Johnson was poorly educated and learned how to write…
Michael Martin
December 6, 2018
Blog

The Problem with Lawyers and the Constitution

On November 10, 2018, the Abbeville Institute hosted an event called The Revival of Nullification and Secession in Dallas, TX. The purpose was to educate people on the means by which we can escape the hatred and hostility that is consuming not only headlines, but our very souls. The population of these United States is split pretty much equally in…
Suzanne Sherman
December 5, 2018
Review Posts

The Man Who Made the Supreme Court

A review of John Marshall: The Man Who Made the Supreme Court (Basic Books, 2018) by Richard Brookhiser John Marshall presents a curious problem for Southern history. How can a man, born and bred in the same State, who breathed the same air and shared the same blood with Thomas Jefferson, have been such an ardent nationalist? The same question…
Brion McClanahan
December 4, 2018
Blog

The Tragedy of Land Use in the South

For all of the pontificating of the virtues of the South, we have increasingly seen our agrarian landscape polluted by strip malls and environmental contamination. I make the case that neither of these things are inherently Southern in character, and as I believe, are contributing negatives to the soul and character of our region. We must work to correct these…
Nicole Williams
December 3, 2018
Podcast

Podcast Episode 148

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Nov 26-30, 2018 Topics: Robert E. Lee, Southern music, Southern culture, the War https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-148
Brion McClanahan
December 1, 2018
Blog

The King and the Fool

The King of Rock and Roll brought himself up by his bootstraps, served Uncle Sam as a soldier and before his early demise came he had made an honest fortune for himself and many others. For that, he is belittled by those who hardly knew him. “A little nod to the good old days, back when black visionaries could invent…
Paul H. Yarbrough
November 30, 2018
Blog

The Washington Post March of Infamy

Yesterday The Washington Post published an Op-Ed by former General Stanley McChrystal in which he boasted of removing a long-displayed Robert E. Lee painting from his home to “send it on its way to a local landfill for burial.” It is but one of perhaps a dozen Post articles during the last three years disparaging Lee, Confederate monuments and Southern heritage.  All condemn Lee…
Philip Leigh
November 29, 2018
Blog

What Country Legend Roy Clark’s Death Symbolizes for America in 2018

The news came Thursday, November 15, that country music legend, Virginia-born Roy Clark had passed away at age 85. For those either too young to know who Clark was, or who perhaps never cottoned to “country” music, for a whole generation, for twenty-four years, he was in many ways the heart and soul of the popular country music variety television…
Boyd Cathey
November 28, 2018
Review Posts

How Europeans Viewed the War

A review of Slavery, Secession, & Civil War: Views from the United Kingdom and Europe, 1856-1865 (Scarecrow Press, 2007) by Charles Adams. At long last Charles Adams’s new book, Slavery, Secession, & Civil War: Views from the United Kingdom and Europe, 1856-1865, has been published. I’ve been anxiously waiting for this book for about five years. The book contains about…
Thomas DiLorenzo
November 27, 2018
Blog

Operation Desert Storm: Lee or Sherman

As the brilliant American military victory in the Persian Gulf approaches its second anniversary, the focus has shifted from the emotions of homecoming celebrations to the seriousness of lessons learned and lessons validated. While the ingredients of victory are a combination of many factors, from logistics to training to armament, history has shown that one of the most important elements…
Jeffrey Addicott
November 26, 2018
Podcast

Podcast Episode 147

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Nov 19-23, 2018. Topics: Southern literature, black slaveowners, historical myths https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-147
Brion McClanahan
November 24, 2018
Blog

How to Run the American Revolution: Belated Advice

In the spirit of historical course correction, I herewith submit some thoughts to those who may find themselves in an American Revolution between 1774 and 1783. 1. Rule number one. Don’t cooperate with any leaders, even if you appointed them. If you do, such cooperation will later be taken as proof that you were just obeying the commands of some…
Joseph R. Stromberg
November 23, 2018
Blog

Driving Through Dixie

Citizens of Dixie…. This is a call to arms, or rather, a call to your legs and feet.  Get up off that couch! If you don’t have family plans, ballgame, school play, or church event- get out and tour Dixie!  Take a few hours, a day, or a weekend, and see the beauty and history of Dixie. Start local; tour…
Brett Moffatt
November 22, 2018
Blog

Poe of Virginia

The opinion has been often stated that Edgar Allan Poe was bizarre and amoral; that he was a lover of morbid beauty only; that he was unrelated to worldly circumstances-aloof from the affairs of the world; that his epitaph might well be: “Out of space-out of time.” But it is dangerous to attempt to separate any historical figure from his…
Robert E. Merry
November 21, 2018
Review Posts

A Black Sugar Planter in the Old South

A review of Andrew Durnford, A Black Sugar Planter in the Antebellum South by David O. Whitten, (Transaction Publishers, 1995). I In the year 1800 the Viceroyalty of New Spain was still intact, and Louisiana still part of the Spanish Empire. So, too, was Mexico, Texas, all the Southwest of today's America, north to Kansas and clear to the West Coast…
Vito Mussomeli
November 20, 2018
Blog

How Jakob Emig Fought the Yankees

From the front porch, Jakob Emig could look across fields where his winter wheat greened nicely. An old man now, with sons gone off to war, he lived mainly in a woman's world of married daughters and daughters-in-law on farms scattered nearby. He himself lived alone, widowed now for two years, hard work during war-time finally having taken its toll…
James Everett Kibler
November 19, 2018
Podcast

Podcast Episode 146

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Nov 12-16, 2018 Topics: Secession, Nullification, Federalism, American Imperialism, Southern Culture, Southern Literature https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-146
Brion McClanahan
November 17, 2018
Blog

Securing the Blessings: Today the South, Tomorrow….

We are threatened by a powerful, dangerous, conspiracy of evil men. The conspiracy is the enemy of free institutions and civil liberties, of democracy and free speech; it is the enemy of religion. It is cruel and oppressive to its subjects. Its economic system is unfree and inefficient, condemning its people to poverty and deprivation. It has a relentless determination…
Ludwell H. Johnson
November 16, 2018
Blog

Defusing a Second Civil War Through Peaceful Secession?

Secession? Nullification? A second Civil War in the presently not-so United States of America? According to a historic and highly fascinating Abbeville Institute event that took place November 9 and 10, 2018 in Dallas, Texas, a number of influential American thinkers, political figures and activists gathered to discuss how peaceful secession and nullification could very well be one of the most important…
Matthew Silber
November 15, 2018
Blog

The Southern Political Tradition is Winning

Nationalist Jeff Sessions gets canned and a nullifier takes his job. This is actually an odd twist of fate. A friend of mine knows Sessions personally, and he continually expressed disappointment at Sessions's actions as AG. Jeff Sessions is from Alabama and is named after two famous Confederate heroes, Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard.  His replacement, Matthew Whitaker, hails from…
Brion McClanahan
November 14, 2018
Review Posts

A Visit to Clay Bank County

A review of four novels by Dr. James Everett Kibler, Jr: Walking Toward Home (Pelican Publishing, 2004), Memory’s Keep (Pelican Publishing, 2006), The Education of Chauncey Doolittle (Pelican Publishing, 2008), and Tiller (Shotwell Publishing, 2016). At the heart of every good work of fiction are characters that are believable and a real or imagined setting that allows readers to inhabit,…
Robin Spencer Lattimore
November 13, 2018
Blog

A Return to Barbarism

Prehistoric warfare was total war in which victors normally killed all enemy women, children, and adult males, according to groundbreaking research published by Lawrence H. Keeley, in his book War Before Civilization1. Keeley wrote that primitive war was always a struggle between societies and their economies, and warriors carried out that struggle. Rome fielded great armies, in historical time, and…
Norman Black
November 12, 2018
Podcast

Podcast Episode 145

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Nov 5-9, 2018. Topics: History, Southern Culture, Political Correctness https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-145
Brion McClanahan
November 10, 2018
Blog

Why Aren’t Americans Interested in History?

The study of history cannot be neatly contained behind the tall foreboding doors of an ivory tower nor swept under the rugs of dusty corner offices housing stacks of paper. It bleeds into other fields as it serves to inform both individual and group identity. It gives context to the current world and helps one understand their place in it…
Jonathan Harris
November 9, 2018
Blog

History and Social Justice Activism

I recently traveled with ten undergraduate students to the Conference on Faith and History (CFH) held at Calvin College, Grand Rapids Michigan.  This was an exciting and enriching trip for our students.  They, along with other history students from across the country, presented research papers at the undergraduate portion of the conference. For the past fifteen years I have attended…
Samuel C. Smith
November 8, 2018
Blog

Charleston’s Faulty “Contextualization”

I grew up in Summerville, South Carolina, just a few miles from historic Charleston. This quiet little town is separated from the Holy City by some plantations, swamps, and marsh but shares the same fascination with local history. Folklore states that Summerville is the birthplace of sweet tea, the source being a newspaper article from 1890 that lists the menu…
Michael Martin
November 7, 2018
Review Posts

An Arch Rebel Like Myself

A review of “An Arch Rebel Like Myself;” Dan Showalter and the Civil War in California and Texas, by by Gene Armistead and Robert D. Arconti (North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2018). Discussion of the War for Southern Independence often includes facts about who were the last to lay down their arms.  It is commonly argued that Gen. Stand Waite’s…
Daniel Peters
November 6, 2018
Blog

Stone Mountain and the “Monument Man”

When National Socialism came to power in Germany in 1933, it sought an ethnic and cultural cleansing of the country. Jewish culture and art was not considered fully human and underwent a purge. Once Nazi Germany started World War II in 1939, it also sought the same purge for all of Europe. Art considered Germanic was confiscated from all over…
Timothy A. Duskin
November 5, 2018
Podcast

Podcast Episode 144

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Oct 29 - Nov 2, 2018 Topics: Southern political tradition, Lincoln https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-144
Brion McClanahan
November 3, 2018
Blog

Was Lincoln a “Conservative?”

The latest in Lincoln polemics comes courtesy of Rich Lowry, editor of National Review.  In the latest issue of the latter, Lowry both promotes his new work and takes aim at those of our 16th president’s detractors that are to Lowry’s political right—the “Lincoln haters.” The “Lincoln haters,” Lowry insists, are limited “mostly, but not entirely,” to a libertarian “fringe”…
Jack Kerwick
November 2, 2018
Blog

McChrystal vs. Lee

Retired General Stanley McChrystal who never led troops in a winning war bravely threw out a picture of Robert E. Lee because his wife apparently made him do so. As a defense of the action he went into a brief explanation that he no longer considered Lee one of the great leaders. Lee, he said was a great soldier for…
Paul H. Yarbrough
November 1, 2018
Blog

A Neoconservative Wakes Up

Pro-Southern writers have long been suspicious of Victor Davis Hanson, given his association with the neoconservative ascendance of the Bush II era.   Yet unlike most of his former colleagues, the California classicist seems to have learned something from the dramatic transformations of recent years.  His book Mexifornia marked his enlistment in the unfashionable cause of border control, in part because…
Jerry Salyer
October 31, 2018
Review Posts

From Founding Fathers to Fire Eaters

A review of From Founding Fathers to Fire-Eaters: The Constitutional Doctrine of States’ Rights in the Old South (Columbia, SC: Shotwell Publishing, 2018) by James Rutledge Roesch. Mr. James Rutledge Roesch is doing God’s work with the publication of his book, From Founding Fathers to Fire-Eaters: The Constitutional Doctrine of States’ Rights in the Old South.  Riding to the sound…
John Devanny
October 30, 2018
Blog

Progressive Neo-Confederates?

Greetings fellow neo-Confederates. You have been right all along. How do I know this? Hillary Clinton said so, and if the smartest woman in the world said it, then it has to be true. Of course, she did not directly call herself a "neo-Confederate," but the progressives have rediscovered federalism and by default have vindicated every evil "neo-Confederate" in America.…
Brion McClanahan
October 29, 2018
Podcast

Podcast Episode 143

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institutes, Oct 22-26, 2018. Topics: Secession, Nullification, Federalism, Lincoln, the Southern Tradition https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-143
Brion McClanahan
October 27, 2018
Blog

The “Desert Blooming Like The Rose.”

In 21st–century America, it’s difficult to imagine life without the ability to access information at an electronic click or command. But it was not always so. Two centuries ago, outside of New England, many small towns and rural communities lacked the institutions and the formally educated individuals (especially higher-learning institutions and pastors) that might have been expected to provide the…
Forrest L. Marion
October 26, 2018
Blog

An Act of Tyranny

Constitutional Violation: Amendment One. Freedom of Speech Denied. Vallandigham Imprisoned in Ohio. “From the beginning to the end of these proceedings law and justice were set at naught;…the President should have rescinded the sentence and released Vallandigham:…a large portion of the Republican press of the east condemned Vallandigham’s arrest and the tribunal before which he was arraigned.” James Ford Rhodes, historian and…
John M. Taylor
October 25, 2018
Blog

Was the Old South Feudal?

Was the Old South Feudal? Eugene Genovese wrote several works on antebellum slavery that essentially argued the Old South was neither feudal nor capitalist. His book Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism and earlier writings on slave economies postulated that the Southern mode of production was pre-capitalist and utilized a type…
Michael Martin
October 24, 2018
Review Posts

Lincoln As He Really Was

A review of Lincoln: As He Really Was by Charles T. Pace (Shotwell Publishing, 2018). Abraham Lincoln was American’s Robespierre, but his crimes only reflected the character flaws he had while in office. Dr. Charles T. Pace, a medical doctor from Greenville, North Carolina, has written a masterful political biography of Lincoln. He portrays Lincoln as a “politician’s politician, a…
Michael Potts
October 23, 2018
Blog

Could “Calexit” Create a Left-Right Confederacy?

“Politics makes for strange bedfellows.” The 2016 Presidential election of Donald Trump produced the wedding of Bible Belt social conservatives and a flamboyant New York Billionaire with a legitimately questionable history of less than “Christian” moral social values. But the wedding of these “strange bedfellows” appears to be working out quite well—at least for the time being. As presidential politics…
James Ronald Kennedy
October 22, 2018
Podcast

Podcast Episode 142

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Oct 15-19, 2018 Topics: Decentralization, Secession, Nullification, Culture War, Political Correctness, Agrarianism https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-142
Brion McClanahan
October 20, 2018
Blog

The Multicultural Politically Correct Briar Patch

Despite the establishment attempts to throttle free speech—most recently actions taken by PayPal, by Google, by Facebook, by Amazon and by other major Internet sites to both block access to sites that these lords of the Net consider to be “racist, sexist, extremist, Neo-Confederate and far right,” and to prevent Internet financial transactions for them—still there are intrepid souls out…
Boyd Cathey
October 19, 2018
Blog

Accuse-Convict-Remove

In the past few weeks two major interrelated events took place in these once United States of America that should serve as a warning for all Americans.  First, after the most contentious confirmation process for a Supreme Court justice in over 100 years, America has displayed its political-cultural division to the world and second, the ever-growing campaign of cultural genocide…
Walter D. (Donnie) Kennedy
October 18, 2018
Blog

Justice Kavanaugh and the Triumph of Symbol over Reality

“History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Attributed to Mark Twain Americans at their best are a pragmatic “can do” folk, be it “Yankee ingenuity” or good old fashioned “get ‘r done.”  We are at our worst when we stray from this pragmatic bent into the misty fields of sacerdotal ideology, which is to say when we ascribe…
John Devanny
October 17, 2018
Review Posts

Taking Root

A review of Taking Root: The Nature Writing of William and Adam Summer of Pomaria by James Kibler (editor) and Wendell Berry (Foreword) (University of South Carolina Press, 2017). Perhaps land is more important to the Southern tradition than any other aspect of the region’s experience. Historians continue to grapple with questions that ask how Southerners understood land and nature.…
Alan Harrelson
October 16, 2018
Blog

A Red and Blue Coalition?

On June 20, 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Crawford: “If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation ... to a continuance in union, I have no hesitation in saying, ‘Let us separate.’” Jefferson thought secession can be a good thing. Lincoln in his first inaugural presented secession as something always bad: “Secession,” he said, “is…
Donald Livingston
October 15, 2018
Podcast

Podcast Episode 141

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Oct 8-12, 2018. Topics: Southern Founders, Andrew Jackson, Poor Whites of the Old and New South. https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-141
Brion McClanahan
October 13, 2018
Blog

Southern Memories of the Good Ol’ Days

Having traveled in all fifty states, I must admit there are certain areas of this great country that continue to draw me back, time and again, to enjoy their natural beauty, pleasing climate, and their historical sites. The most fascinating place I’ve traveled is the tiny village of Barrow, Alaska, the northern most of cities in the United States. However,…
Cary Lindsay
October 12, 2018
Blog

The Old South’s Poor Whites

There was a time, before universal white male suffrage and the closing of the frontier, when the poor whites of the South were considered shiftless and without caste. If we were to look at the South as a hierarchical system, it could be argued that the poor whites were a kind of pariah. There’s a common misconception that all whites…
Michael Martin
October 11, 2018
Blog

What if We Listened to the Southern Founders?

Mel Bradford's outstanding tome A Better Guide Than Reason lifted that phrase from a speech John Dickinson made during the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. Dickinson worried that the delegates to what we now call the "Constitutional Convention" were insistent on crafting a document that would reinvent the government of the United States, something James Madison proposed with his now famous…
Brion McClanahan
October 10, 2018
Review Posts

In Defense of Andrew Jackson

A review of In Defense of Andrew Jackson by Brad Birzer (Regnery History, 2018). Andrew Jackson, who Davy Crockett famously mocked as “the great man in the white house,” occupies an entire epoch in American history. In almost every conceivable way, he was a classic paradox – a benevolent crusader to his friends, and a despotic tyrant to his enemies.…
Dave Benner
October 9, 2018
Blog

The Supreme Selection Supported by Senator Sasse and the Several Dwarfs

Why does congress have hearings for people who are paraded through their judiciary committee- noise for examination as to their qualifications. Quality of what?  Those jobs, for example the Supreme Court Justices, certainly only require little more than a reasonably educated person. And the people examining these people seemingly requires virtually no intelligence at all. It is a monstrous show…
Paul H. Yarbrough
October 8, 2018
Podcast

Podcast Episode 140

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Oct 1-5, 2018. Topics: The New South and Nu South, Ty Cobb, Southern history, Southern culture. https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-140
Brion McClanahan
October 6, 2018
Blog

The Left Edge of Insanity

A Short Story of a Dystopian America To my fellow Associates: My name is Diversity-26, although my family and friends knew me as John before the Great Purge of Christianity. Today, as part of my punishment, I have been required to give you my story and beg you all for forgiveness for having disrupted your safe and happy lives. According…
Lewis Liberman
October 5, 2018
Blog

Why Was General Earl Van Dorn Murdered?

In some ways, historians are like anyone else: they hate to make mistakes. But if you write enough, sooner or later, you will make a mistake—I assure you. I certainly have, but I have been more fortunate than most. Sometimes, mistakes benefit you. What I suppose are my two most significant errors to date came more than two decades apart,…
Samuel W. Mitcham
October 4, 2018
Blog

Confederate Soldiers Were Not Traitors

The following is a letter-to-the-editor of the Charleston, SC Post and Courier September 15, 2018 defending the crew of the CSS Hunley. It applies to all Confederates soldiers. Dear Editor of The Post and Courier, A letter writer on September 12, 2018 is adamant that the proposed museum for the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley should not be incorporated into…
Gene Kizer, Jr.
October 3, 2018
Review Posts

The Real Ty Cobb

A Review of Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, by Charles Leerhsen, (Simon & Schuster, 2015). Baseball fans familiar with major league records remember Ty Cobb for his .366 lifetime batting average during the dead-ball era. Some may even remember that he held more than 90 baseball records. During his career, Cobb was the idol of millions of fans and received…
Norman Black
October 2, 2018
Blog

Reconstructing the New South

“Nashville’s going to be a progressive, diverse city and there’s nothing that you can do about it. Millennials moving from up north and foreigners immigrating from across the border have changed the city’s population and thus changed the city’s way of life – for the better. Nashville isn’t a Southern city anymore and is never going to be a Southern…
James Rutledge Roesch
October 1, 2018
Podcast

Podcast Episode 139

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Sept 17-28, 2018 Topics: Federalism, Southern Culture, Southern History https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-139
Brion McClanahan
September 29, 2018
Blog

What’s in a (Generational) Name?

The whole 20th century was a horrible time for the friends of tradition:  the mild rule of Europe’s Christian monarchs - Habsburgs, Romanovs, and others - was replaced by the ruthless Communists and later the despotism of the European Union, amongst other totalitarian ‘isms’; Mao overthrew Confucius in China; the natural rhythms of the agrarian life in many places of…
Walt Garlington
September 28, 2018
Blog

Was Jesse James a Southern Robin Hood?

There is a dichotomy to how people view Jesse James. While some have viewed him as a murdering thief, others have argued that he was like a modern-day Robin Hood. To really understand the man requires an examination of his life and an honest analysis of the events that shaped him in Missouri. WHO WAS JESSE JAMES? Jesse James was…
Michael Martin
September 27, 2018
Blog

Calhoun, Not Webster, Was Right

Writing about the “Great Triumvirate” of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun during the third Nullification controversy in America of 1828-1832, and in particular about the Webster-Hayne debate of 1830, the late Prof. Merrill D. Peterson made this telling point:  “In the course of answering Hayne point by point, Webster unfolded a  conception of the Union and the Constitution that stood in stark…
W. Kirk Wood
September 26, 2018
Review Posts

Republicans Knew Where Their Brot Was Buttered In 1860

A Review of The Election of 1860: “A Campaign Fraught with Consequences” by Michael F. Holt (University Press of Kansas, 2017). Chapter One of Michael F. Holt’s contribution to the corpulent body of work covering the election of 1860 is called “Republican Storm Rising” and it was political perfect storm that blew Abraham Lincoln into the White House. One of,…
Joe Wolverton
September 25, 2018
Blog

Rhetoric, Reality, and the Late Unpleasantness

The 1850s is viewed by most scholars as the crucial decade of the sectional crisis that resulted in the War Between the States. The Great Triumvirate of John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster had passed from the scene.  These giants were replaced by lesser lights, and “the war came” as Mr. Lincoln claimed.  As historical explanations go, there…
John Devanny
September 24, 2018
Blog

First Kiss

Back in 1958, when I was fifteen years old, I made the most critical and important decision in my youthful life. I made the choice any all-American fifteen-year-old farm boy would have made. It was time for me to get my first kiss from a girl. You see, I had a crush on Mary Sue! Mary Sue and her brother…
Cary Lindsay
September 21, 2018
Blog

Six Reasons to Love the Confederate Battle Flag

Some claim offense by the red white and blue image of the Confederate Battle flag and demand its immediate removal from public places. Others embrace it and fly it proudly. Why would in individual chose one side over the other? Here are some possible reasons. 1. Christianity A prominent feature of the Confederate Battle Flag is the “X” emblazoned boldly…
Lola Sanchez
September 20, 2018
Blog

Fighters

Editor's Note: The text is taken from Tom Skeyhill's, His Own Life Story And War Diary, a collection of interviews Skeyhill conducted with World War I Medal of Honor recipient Alvin C. York of Pall Mall, TN in the 1920s. I ain’t had much of the larnin’ that comes out of books. I’m a-trying to overcome that, but it ain’t…
Alvin C. York
September 19, 2018
Review Posts

The Legacy of Anti-Federalism

A review of The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 by Saul Cornell (University of North Carolina Press, 1999). The Anti-Federalists who opposed ratification of the Constitution have not fared well among American historians and political , scientists. Nothing reveals more starkly the near-complete disinterest in Anti-Federalist thought than a bibliographical check of books and essays on…
James McClellan
September 18, 2018
Blog

Fractured Federalism

Proposals to turn national programs over to the states are abound in Washington. The failure of federal programs over the past 60 years demonstrates that centralized solutions to local problems are ineffective. Federalism—the constitutional distribution of power between the states and national government— is once again on the agenda. Lessons regarding centralization have been learned the hard way. For example,…
William J. Watkins
September 17, 2018
Podcast

Podcast Episode 138

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Sept 10-14, 2018. Topics: Southern literature, the War, Southern music, Bobby Horton https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-138
Brion McClanahan
September 15, 2018
Blog

Myth of a Nation

Galactic Imperium News Service (GINS) Special Report: Will Democrats and Republicans in America finally set aside their differences and save the world through the imperial aspirations of big government, a robust Presidential ruler and visionary leaders like Abraham Lincoln? Such are the much heralded promises made surrounding Dinesh D’Lousa’s most recent unveiling of his controversial film, Myth of a Nation:…
Lewis Liberman
September 14, 2018
Blog

Mule Breeding

“Why don’t you get a tractor? You could get more done.” “Don’t need more done.” “But you could get it done faster.” “Faster than what?” “Faster than that mule goes.” The Yankee machine man really wanted to sell this down-south farm boy a tractor on account of the boy seemed to really be struggling with the mule (whom the boy…
Paul H. Yarbrough
September 13, 2018
Blog

When the Yankees Shut Down the First Amendment

Constitutional Violation: Amendment One: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. “Freedom of speech and freedom of the press, precious relics of…
John M. Taylor
September 12, 2018
Review Posts

My Own Darling Wife

A review of My Own Darling Wife: Letters from a Confederate Volunteer by Andrew P. Calhoun (Shotwell Publishing, 2018). This is not just a book of family letters from the War Between the States. You will learn more about the typical Confederate soldier in these 208 pages than in most books. The author of these letters is John Francis Calhoun,…
John C. Whatley
September 11, 2018
Blog

Was the Louisiana Purchase Constitutional?

When the evolution of presidential power in early American history is discussed, it is sometimes alleged that the Louisiana Purchase was a particularly unconstitutional act and an example of presidential malfeasance. According to this line of reasoning, President Thomas Jefferson expanded the bounds of the presidency and betrayed his republican inclinations by favoring desired outcomes over executive restraint. Those that…
Dave Benner
September 10, 2018
Podcast

Podcast Episode 137

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Sept 3-7, 2018 Topics: Secession, nullification, federalism, Thomas Jefferson, United States Constitution. https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-137
Brion McClanahan
September 8, 2018
Blog

When New Yorkers Cheered Dixie

On October 31, 1910—seven years after the Wright Brother’s first airplane flight of less than a minute—seventy-five thousand spectators gathered at Belmont Park to watch a day of competition among pioneering aviators. Events culminated with a thirty-six mile round trip race between Belmont Park to the Statue of Liberty. Only three aviators attempted the trip, which had about one million…
Philip Leigh
September 7, 2018
Blog

Calhoun and Modern Economics

Much of John C. Calhoun’s criticism stems from his 1837 speech in the Senate where he stated slavery was “a positive good.” This quote is often paraded as evidence of Southern racism and is used in attempts diminish Calhoun’s legacy. Quite possibly no other politician, aside from Lincoln, is so often misrepresented and misunderstood. The reason is that nowadays, we…
Michael Martin
September 6, 2018
Blog

Upholding Voter ID in the South

The punitive “preclearance” regime under the Voting Rights Act (“VRA”) of 1965, imposed on seven “covered” southern states and a number of counties in two others, was essentially invalidated by the U.S. Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013.   The lifting of this incubus freed the previously “covered”  states and emboldened others to introduce legislation, notably a requirement…
Michael Arnheim
September 5, 2018
Review Posts

The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson

A review of The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson by David N. Mayer (University of Virginia Press, 1994). Thomas Jefferson’s reputation is that of a great thinker. He is popularly (and I believe wrongly, but that is a different matter) believed to have been the greatest thinker among American’s Revolutionaries. It is as a writer and as an unofficial pontifex…
Kevin R.C. Gutzman
September 4, 2018
Blog

Nullification and Secession: Solutions or Talking Points?

Many of us in the South have maintained our faith in the Constitutional right of nullification and secession despite the efforts of massed, bloody, Yankee bayonets. But is the talk about nullification and secession an earnest effort to put forward solutions to an out of control, Deep State, supreme federal government or is it merely an exercise in heady political…
James Ronald Kennedy
September 3, 2018