Tag

Cancel Culture

Blog

Trump the Nominalist

In Dixieland, ‘nominalism’ is a dirty word.  This is because, as Richard Weaver noticed, it is an act of aggression against creatures and things of all kinds in the world, removing any notion of a fixed meaning and nature from them and imposing new ones on a whim.  Nominalism is ‘the notion that nature has no essential independence or meaning.’ …
Walt Garlington
June 18, 2025
Blog

The Big Lie

When the newly-minted Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, named Fort Liberty, North Carolina “Fort Bragg” after Roland L. Bragg, a native of Maine, who served in WWI, instead of the original namesake, many were quick to excuse it saying “he did the best he could” and, or “the law prevents any military installation to be named after a Confederate”. Poppycock. …
Lola Sanchez
March 10, 2025
Blog

The Death of Debate

In ancient China, a physician could not look directly upon a lady from the Emperor’s court; she would appear before him in a screened palanquin. All diagnoses were the result of careful questions lest one offend, a matter that could lead to decapitation, or worse! — and an examination of the lady’s hands and wrists, the only parts of her…
Valerie Protopapas
January 30, 2025
Blog

Puritans, Quakers, and Michel Foucault

Although he is not “one of us,” Southern conservatives can certainly learn something from the eloquent blogger Steve Sailer.  For instance, Sailer recently summarized a new theory from a book which relates the Woke Cult to the North’s two characteristic religious strains:  “Puritans tended to be intense and Quakers nice,” Sailer observes.  “Put them together and you get an intolerant…
Jerry Salyer
January 23, 2025
Blog

War on the Past

A University of Virginia religion professor said this about the presence of the Charlottesville Robert E. Lee statue: it was “like if there’s a rabid dog in the neighborhood that has been hurting people, and it needs to be euthanized.” Such a statement is ignorant, fanatical, and substitutes childish subjectivism for objective reality. The statue has since been destroyed. That…
Clyde Wilson
January 21, 2025
Blog

A Slap in Jimmy Carter’s Face?

The Episcopal Church USA has long prided itself as hosting the venue for state occasions at its so-called National Cathedral in Washington D.C. The National Cathedral is a large building in the gothic style which was built over the course of decades with much fund-raising done by that denomination nation-wide. Begun in 1907, the Cathedral is actually dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul, but…
David McCallister
January 6, 2025
Blog

I Ain’t Apologizing

Jon Harris has been affiliated with the Abbeville Institute for nearly a decade. He was one of our Summer School students, has been responsible for some of our video work, and was the editor and producer of our 1607 Project documentary. He hosts the popular YouTube channel Conversations That Matter and published two books on social justice and Christianity. He…
Abbeville Institute
January 3, 2025
Blog

How Sally is Saving Monticello

Recently, I watched the Abbeville Institute’s Zoom conversation with Mike Kitchens on the loss of historic antebellum homes. Many have been lost to demolition or neglect.  But there is another kind of loss threatening these historic sites. While it is important to discuss the people who built and kept these plantations afloat, some house museums are focusing disproportionately on the…
Celia Jones Prehn
August 28, 2024
Blog

Have We Learned Anything from the Destruction of Confederate Monuments?

On a bright September day in 2017, in my hometown of Dallas, Texas, a work crew removed a large, bronze statue from Lee Park. The sculpture depicted Robert E. Lee accompanied by a young soldier, each mounted on horseback, and had been unveiled eight decades earlier as part of the Texas Centennial. During that celebration marking 100 years of Texas…
Aaron Archer
July 22, 2024
BlogPodcast

Arlington Reconciliation

Ep. 13: How did Americans think about the Arlington Confederate or Reconciliation monument in 1914? They clearly told you, and it isn't what the woke cancel culture folks want you to believe. https://youtu.be/UGPyhKLXIY8
Brion McClanahan
June 29, 2024
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Never Reconciled: Boston’s Revenge

“Then the Lord said unto me, out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land.”  Jeremiah. 1:14. Harvard University has a memorial to all its students who were killed in military service, including several Nazis. The only omission is of  some Americans---Confederates. I know of about a dozen Confederate generals who attended Harvard,…
Clyde Wilson
May 13, 2024
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Cowboy Carter and Cultural Appropriation

At the time of the Super Bowl in February, 2024, pop singer Beyoncé Knowles released two new singles that sounded a little different than her usual stuff. One of those two singles called Texas Hold ‘Em went to number 1 on the Billboard Hot Country chart and eventually number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. In late March, Beyoncé followed…
Tom Daniel
April 4, 2024
Blog

Soured on the South

I grew up in Virginia, though my accent, apart from a few words and phrases, is almost indistinguishable from my friends from California, Massachusetts, and Michigan. For many Southerners, especially in the Upper South, all that remains of that once rich linguistic heritage are such expressions as “y’all,” “yonder,” and “if I had my druthers.” For that, we can thank…
Casey Chalk
April 3, 2024
Blog

The Use and Misuse of History

“I am heir to  the greatest civilization the world has ever known. I’d like to defend it but I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.” --Alice Teller “By 2050—earlier probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared.  The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed….shall exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually…
Clyde Wilson
February 28, 2024
Blog

Monument Desecration in the U.S.: “If It’s Not Love….”

What do pro-Israel Jewish Americans, Italian Americans, and American Southerners have in common?  First and most obviously, they have proud traditions based on Judeo-Christian ethics.  Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism, the predominant religions in the groups, share belief in God though there are many and complex variations in their beliefs and practices.  Second, another important thing they have in common is…
Philip Dickey, MD
February 6, 2024
Blog

Setting Aside Historical Accuracy

The recent video, “The Fall of Minneapolis,” by journalist Liz Collin and Dr. J.C. Chaix, is chillingly eye-opening. The documentary, following the book, “They’re Lying: The Media, The Left, and the Death of George Floyd, is painstakingly researched. It shows convincingly that the four officers, who were involved in the arrest of George Floyd on the day of his passing,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 8, 2024
Blog

Blame Republicans

In February 2000, Republican presidential candidate John McCain told “Face the Nation” that he considered the Confederate Battle Flag to be “offensive” and a “symbols of racism and slavery.” Candidate George W. Bush remarked that while he considered the display of the flag to be a state issue, he refused to allow Confederate symbolism at the Texas statehouse and had…
Brion McClanahan
January 2, 2024
Blog

An Open Letter for Arlington National Cemetery Confederate Monument

I recently finished reading The Need To Be Whole by Wendell Berry, and it has inspired me to write to you in protest of the imminent—if not actually underway as you read these very words—removal of the Arlington National Cemetery Confederate Monument. I am certain that you have already encountered many arguments in favour of the monument. You have heard…
James Rutledge Roesch
December 21, 2023
Blog

VMI and the American Empire

The instances are innumerable, their details vast. To exist outside and apart is to be a threat, a West Berlin just visible over the parapet. All distinction must submit. There is no more dialogue as once offered to Melos, there is no longer even the illusion of choice: your old god must be displaced, your plinth must be empty, and…
Thomas Ellen
December 14, 2023
Blog

Bronze is the Mirror of Form

With the Thanksgiving of 2023 in the rearview mirror, I am still thankful for the over 9000 Americans who submitted comments around the removal of the Confederate Memorial in Arlington Cemetery. Only 10% of the comments supported the decision to remove the memorial. Over eight thousand Americans wrote in defense of the Confederate Memorial, and over 364 people mentioned grave…
Sara Sass
December 1, 2023
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An Educator’s View on Preserving the Arlington Confederate Monument

Despite being a young, developing discipline in America, historic preservation, as it continues to grow, is of vital importance to the very fabric of this nation. Historic lands, buildings, and monuments do not just represent a window into time that best exemplifies the quality of life and happenstance of the past but also offers a teaching opportunity for future generations.…
Jonathan Papanikolaou
November 8, 2023
Blog

Swords Into Plowshares

Last week, activists destroyed the Charlottesville, Virginia Robert E. Lee monument in secret. They said it was to prevent violence, but not their own. The Washington Post attended the event and documented the final moments for Lee's face. The iconoclasts fashioned it into a "death mask" and then melted it down, creating a haunting image captured by the Post's photographer. You…
Brion McClanahan
October 30, 2023
Blog

Sayonara Aunt Jemima

Over the past several decades, anything connected with the Confederacy, as well as much of Southern culture and heritage, have all been transformed from objects of American pride into nothing more than racist pariahs that must be blown away by the winds of woke social change and cancel culture. A prime example of such objects is Georgia-born writer Margaret Mitchell’s…
John Marquardt
October 17, 2023
Blog

The Night of Replaced Glass

This week, new stained-glass windows at the National Cathedral of the United States were unveiled. Were these new windows a testament to the saving power of Jesus Christ? Did these windows proclaim peace? Did they show Elijah carried into the clouds, or John the Baptist in the river? Not at all. These four new windows proudly proclaim NO and FOUL…
Sara Sass
October 3, 2023
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A “Proof” Gone Bad in the Jefferson Paternity Issue

After the 1998 DNA study in Nature indicted Thomas Jefferson apropos of the paternity of Eston Hemings and the rest of Sally Hemings’ children, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation (hereafter, TJMF)—now merely the Thomas Jefferson Foundation—formed a committee to examine the DNA study and strands of historical evidence. In 2000, the foundation declared, “The DNA study, combined with multiple strands…
M. Andrew Holowchak
September 13, 2023
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The Argument for Preserving Our Early American Symbols

Annie Gowan of The Washington Post writes of an incident a few years ago, June 2020, where a group of Portland, Oregon, protestors, gathered a high school and used bungee cords, wires, and human muscle to topple a statue of Thomas Jefferson off its pedestal and into the cement. Says 26-year-old removalist Triston Crowl, “When it came down, we could…
M. Andrew Holowchak
August 21, 2023
Blog

The Most Effective Way

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their own history.” – George Orwell, 1984. Who knew the Biden administration was using this dystopian novel as a guidebook? In 2022, the Commission on the Naming of Items of the Department of Defense that Commemorate the Confederate States of America or Any Person…
Sara Sass
August 8, 2023
Blog

David Blight, Neo-Confederate

Editor's Note: On May 9, 2023, Art History Professor Erin Thompson published a piece at The Nation gleefully announcing that Arlington Cemetery will finally be rid of its "racist" Confederate monument. The piece is indicative of the current level of scholarship by modern mainstream academics. Most of it centers on Tweets that attacked her public joy--also through a Tweet--at the…
Abbeville Institute
May 15, 2023
Blog

Why They Hate Thomas Jefferson

The essay is included in Writing on the Southern Front: Authentic Conservatism for Our Times (Taylor and Francis, 2018). Thomas Jefferson is America’s favorite whipping boy. Not among the public, which remains either ambivalent or blissfully ignorant of most history. But this certainly is the case among the jealous elites. Nowadays, Jefferson is even more despised than such longtime bogeys…
Joseph Scotchie
April 19, 2023
Blog

When Civil Rights Activism Runs Afoul

In recent years, Thomas Jefferson, father of University of Virginia and first citizen of Charlottesville, has been the target of vitriolic assaults from countless persons, scholars among them, and groups in America. What is most surprising is that many of the assaults today come from persons or groups in or around his hometown, Charlottesville, where, one might expect, the citizens…
M. Andrew Holowchak
April 18, 2023
Blog

Could Jefferson Have Done More to End Slavery?

It is today all too customarily asserted that anyone who owned slaves in the pageantry of American history was racist. The argument goes something like this: Slave-owning is a racist practice, so, anyone owning slaves is racist. There is, of course, much to unpack in the argument. First, it wrongly assumes that all slavery comprised Whites owning Blacks. Second, it…
M. Andrew Holowchak
April 6, 2023
Blog

Washington and Lee’s Prescient Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe was one of the most insightful writers and novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. He was also a Washington & Lee graduate who sometimes championed politically incorrect viewpoints, a context in which he was ahead of his time. Today’s W & L faculty and administrators would do well to take note. In 1970, he published…
Philip Leigh
March 7, 2023
Blog

Getting the Truth “Out There”

The fictitious “history” of the great conflict between the two sections of the (formerly) “united” States has been ongoing for a long, long time. The present narrative, however, has been changed greatly in the last decade or so. Older folks such as myself remember that the whole conflict was “summed up” in what became known as The Grand Bargain, a…
Valerie Protopapas
February 16, 2023
Blog

The Wrong Question

An article appeared on January 20th, 2023, touching upon the assault on the “Reconciliation” monument in Arlington National Cemetery. The monument has been labeled as “Confederate” and therefore resides in the cross-hairs of the present Woke Nation. Author Allen Brownfeld entitled the piece: Removing the Confederate Memorial From Arlington: What Would Lincoln or Grant Think? Of course, the contretemps about…
Valerie Protopapas
February 6, 2023
Blog

The 518

The names, below, are a few of the 375,000 Confederate soldiers about whom Union soldier and president of the United States, William McKinley, said: . . . every soldier's grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor . . . And the time has now come . . . when in the spirit of fraternity…
Gene Kizer, Jr.
February 1, 2023
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The Naming Commission Comes for West Point

Created by the fiscal 2021 national defense authorization act, the Naming Commission’s duties included recommending procedures for renaming Department of Defense assets “to prevent commemoration of the Confederate States of America or any person who served voluntarily” with them. While nine U.S. Army posts named for Confederates have received the most attention, the commission’s “remit” extends much further. In fact,…
Forrest L. Marion
January 31, 2023
Blog

A Morsel of Genuine History

“A Morsel of genuine History, a thing so rare as to be always valuable.” ---Thomas Jefferson Recently a young professor wrote that Confederates had slandered and “dehumanised” Northern soldiers by giving them an unfavourable image.  Dehumanisation.  How awful and unfair! Those righteous Northern soldiers having their feelings hurt by mean old Southerners. A relevant fact is that the Yankees had…
Clyde Wilson
January 30, 2023
Blog

Why Lee Still Matters

In Richmond, there’s a movement afoot to rename the Robert E. Lee Memorial Bridge. At Charlottesville, a statue to the Confederate general was removed last year. In Abilene, Texas, Lee Park, named after the general, has been changed to that of a local football coach. The list could go on and on, as we’ve all seen. But let’s step back…
Stephen Davis
January 25, 2023
Blog

Our Hate Confederates Moment

The Confederacy makes up a sizable and interesting chunk of American history. Not only interesting but often regarded as admirable.  Admiration for the Confederacy’s brave struggle against great odds and its noble leaders has lasted for generations and is worldwide. Its admirers have even included some of the best of the men who fought against it. Wiping the Confederacy from…
Clyde Wilson
January 23, 2023
Blog

And So It Goes…

And so, the final blows fall around us, in our institutions and on our streets, and we can say as God Himself once said, “It is finished.” He said it of His great work of redemption, but we can now say it of the noblest experiment of government ever attempted by man—the “united” States of America. As in all things,…
Valerie Protopapas
November 18, 2022
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Suppression of Free Speech at Poplar Forest

On November 3, 2022, in response to an invitation of group of Thomas Jefferson mavens, I went to Jefferson’s get-away residence at Poplar Forest. I was asked to join their tour, to begin at 12:30 p.m., and to field questions after the tour. I was asked also to bring any books on Jefferson that I wished to sign and to…
M. Andrew Holowchak
November 14, 2022
BlogMedia Posts

The Arlington Confederate Monument

The Naming Commission has recommended the removal of the Arlington Confederate Monument. This would not only be a historical travesty and a barbaric leveling of art, it would lay waste to the very message the monument was intended to convey: fraternity, healing, and reconciliation. Tell your Representative you want to stop this heinous act of cultural destruction. https://youtu.be/IwST0QslHLs
Abbeville Institute
November 9, 2022
Blog

Never the Twain

In today’s America, to paraphrase Rudyard Kipling, North is North, and South is South, and never the twain shall meet. This dichotomy, of course, was not always the case, for after the many years of bitter sectional rancor and four years of bloody internecine warfare that took place over half a century before, the North and the South finally managed…
John Marquardt
October 17, 2022
Blog

Removing The Confederate Memorial At Arlington Isn’t About Racial Reconciliation, It’s About Political Power

Amid the steady stream of horrible economic news this week you might have missed a rather bland headline from the Associated Press: “Panel advises removal of Confederate statue at Arlington.” The news itself, that an independent commission charged with renaming U.S. military bases with Confederate names has recommended the Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery be dismantled and removed, might seem painstakingly…
John Daniel Davidson
September 21, 2022
Blog

Destroying the Past to Change the Present

On June 17th, 2015, a deranged white man, Dylan Roof, attacked an all-black prayer meeting in a South Carolina church killing nine of the participants. Of course, most rational, intelligent (that is, ordinary) Americans saw the mass shooting as another opportunity for the “gun violence” crowd to demand an end to the rights of law-abiding Americans to own guns; and…
Valerie Protopapas
September 15, 2022
Blog

History by Emotion

I presume the decision by the U.S. Postal Service leadership didn’t sound like a difficult one, especially in 2022. In Montpelier Station, Virginia, a post office was operating in a building where signs reading “White” and “Colored” hung over two separate doors. The signs were a historical artifact, and were intended to direct visitors to an exhibit about historical racial…
Casey Chalk
September 13, 2022
Blog

Attacking George Washington

In yet another attack on American history and heritage, the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. is changing the name of their sports team, which is known as the Colonials. GW Today, the University’s official online news source, reported, “The George Washington University Board of Trustees has decided to discontinue the use of the Colonials moniker based on the recommendation…
Timothy A. Duskin
July 20, 2022
Blog

Holding Heritage Groups Responsible

When the assault on Southern heritage with the destruction of monuments, symbols and heroes began, I wrote a letter to the President of the Civil War Trust as a member of that group attempting to determine the course the Trust would take in this matter. Sadly, the gentleman did not even have the courtesy to respond even in a form…
Valerie Protopapas
June 30, 2022
Blog

Pete Hegseth’s Hopeful War on “Education”

Pete Hegseth has a book out, Battle for the American Mind, which among other promotions and revelations has taken on the chore (however “Johnny-come-lately”) of denigrating the general process of education in this country. First, and foremost I would say, hooray for Mr, Hegseth. And to his efforts, I say, good hunting, Sir.  And when you finally tree this coon,…
Paul H. Yarbrough
June 28, 2022
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An Open Letter to the Valentine Museum

On June 24, 2022, Mr. William J. Martin, Director of the Valentine Museum in Richmond, gave notice that the damaged, desecrated, and vandalized statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis – on loan from the Black History & Cultural Center of Virginia - would be displayed by the museum within its core exhibit. The purpose stated by the Valentine is for…
H.V. Traywick, Jr.
June 27, 2022
Blog

W.E.B. DuBois’s Selective Moral Outrage

In March of 1928, W.E.B. DuBois published a short essay attacking the character of Robert E. Lee in a publication created by DuBois called The Crisis. This magazine was also the official publication of the NAACP, which was also co-founded by DuBois, and (according to their November 1910 premier issue) had the expressed goal of setting forth “those facts and…
Michael Martin
June 2, 2022
Blog

The Worst Street Corner in America

Mako Honda recently told the Washington Post that she and her husband Ryan Finley live on “the worst street corner… across the U.S.” You might speculate that the couple live somewhere in Los Angeles, which retains the notoriety of having the three most dangerous neighborhoods in the United States. Or perhaps they live somewhere in inner-city Chicago like West Garfield…
Casey Chalk
May 30, 2022
Blog

A Suburb to Nothing

I. The Fall of Richmond In 1930, that caustic fellow H.L. Mencken wrote that if the war of 1861-1865 had gone otherwise, “Richmond would be, not the dull suburb of nothing that it is now, but a beautiful and consoling second-rate capital, comparable to Budapest, Brussels, Stockholm or The Hague.” I had occasion to be in downtown Richmond for a…
Joseph R. Stromberg
February 16, 2022
Blog

Rally ‘Round the Flag!

As in the practice of lingchi, the ancient Chinese form of slow and painful execution by a thousand cuts, Southern history and tradition are today dying a similar death. The first of these virtual cuts was inflicted over twenty years ago in South Carolina when the Confederate Battle Flag was taken down from the dome of the State Capitol in…
John Marquardt
November 16, 2021
Blog

Conservatism’s Dixie Roots

It is maddening to listen to people who attempt “conservative thought” with but a shallow mentality for the concept.  True conservative thought comes from the seeds of agrarians and various cultivations in spirit and in heart; the heart of family conservation and the kneeling before God. It is not fractious political parties and preening T.V. personalities lost to history and…
Paul H. Yarbrough
July 21, 2021
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Responding to the Scalawags

If timid and pacified Southerners needed more proof that we are a defeated and occupied people, then indisputable proof was recently provided by the United States House of Representatives. At 7:24 PM June 29, 2021 the House of Representatives passed HR 3005. This legislation requires that all “statues” of Southern “Civil War” heroes be removed from the United States Capitol…
James Ronald Kennedy
July 20, 2021
Blog

The Star that is Called Wormwood

And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountain of waters; and the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters,…
Enoch Cade
July 12, 2021
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The True Cause of the War Between the States

I have been studying the War Between the States for 53 years. In all those years, the one quotation I have read which summarizes the true reason for the differences between the North and the South which led to that war was stated by James Henley Thornwell (1812-1862). He was the President of Columbia Theological Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina,…
Timothy A. Duskin
July 8, 2021
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John Pelham and the “Myth of the Lost Cause”

Some twenty years ago I had planned to write a full-length study of John Pelham—known in the South as the Gallant John Pelham—and the making of myth. The business of earning a living and other distractions, however, intervened to keep that project from being completed. I finally abandoned it as a lost cause of my own. Recently, however, I came…
Thomas Hubert
July 7, 2021
Blog

A New 4th of July Resolution

The solution offered by Mr Vivek Ramaswamy to the destructive ideology of the Woke Social Justice Warriors could not be stranger: The antidote isn’t to fight wokeness directly. It can’t be, because that’s a losing battle. The true solution is to gradually rebuild a vision for shared American identity that is so deep and so powerful that it dilutes wokeism…
Walt Garlington
July 2, 2021
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Facebook and Old Glory

Facebook canceled the Abbeville Institute. I was notified on June 10 that the Abbeville Institute Facebook page had been unpublished due to “repeated community standards violations.” Our offenses? We used the image of the Confederate Battle Flag for one post in July 2020 which earned the Institute our first strike. A purely American image that had been the recognized symbol…
Brion McClanahan
June 28, 2021
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The Real VMI: A Little Meritocracy, 1839-2021?

On June 1, 2021, the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) – historic, meritocratic, renowned for rigor and its graduates’ service, and, for decades as color-blind as any institution may reasonably expect to be in a fallen world – may well have ceased to exist in a sense when the results of a Richmond-mandated investigation of so-called “structural racism” were released; and…
Forrest L. Marion
June 16, 2021
Blog

A Southern Song, A Southern Heritage–Canceled

“When we talk about the War it is our history we are talking about, it is a part of our identity.  To tell libellous lies about our ancestors is a direct attack on who we are.” —from Lies My Teacher Told Me by Clyde N. Wilson “The Story of Maryland is sad to the last degree.” —Jefferson Davis In the…
J.L. Bennett
June 14, 2021
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Make History History Again

In the 1986 comedy film Back to School, Rodney Dangerfield’s character, Thornton Mellon, a wealthy, middle-aged father, decided to attend college with his young son. Never serious about the endeavor, and more interested in women and parties, Mellon uses his vast fortune to hire experts to do his academic work for him. For his astronomy project, he hires scientists from…
Ryan Walters
May 20, 2021
Blog

The Attack on Marco Bassani

Originally posted at LewRockwell.com You may remember a meme circulating widely after the U.S. presidential election last November with a picture of Kamala Harris and the following comment: “She will be an inspiration to young girls by showing that if you sleep with the right powerfully connected men then you too can play second fiddle to a man with dementia.…
Jo Ann Cavallo
May 19, 2021
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The Statues Should Stay Up

During the ongoing debate regarding the removal of the monuments honoring Confederate Generals, those in support of the statues often say in defense, “The statues are part of America’s history; we need to learn from history.” While this statement is of course true, I do not believe it is appropriate in this context, as “learning from history” is synonymous with…
Prioleau Alexander
May 14, 2021
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Angers Away

Over half a century before the Imperial German Navy launched its new and deadly method of undersea warfare against the Allied navies and merchant shipping in World War One, the Confederate Army was making history’s first successful submarine attack on an enemy warship.  On the night of February 17, 1864, First Lieutenant George E. Dixon, a former steamboat engineer before…
John Marquardt
May 13, 2021
Blog

Yankees 38, VMI 3

The Virginia Military Institute, ever the underdog. . . . For longtime VMI football fans, the above score may be all-too-painfully reminiscent. I recall the first time I heard of VMI. It was a University of Maryland vs. VMI football game in 1971. I was captivated by VMI from then on and began there as a “Rat” five years later.…
Forrest L. Marion
March 11, 2021
Blog

Now Is The Best Time To Be Southern

These past several years, we Americans have been living in an accelerating anti-cultural vortex. Day by day the Yankee juggernaut gains steam. Once content with carpetbombing Hanoi and Baghdad, the Yankees are now taking their civilizational demolition derby back South, where it all began. Topple the Southern statues, spraypaint the Southern monuments, mock the Southern accents and folkways, and cancel…
Jason Morgan
March 10, 2021
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Standing Like a Stone Wall

The City Council of Lexington, Virginia has renamed the Stonewall Jackson Cemetery. The new name is Oak Grove Cemetery. The reasons stated were the usual ones. Jackson was a racist who fought for slavery. I hope the males on that council never have to do anything requiring manhood. Lexington Councilman Chuck Smith said the effect on tourism would likely be…
Paul H. Yarbrough
September 11, 2020
Review Posts

“You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me”

A review of Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (University of California Press, 2014) by Nadine Hubbs If I had been told a short while ago that I would soon read a book by the Professor of Women’s Studies and Music at the University of Michigan, I would not have believed it. Had I further been told that the author would…
Joshua Doggrell
September 8, 2020
Blog

The Kwanzaafication of America

Kwanzaa is an invented tradition. Billed as a kind of “black Christmas”—you can even buy Kwanzaa greeting cards at the store and mail them with Kwanzaa stamps—the odd holiday was created out of spite by a certain Ronald Everett in the 1960s in a fit of pique after the Watts Riots in Los Angeles. Kwanzaa begins the day after Christmas,…
Jason Morgan
September 7, 2020
Blog

What Lee Said About Monuments in 1869

A frequent argument against Confederate monuments is a “sound bite” of a quote from General Robert E. Lee in 1869 in some variation to “I think it wiser not to keep open the sores of war.”   The time of the event and the Monument Movement is significant.  Understanding this connection changes the meaning of the "sound bite" entirety.  Here's the…
Ernest Blevins
September 2, 2020
Blog

Of Apostates and Scapegoats

And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness: And the goat…
H.V. Traywick, Jr.
August 27, 2020
Blog

Idiotic Idioms

Identity Politics is changing our language in order to advance its agenda. One example is “people of color.” Hemingway would have convulsed at such a laborious construction. Does its nearly Global use today  suggest  that “people of whiteness” should also be adopted for consistency? While the simpler “colored people” technically has the same meaning, perhaps its potential racist connotation can…
Philip Leigh
August 21, 2020