Tag

Ludwell H. Johnson

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
Review Posts

Cracks in the Treasury of Virtue

A review of Division and Reunion: America, 1848-1877, by Ludwell H. Johnson, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1978. 301 pages; and The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolitionist Movement, by Otto Scott, New York: Times Books, 1979, 375 pages. It was Flannery O'Connor who remarked, in one of her short essays, that people will believe anything about the…
Clyde Wilson
May 29, 2018
Blog

Is the Confederacy Obsolete?

This article was originally published in Southern Partisan magazine in 1994. The past—what we believe happened and what we think it means—can be a very slippery customer. Even the recent past can be elusive. In the early 1950s, when I was a student at Johns Hopkins, C. Vann Woodward gave an amusing but provocative talk called "Can We Believe Our…
Ludwell H. Johnson
June 23, 2017
Blog

The Plundering Generation

This piece was originally published in Southern Partisan magazine in 1987-88. A few years ago I was shuffling through accumulated litter in my garage attic when I came across some clippings dating from the 1960s. Among them were several letters to Life magazine comment­ing on an article by Bruce Carton. One reads as follows: Bruce Carton's article is interesting and…
Ludwell H. Johnson
May 29, 2015
Blog

Lincoln and Equal Rights: The Authenticity of the Wadsworth Letter

This article was originally published in The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Feb., 1966), pp. 83-87. In the current national debate on the race problem, the authority of the Great Emancipator has been claimed by both sides. Some have represented Lincoln as an archsegregationist by quoting from the 1858 debates, in which he opposed political and social…
Ludwell H. Johnson
May 28, 2015
Review Posts

Ludwell Johnson: Master Southern Historian

  Life and Work Why Read Ludwell Johnson? Both Ludwell Johnson’s style of work and choice of subject matter strongly recommend him to our consideration. As a working historian he is calm and measured, with just the degree of detachment that historical work ideally requires. As he puts it, “trying to identify cause and effect is, to me, the very…
Joseph R. Stromberg
May 26, 2015
Blog

PBS’s “The Civil War”: The Mythmanagement of History

This piece was originally printed by Southern Partisan magazine in 1990. In the September issue of the American Historical Association's newsletter, a rave review predicted that the PBS production "The Civil War" might become "the Gone With the Wind of documen­taries." After watching almost all of it, I would suggest Uncle Tom's Cabin as its fictional alter ego. But let…
Ludwell H. Johnson
May 25, 2015