Tag

Southern Tradition

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Same Old, Same Old

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

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

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

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

Originally published at Mises.org. The court historians, who insist that they have the only “correct” view of history, like to claim that theirs is the only true version of history because it is based on primary sources. But they fail to distinguish between what the primary sources state, and their own interpretation of the significance to be attached to those…
Wanjiru Njoya
December 9, 2025
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Weaver’s Lessons for the Modern Right

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

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

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

Appalachia was dying. It had been the most self-sufficient region of the country in 1840, but the eighty years that followed saw the culture of Appalachia come under a series of unrelenting attacks. The first blow came during the Civil War. Far from the homogenous block of Union sympathizers that liberal academics have made the region out to be since…
Benjamin Grist
November 21, 2025
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Time Will Tell

Time Will Tell: Collected Poems of David Middleton (2025) The publication of David Middleton’s collected verse, from 1973 to the present year, in 362 pages, is a hallmark event in Southern culture.  It is also a significant event in American literature. But you will not see much attention to either of these facts. The great literary journals founded by great…
Clyde Wilson
November 13, 2025
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Thomas Jefferson Visits the Natural Bridge

(A story told, for no good reason, wholly in the present tense.) On August 18, 1767, Thomas Jefferson makes his way to the Natural Bridge. The trip is arduous, for the route is arduous and anfractuous. He stays first at Steele’s Tavern and then at PaAxton’s Tavern in Glasgow, where Paxton and his sons likely take Jefferson to find the…
M. Andrew Holowchak
November 7, 2025
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A Short History of the South, Part 3

Originally published at Reckonin.com The War for Southern Independence, 1861-1865  Americans generally miss the point in considering the great war of 1861-1865. The simple fact is that it was an unprovoked war of invasion, conquest, and exploitation of some Americans by a minority party in control of the federal machine. The invasion does not fit any of the requirements of…
Clyde Wilson
November 6, 2025
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The Expansion of Slavery or States’ Rights?

In my various interactions with promoters of the winners’ version of the Civil War, I often hear that the South and the Confederacy desired to expand slavery into the western territories, to reignite the slave trade, and generally to create a republic built upon slave labor; and that they left the Union to protect slavery and its extension into the…
Jeb Smith
November 3, 2025
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How John Taylor of Caroline Unmasked the Tyranny of Special Privileges

This piece was originally published at fee.org Taylor’s arguments are as relevant today as they were in the 1820s. John Taylor (1753–1824) of Caroline County, Virginia, is not often remembered as a key figure in the early American Republic, but for champions of liberty, perhaps he ought to be. While Taylor’s life included stints as a lawyer, Revolutionary War officer,…
Justin Madura
October 30, 2025
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Northern Noticing

The vindictive attacks on the South and her history are nothing new. For generations, Southerners have been chastised and ostracized by mainstream politics, media, and academia. For just as long, many Northerners have been convinced of Yankee lies and propaganda concerning the War for Southern Independence, its causes, and “Proposition Nation-Righteous Cause” puffery. This extended itself into all subsequent history…
Cole Branham
October 28, 2025
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Ain’t That America?

Just when it looked like things might be taking a more positive turn for Dixie with the restoration of the Reconciliation Monument in Arlington Cemetery, along come other events to remind us that hatred of the South has not waned much at all. Woke Leftist artists have created vile ‘re-imaginings’ out of once beautiful artwork honoring Southern heroes, mostly because…
Walt Garlington
October 24, 2025
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A Short History of the South, Part 2

Originally published at Reckonin.com We can only paint in very broad strokes a period that was marked by a vast expansion of the South and the U.S. in territory, population, economy, and culture. The Era of Expansion is an apt name. A major aspect of this period is the westward movement. New States admitted to the Union: 1790s: TN and…
Clyde Wilson
October 21, 2025
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Building Upon a Southern Ethnos Through True Faith

Delivered at the 3rd annual conference of the The Philip Ludwell III Orthodox Fellowship. The theme of our gathering today seems a hefty one, so I’m gonna take a stab at connecting the dots between some of those points and my particular focus, while always keeping in mind the Fellowship’s guiding mission as described by co-founder Clark Carlton: “to facilitate…
Dissident Mama
October 20, 2025
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The Humble Optimism of Robert E. Lee

There is much that has been and still can be said of General Lee’s character. It is probably to the benefit of all modern readers that we explore and attempt to understand Lee, as our own era has more frequently been concerned with deconstructing the past rather than holding up honorable men to emulate and admire. Following a brief perusal…
Justin Madura
October 17, 2025
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A Short History of the South, Part 1

Originally published at Reckonin.com Introduction There is a vast and often contradictory literature describing and explaining the South. Various theories have been put forth to describe Southern distinctiveness. We might note that the greater part of this literature is written by outsiders who have found the South to be a problem—either the South was evil or it had by some…
Clyde Wilson
October 16, 2025
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A Tribute to Robert E. Lee

On this day (Oct. 12) marks the anniversary of the death of General Robert E. Lee CSA, Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. He graduated from West Point without a single demerit. He fought with high distinction & courage in The Mexican-American War. He served his nation as West Point Superintendent. Many of his cadets would go on to…
Alphonse-Louis Vinh
October 14, 2025
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Black Slaveholders: O, the Irony

A review of Larry A. McCluney, Jr., Paradox of Freedom: A History of Black Slaveholders in America (Scuppernong Press, 2025) While working several years ago, a Black friend informed me that she was taking her family to a reunion at a plantation in the Cane River area of Northwest Louisiana.  As a longtime resident of north Louisiana, I understood something…
Walter D. (Donnie) Kennedy
October 13, 2025
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Thomas and Randolph

Unsurprising it would be to find that many persons, decently familiar with Thomas Jefferson (and that includes Early American historians), were unaware that he had a brother. Biographers sometimes passingly mention Randolph early in a Jeffersonian biography inasmuch as Thomas, as the older brother, was saddled with the task of choosing between a tract of land on the Rivanna River…
M. Andrew Holowchak
October 10, 2025
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“Half the Truth is often a great Lie.”

Originally published at Reckonin.com After reading Clyde Wilson’s latest articles, “Hitler’s New Fans” and “The South and the ‘Alt-Right’” (and the comments), I must ride towards the sound of the guns! As a revisionist and as a “paleo-libertarian,” my view of the “Alt-Right” was that despite its vices it was a vital and youthful revolt against a “Gerontocratic Obsolete Party”/“Stupid…
James Rutledge Roesch
October 3, 2025
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Sam Francis and the Revolution from the Middle

Sam Francis is virtually unknown in American conservatism today. That wasn't always the case. Joseph Scotchie discusses his new book, Samuel T. Francis and the Revolution from the Middle. Get the book: https://a.co/d/0BVmube https://youtu.be/knU6B9M8KnU?si=6tuYs9yCUC6cFEfS    
Abbeville Institute
October 2, 2025
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The Sorrow Singer

In the South, a funeral isn’t just a formality. It’s a moment when music becomes memory, and memory becomes something you can hum for the rest of your life. —Tom Daniel My memory puts on a coat of gray, A keening tweed that moans just like a choir, A dirge-like gabardine that knows the way Of tears, a worsted wool,…
Maura H. Harrison
October 1, 2025
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The Southern Conservative View of Equality

Originally published at Mises.org. “You just can’t attack Lincoln and get away with it—you just can’t.” Hearing these words, spoken in front of a portrait of Lincoln at the Rockford Institute in 1989, is my first memory of Mel Bradford. That remark, delivered in an accent characteristic of the Texas-Oklahoma border that was his home country, reflected the wounds of…
Wanjiru Njoya
September 30, 2025
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Virginia First–A Review

Editor's Note: This review was originally published at the Independent Institute. We would like to thank Dr. Coclanis for his thorough and critical review of Virginia First: The 1607 Project The overhyped and tendentiously argued “1619 Project” (hereinafter 1619) was rolled out in vainglorious fashion by The New York Times in August 2019 (nytimes.com). Since the release of the first…
Peter A. Coclanis
September 24, 2025
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South Carolina was Not an Oligarchy

In the heated political rhetoric of the mid-19th century, Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA) famously lambasted South Carolina's government in his 1856 speech "The Crime Against Kansas," portraying it as an oligarchy where political power was confined to an elite few, specifically requiring legislators to own "a settled freehold estate and ten negroes." This claim, however, was a deliberate distortion of…
Abbeville Institute
September 22, 2025
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Calhoun, Reagan, and States’ Rights

Not long ago, California governor Gavin Newsom condemned President Trump's nationalization of California's National Guard units, characterizing it as an attempt “to usurp state authority and resources.”  Newsom went on to accuse Trump of “inflaming fear in the community, inciting fear and violence, and endangering state sovereignty.”  While nationalist-leaning conservatives are quick to compare the governor to Jefferson Davis, the…
Jerry Salyer
September 17, 2025
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Why Did Jefferson Write the Notes on the State of Virginia?

Thomas Jefferson in his 1821 never-finished autobiography, writes of the motivation for and the history behind his only book Notes on Virginia: Before I had left America, that is to say in the year 1781. I had received a letter from M. de Marbois, of the French legation in Philadelphia, informing me he had been instructed by his government to…
M. Andrew Holowchak
September 16, 2025
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Reply to MAGA: MAHAHAHA!

For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?  Mark 8:36 On July 23, 2023 Donald Trump addressed the AI (Artificial Intelligence) Summit in Washington, D.C., delivering his AI action plan including these words (here starting about 21:35): We also have to have a single federal standard not 50 different states…
Mike Goodloe
September 15, 2025
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The South and the “Alt-Right”

Originally posted at Reckonin.com My last post (Hitler’s New Fans) has received a fair amount of comment, mostly negative. Some have questioned why I addressed the subject? Because I thought someone needed to take notice of an unfortunate trend. I have no quarrel with the Alternative Right as long as it is attacking the evil Yankee Empire. But to bring…
Clyde Wilson
September 11, 2025
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The Drawl and the Song

At a recent Abbeville Conference, I tackled a subject that’s been hiding in plain sight all along - the Southern accent. I’ve lived in Alabama almost my whole life, so I’m definitely familiar with the Southern accent. Now it’s true that my wife and I lived in Iowa for three years, but we actually kind of liked it up there.…
Tom Daniel
September 3, 2025
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Real American Conservatism

For the past week, Dinesh D’Souza has engaged in an ongoing debate on social media concerning the meaning of American conservatism and the influence of the South in American history. D’Souza—like Victor Davis Hanson, Harry Jaffa, Larry Arnn, Allen Guelzo, and a host of other mainstream conservatives—argue that while Robert E. Lee has admirable traits, the South cannot be integrated…
Brion McClanahan
September 2, 2025
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Notable Trees in Alabama

This piece was originally published in 1931 in the Montgomery Advertiser. God willed that even trees should have an individuality. In the world's history, there is the "Charter Oak" and there was the “Washington Elm,” and in Athens, Ga., a tree has a deed to its own plot of ground. Most of us have heard of the “Cedars of Lebanon,”…
Peter A. Brannon
August 29, 2025
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State Sovereignty?

The United States of America, bases its legal argument of national union, and national sovereignty over the individual states; on the  premise that the individual states were never individually sovereign nations unto themselves, and that they united to form a sovereign nation or federal state. However,  investigation reveals that the individual states were indeed founded as (thirteen) fully separate sovereign nations,…
Brian McCandliss
August 25, 2025
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Would States’ Rights Solve our Issues?

I have been a big advocate for decentralized power, which in our American context has been connected to “states' rights;” the most prominent period and example being the American Civil War, where the Southern states resisted centralized federal control and both fought for and applied to their Constitution a strong decentralized states' rights policy. A decentralized Union where sovereignty lay…
Jeb Smith
August 22, 2025
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The Genius of Thomas Jefferson

The question “Was Thomas Jefferson a genius?” might seem awkward to anyone who has spent any time studying Jefferson, for it admits an obvious answer: He was. I have consistently maintained that he was one of the most gifted thinkers of his day—“gifted” because of his Edison-like penchant for and persistency at hard study and hard work. He had an…
M. Andrew Holowchak
August 15, 2025
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The Sabbath and Slavery

No topic of importance in the Old South may be handled rightly without dealing with the Peculiar Institution, slavery. The holy Sabbath was no exception. Embedded in the Ten Commandments, the fourth commandment (according to Protestant enumeration) – to remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy – called for a weekly day of public worship and rest from secular…
Forrest L. Marion
August 6, 2025
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Legends of Southern Radio

Imagine a world where radio wasn’t just background noise, but was a powerful force across an entire region of the country. I want to look into the dusty dials and glowing tubes of early Southern radio, and explore all about some of the stations that didn’t just play music, but changed culture, identity, and race relations in the American South…
Tom Daniel
August 4, 2025
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The Kingfish

“Every man a king, but no one wears a crown.” With that slogan Huey Pierce Long Jr. promised to dynamite America’s caste system and pave the rubble with schools, hospitals, and paved highways. To his enemies he was a bayou Mussolini; to his followers he was the first man in living memory who kept the lights on in forgotten parishes. Strip…
John Slaughter
August 1, 2025
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Are you a Confederate but Don’t Know It?

Most of the political problems in this country won’t be settled until more folks realize the South was right. I know that goes against the P.C. edicts, but the fact is that on the subject of the constitutional republic, the Confederate leaders were right and the Northern Republicans were wrong. Many people today even argue the Confederate positions without realizing…
Charley Reese
July 31, 2025
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Havin’ A Large Time

Reporter Bill King discusses his decade of work covering the Southern music scene from 1976-1986. We're havin' a large time. You can pick up his book, Large Time: On the Southern Music Beat, 1976-1986, and enjoy more detailed stories. https://youtu.be/cxMqZTfhqSM The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily the views of the Abbeville Institute.
Abbeville Institute
July 30, 2025
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Music and the Soul

Originally published at Reckonin.com Most of the music we hear in modern life is of the pre-recorded sort, mass produced by corporations. One might argue that the large-scale production and distribution of music has some upsides - we can experience a wider variety of musical styles, and the work of the most talented artists can be appreciated by everyone regardless…
Anne Wilson Smith
July 29, 2025
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Understanding the Doctrine of State’s Rights

Originally published at Mises.org One hundred sixty years after the war for Southern independence, great confusion is still caused by the claim that the South fought for their independence and for “states’ rights.” What does the doctrine of “states’ rights” mean in this context? The dictionary definition is easily understood: “the rights and powers held by individual US states rather…
Wanjiru Njoya
July 24, 2025
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Southern Food and Family

You might be Southern if you think a salad means something held together by Cool Whip. In the South, we don’t just eat meals. We remember. We gather. We keep our people’s memories alive one bite at a time. As a big man that loves to eat, I’m concerned that we don’t talk nearly enough about Southern food. Every Abbeville…
Tom Daniel
July 23, 2025
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The Long Gray Line

“The long gray line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray (my emphasis), would rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic words: Duty, Honor, Country.” Douglas MacArthur. General Douglas MacArthur gave his final speech (amazingly extemporaneous) to the Corps of Cadets at West point…
Paul H. Yarbrough
July 21, 2025
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Flying Dixie’s Flag on the 4th of July

It is unsurprising to see the United States flag flying on the 4th of July.  It is the day of the colonies’/States’ separation from Great Britain, and the beginning of their existence as countries on an equal footing with the others of the world. And yet something is missing.  The Southern cultural element that should be present in Louisiana and…
Walt Garlington
July 15, 2025
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Music and Mourning: Funeral Traditions of the South

Southern funerals. There’s nothing like them anywhere in the world. They are a unique blend of faith, reverence, tradition, and music, and Southern funerals and burials have been tremendously shaped by song. Whether it’s the keening moan of a gospel choir, the slow march of a brass band, or a lone fiddle crying out over a pine box, music has…
Tom Daniel
July 14, 2025
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The “Egghead” Got it Right

The Democratic Party nominated Adlai Stevenson for President of the United States twice, once in 1952 and again in 1956. He is often described as a sacrificial lamb, cannon fodder for Dwight Eisenhower in a contest of David and Goliath, except in this case, Goliath won. Stevenson never fared well with the press and could not capture the popular imagination…
Brion McClanahan
July 10, 2025
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Oswald Spengler and the Confederacy

The Southern land bled a rhythm no industrial algorithm can measure, its tempo measured through cotton fields and porch sermons, chivalry rising from the soil like heat. Spengler didn’t merely observe. It was divination, reading omens in the shadow of collapsing empires. The Confederacy became for him a form, sculpted not from policy or party but from blood memory and…
Constantin von Hoffmeister
July 8, 2025
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What are We Celebrating on July 4?

On July 4, Americans will have a day of celebration with cookouts, parades, and fireworks.  Yet how many really understand just what we are celebrating?  Why is there a Pride Month but not an American Patriotism Month? What was actually the purpose of the Declaration of Independence?  What specifically did it state?  Why do our unalienable freedoms that were enshrined…
Carole Hornsby Haynes
July 4, 2025
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Gettysburg

One personal annual tradition I have is to watch the classic war film Gettysburg.  I have been a Civil War buff for longer than I can remember, so long that I don’t remember when my interest started.  One of the first books I remember reading was Mary Williamson’s Confederate Trilogy for Young Readers, published by the (sadly) now defunct Sprinkle…
Samuel Ashwood
July 2, 2025
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The Disappearing South

There is a peculiar stillness in the late afternoon air of the South, a pause that speaks not only to the settling heat but to a deeper, more troubling quiet. It is the silence of a culture slowly slipping beyond reach, not through violence or sudden upheaval, but rather by the gentle erosion wrought by time, change, and migration. As…
Gabriel Ward
July 1, 2025
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Immigration and State Sovereignty

On a recent episode of The War Room (here) with Stephen K. Bannon the following exchange between Bannon and Mike Davis of the Article III Project took place.  Davis is a constitutional lawyer and a very active and successful supporter of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, as is Bannon.  The segment reference runs from 16:25 to 17:50 (transcript taken…
Mike Goodloe
June 30, 2025
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Where are Your People Buried?

“Where y’all from” once meant “where are your people buried?” Buried, in turn, implies place, a postage-stamp of sod or swamp or forest, a landscape secured by name, by generations, by labor and blood and memory. That, as we know, is unacceptable for a polity predicated the free flow of capital and labor. “Local attachment,” much less “familial,” interferes with…
Enoch Cade
June 27, 2025
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Reconciliation in Frontier Film

Several weeks ago, I read The Cavalry Trilogy by Michael F. Blake. This short book covers the history of three John Ford Westerns, each starring John Wayne as a cavalry officer in the 1870s and 1880s. All three Westerns, Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950) feature beautiful shots of the southwestern desert, cavalry…
Vaugh Sullivan
June 24, 2025
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George Wallace Reconsidered

This piece was originally published at The Old South Repository. “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Those six words, burned into every high-school textbook, reduce George C. Wallace to a cartoon villain. They hide the inconvenient reality that the same man paved Alabama’s roads, built her community colleges, raised teacher salaries, and, in the twilight of his career, asked forgiveness…
John Slaughter
June 23, 2025
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“I Cannot Live Without Books”

“I cannot live without books,” Jefferson confides in a letter to John Adams (10 June 1815). The statement today is well-known and readily available on coffee mugs, book bags, and tee-shirts, for anyone willing to pay an inflated price. What is seldom recognized is that the statement is part of a larger sentence, which continues concessively, “but fewer will suffice…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 20, 2025
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Immigration and the States

As with most departures from prescribed constitutional procedure the immigration process has over the years resulted in disaster after disaster.  The current flare-up in this area is no exception.  Several states which have long claimed to be “sanctuaries” for undocumented persons residing within the boundaries of the United States have indicated that they will not cooperate with the Trump administrations’s…
Mike Goodloe
June 19, 2025
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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
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The Republican War Machine Never Dies

The escalating conflict between Israel and Iran has Americans debating the future of a "conservative" American foreign policy. President Trump campaigned on a promise to keep the United States out of World War III while creating a solution to international problems in Ukraine and the Middle East. He blustered that Europe should be forced to pay for the upkeep of…
Brion McClanahan
June 17, 2025
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Government, of the People…That’s a Riot!

The unrest and riots in California have been underwritten by the clods of political planning such as California’s own governor, the useless idiot Gavin Newsom, who blows hard with demands that Donald Trump arrest him. Newsom, of course, wants confrontation for political gains from the glory hallelujah Democratic party. Arm in arm with the girly-screamer Mayor Karen Bass they could…
Paul H. Yarbrough
June 16, 2025
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Secession: The Inalienable Right of a Free People to Leave a Tyrannical Union

In the immortal words of the Declaration of Independence, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” When that consent is withdrawn—when the government becomes the destroyer, rather than the protector, of life, liberty, and property—then the people retain the right, indeed the duty, to dissolve the political bands which have connected them…
Joe Wolverton
June 13, 2025
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James Kibler and Southern Literature

James E. Kibler, Beyond the Stone: Poems of Tribute and Remembrance. Shotwell Publishing, 2025. The publication of James Kibler’s second book of verse is more than just another book. It is an event in Southern culture, a hallmark in Kibler’s career as a consummate man of letters. A consummate man of letters describes a writer who does outstanding work in…
Clyde Wilson
June 11, 2025
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A Woman Rice Planter’s Story of Love and Faith

Elizabeth Allston Pringle was one of the most famous Southern authors of the early twentieth century, best known for her books A Woman Rice Planter, published in 1913, and Chronicles of Chicora Wood, published posthumously in 1922. Born in 1845, she was the daughter of Robert F. W. Allston, a gentleman rice planter of Georgetown District, South Carolina. In 1870…
Karen Stokes
June 10, 2025
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The World the Slaveholders Made

A Review of Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made (Vintage Books, 1971). European history is replete with examples of anti-capitalist sentiment on the political right. Nineteenth-century opponents of the market economy and bourgeois mores in Great Britain and on the Continent squarely blamed the decline of tradition, community, and natural hierarchy on the Industrial Revolution. The reduction of…
Grant Havers
June 6, 2025
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A Southern Solution to the Plastic Waste Problem

I. Problems Caused by Plastics Increasing Rapidly Plastic has brought beneficial improvements to many areas of life, from health care to household appliances.  However, the negative effects of its ubiquitousness around the world are also making themselves known. The amount of plastic produced each year has grown from 20 million tons (Mt) in 1966 to 460 Mt in 2019.  This…
Walt Garlington
June 4, 2025
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Hubris

Serious studies of the causes of both the American Revolution and the later “Civil War” (sic) must produce the conclusion among scholars that one cannot truly understand the second “civil war” that took place in the middle of the 19th Century without an in-depth understanding of the causes of the first civil war that took place at the end of…
Valerie Protopapas
May 29, 2025
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The Destruction of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation

In 1985, Daniel Jordan—a Ph.D. in history from University of Virginia—became president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and runs Monticello. He would preside over Monticello for the next 24 years, during which time Thomas Jefferson’s life and legacy would be radically transformed through information made readily available by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Under his guidance, TJF created a…
M. Andrew Holowchak
May 27, 2025
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Nottoway

The South lost another cultural jewel. On May 15, Nottoway, the largest antebellum plantation home in the South, burned to the ground. The fire reportedly started in one of the second story bedrooms, but the cause of the blaze is still under investigation. And while it appears to be an accidental electrical fire, in our current political climate, arson can…
Brion McClanahan
May 22, 2025
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M.E. Bradford: In Memoriam

Originally published in the Fourth Quarter 1992 edition of Southern Partisan. I’m always amazed at how wisely good people face death, how perfectly they focus their attention at the end. 1 got a call from Mel Bradford the night before he was to undergo open-heart surgery; and we talked for a few minutes about the huge number of these operations…
Thomas Landess
May 16, 2025
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Reconstructed But Unregenerate

From I'll Take My Stand (1930) It is out of fashion in these days to look backward rather than forward. 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. He is punished as his crime deserves. He feels himself in…
John Crowe Ransom
May 15, 2025
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On the Settling of North Louisiana: The Yeoman Farmers

Section iv of The Dwelling Place I have not changed any of my views on Agrarianism since the appearance of I’ll Take My Stand . . . . I never thought of Agrarianism as a restoration of anything in the Old South; I saw it as something to be created, as I think it will be in the long run…
David Middleton
May 13, 2025
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Springtime of Renewal in Serbia, but What of Dixie?

The European Christian country of Serbia may be considered something of a sister of Dixie’s.  Both peoples have followed similar paths:  After attaining a solid Christian identity and unity, both faced an horrible cataclysm:  The Serbs were conquered by the Muslim Turks in the 14th century and remained their vassals until the 19th century; the South was subjugated to the…
Walt Garlington
May 9, 2025
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What the Confederate Constitution Got Right

In today’s hypersensitive society, saying anything nice about the South, and especially the Confederacy, could very well be a death sentence in many job fields, not to mention academia. The clowns of “cancel culture” will be out in force. This should come as a shock to no one, for the South has always had to defend itself, first in the…
Ryan Walters
May 7, 2025
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Building Conservatism

"I have never subscribed to the idea, apparently held by some, that conservatism is only a brake on somebody else's engine. Such persons seem to think that a conservative has done his job when he has issued a warning against going too fast." -- Richard Weaver, In Defense of Tradition (The Prospects of Conservatism). Recently I’ve began to read a…
Rev. Benjamin Glaser
May 6, 2025
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I Wish I Was in the Land of Cotton…

Recently someone posted on Facebook that they had recently purchased a DVD copy of the 1948 picture-show (“picture show” being Southern for the Yankee appellation “movie”) Song of the South. SS being the award-winning partial animation of tales written in the 19th Century by Joel Chandlor Harris about animal characters and their personification of Southerners. Probably Southerners from Georgia, since…
Paul H. Yarbrough
May 5, 2025
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The Sede Vacante of Southern Tradition

Pope Francis was, at most, a peripheral figure in the story of the South.  Though the leader of the world’s largest Christian denomination, his influence has largely remained on the Catholic fringes of our cultural sphere – Texas, Cajun country, Florida, Maryland, Savannah, and in pockets of many of our larger cities.  I primarily heard about Pope Francis and his…
J. Shaw Gillis
May 1, 2025
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Whiskey Men

Originally published at In The Shadow of Red Rock As the New Year 1930 dawned across the hills, it seemed prohibition had made little difference to the tough and resilient mountaineers of my home. The cat and mouse game of whiskey men and revenuers seemed to be less-covered by the papers as of late, but it undoubtedly was still being…
Travis Holt
April 24, 2025
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Calhoun’s Lesson for Europe

The Union, next to our liberty, most dear. May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the States and by distributing equally the benefits and burdens of the Union – John C. Calhoun In A Disquisition on Government John C. Calhoun sought support for his political concepts among European solutions that had developed…
Karol Mazur
April 22, 2025
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American Refugees

A Review American Refugees: The Untold Story of the Mass Migration from Blue States to Red States (Encounter Books, 2023) by Roger L. Simon Your eyes do not deceive you: the South is growing in population. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, since 2020 domestic migration trends have led to five of the top seven destination states being in the…
Thomas Ellen
April 21, 2025
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For God, King, and People

A Review of For God, King, and People: Forging Commonwealth Bonds in Renaissance Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) by Alexander Haskell Intellectual history is the most difficult history to write. Too often it is written in a pedestrian manner resembling a genealogy from the Book of Genesis where this thinker begat that thinker and so on. Meanwhile, the followers…
John Devanny
April 17, 2025
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Jefferson on the Possibility of White Slaves and Black Masters

Sholars today typically refer to Query XIV of his Notes on the State of Virginia as evidence of Jefferson’s racism. Jefferson states that Blacks were likely inferior in imagination, beauty, and intelligence, and more bestial and hasty in romance, but added that such sentiments must be taken cum grano salis—at least, until such time as they can be made objects…
M. Andrew Holowchak
April 10, 2025
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The Cultural Cleansing of VMI

Author's Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this piece are strictly my own. I do not presume in any fashion to speak for the Abbeville Institute or VMI. I severed all of my connections with VMI (except for the Class of 1967) when she removed "Stonewall" Jackson’s statue from the parade ground. Just before unleashing his thunderbolt on Hooker’s flank at…
H.V. Traywick, Jr.
April 9, 2025
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Sinners in the Hands of “Southern Studies”

Started out with the intention of a quick post on X about this book I’m reading, but my blood pressure kept rising and I kept writing and here we are. The book: Wilson, Charles Reagan. The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South. University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Mr. Wilson comes off as…
Chase Steely
March 25, 2025
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Green Men and Green Churches

A modern prophet from England, Paul Kingsnorth, has made the comment in a number of his essays that he appreciates how the ancient churches in England look as if they grew out of the soil itself rather than were constructed by human hands.  If one looks into Southern life, he will find that our churches share a strong resemblance to…
Walt Garlington
March 24, 2025
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Conservatism’s Womb

Almost four years ago I wrote an article regarding Tucker Carlson. The article was posted in “The Abbeville Institute” and described his attitude, as he had stated, regarding the South and its history with the Confederate States of America. My opinion was that Carlson (and I still have this opinion) is an intelligent conservative but misguided regarding the South’s Cause.…
Paul H. Yarbrough
March 20, 2025
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A Confederate Apology

A longer version of this essay was published at Rev. Beane's substack. I’ve made no secret about my views on a controversial period of American history: when thirteen states seceded from the American Union, formed a confederation, adopted a constitution, were invaded, were conquered, and were forced back into the Union - a Union transformed by the experience into a…
Rev. Larry Beane
March 19, 2025
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The Future Calhoun

Today is John C. Calhoun's 243 birthday. Several years ago, I took some time to visit John C. Calhoun's grave in Charleston, SC., a massive stone monument at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church erected in the 1880s to honor the State's greatest son. Calhoun's body had been exhumed three times, once from Washington D.C. after he died in 1850 so it…
Brion McClanahan
March 18, 2025
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Red Pill Without Roots

This piece was originally published at The American Reformer. The Crisis of the Modern Right The greatest internal threat to genuine conservatism stems from modern ideological impulses that seek to reduce all human activity to simple precepts meant to explain the entirety of human existence. Today, this primarily takes the form of a neutralist liberalism masquerading as conservatism. In the…
Jonathan Harris
March 14, 2025
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What is Living and What is Dead in the Southern Tradition?

Dr. Don Livingston presents "What is Living and What is Dead in the Southern Tradition" at the 2025 Abbeville Institute Conference, "The New South and Future South", February 20-23, 2025. Purchase all of the lectures for this conference at: https://abbevilleacademy.org/p/thenewsouthandfuturesouth https://youtu.be/OkLKWU9f6tY
Donald Livingston
March 12, 2025
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Porches

The Village of Saline, Bienville Parish, North Louisiana At My Late Maternal Grandparents’ House The sand and gravel road, smooth asphalt now, Passes beside the church and sunken stones Of kin both dead and living yet awhile In memories of one who left and stayed. I slow down for those fields recalled and seen— The cultivated, fallow, undisturbed— Shift my…
David Middleton
March 6, 2025
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The South During Reconstruction

From the Author's Preface of E. Merton Coulter, The South During Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (1947). AMERICANS have generally called the fifteen years following the Civil War the Reconstruction period, and writers in this field until recently have let the reconstructing processes crowd out of their narratives everyday developments in the lives of the people. This custom has been especially true of…
E. Merton Coulter
March 4, 2025
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Livin’ in the DMV

Colin Woodward, author of American Nations, identified eleven regional and rival cultures overlapping state boundaries that shapes American culture and politics. The work is insightful, bringing to mind the European observation that America is a continent, not a country. Woodward’s work has its limitations. One of these limitations is how to deal with the Megalopolis known as the District of…
John Devanny
February 26, 2025
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The Southern Cadence

We all have an idea that when we hear Southern Music, we know it, but what is it? What is it about Southern music that makes it stand out from other types of American music or music from around the world? How do you know it when you hear it? How do you explain to somebody the difference between the…
Tom Daniel
February 25, 2025
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We Are All Saint Oncho Now

Since the end of the War, with the Yankees in the ascendancy, the dominant ideas in the union have been mainly change, innovation, progress, and their near-of-kin.  Sultan Donald the Magnificent re-confirmed this in his Inaugural Address in January: ‘And, right now, our nation is more ambitious than any other. There’s no nation like our nation. Americans are explorers, builders,…
Walt Garlington
February 19, 2025
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Power Shift

A Review of Kirkpatrick Sale, Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment (Random House, 1976) Editor’s note: Many Abbeville readers and supporters are familiar with Kirk Sale, a well-known advocate of decentralization and secessionism, and certainly a friend of the South. In asking him to review a book he penned in 1976,…
Kirkpatrick Sale
February 10, 2025
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Did Jefferson Really Hate Washington?

Editor's Note: Professor Holowchak has published a SIGNED leather bound edition of his book, Framing a Legend: Exposing the Distorted History of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. You can take 10% the retail price at checkout by using the code JEFFERSON. Scholars commonly talk of the enmity between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, as they commonly do of the enmity…
M. Andrew Holowchak
February 5, 2025
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The South in the American War for Independence

You probably learned in school that America began when the “Pilgrim Fathers” landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, and really took off when the Puritans founded Boston. Never mind that these events happened some decades after the founding of Virginia. You probably also learned that the American Revolution story centers around Paul Revere and the battle of Bunker Hill, although New England…
Clyde Wilson
February 4, 2025
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Go Away and Think

The first quarter of this century has been marred by cancel culture, a consequence of an ideology pursued by reformers who call themselves “progressives,” believing themselves morally superior to others.  By this ideology, each person in the world is categorized into oppressive or victim groups, largely based upon race, without regard to individuality.  It is a staggeringly ignorant way to…
Charles Roberts, MD
January 29, 2025
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“I Will Make Known My Lineage to All of You”

Remember the speeches we bravely shared At the meadhall tables – we boasted from the benches That we would be heroes, hard-fighting in battle. Now we'll see who's worthy of his vow, Who'll back up his boast in the rush of battle. I will make known my lineage to all of you: I come from a mighty family of Mercians;…
Enoch Cade
January 27, 2025
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Jefferson’s “Religion”

In one of my recent videos, a viewer from Abbeville asked whether Thomas Jefferson was a deist or a theist. This essay answers that question. There has been and continues to be overwhelming confusion apropos of Jefferson’s religiosity. That is, in large part, due to Jefferson, whose behavior invites contradictory assessments of it. He attended worship and participated in prayers…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 24, 2025
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The Two Funerals of Jimmy Carter

This past week, I, along with the rest of the nation, watched the funeral service for President Jimmy Carter and followed along as his remains were transported around the country for his final goodbyes and honors.  I was born well after Carter’s Presidency, so I never grew up with any baggage regarding his Presidency nor Governorship.  I knew him at…
J. Shaw Gillis
January 22, 2025
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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
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Lee the American

It is now fourteen years since the publication of “Lee the American,” but the interest in at any rate the subject of the book seems by no means to have diminished. The colossal struggle of the European War, with all the passions and sacrifices involved in it, has made the American Civil War in general seem not perhaps less important,…
Gamaliel Bradford
January 20, 2025
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Is MAGA in the Southern Tradition?

In a previous article I compared the 2024 election to the Battle of Gettysburg and said that I was cautiously optimistic that developments after the election would result in a rearrangement of American institutions (governmental and otherwise) so that they would more closely resemble those of the constitutional republic envisioned by the Founders.  If this occurs it will be a…
Mike Goodloe
January 17, 2025
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The Land They Loved

A review of The Land They Loved, Vols. I and II (Shotwell Publishing, 2022, 2024). Clyde N. Wilson, known rightly as the dean of southern historians today—the most learned, the most honest—has a marked literary bent, which he has turned to the service of his homeland. Under the collective title The Land They Loved, he has assembled two volumes of…
Catharine Savage Brosman
January 15, 2025
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Bill Neal: A Culinary Genius of the South

It was in New Haven that I picked up a seminal Southern cookery book written by a young Southern chef working in Chapel Hill. His name was Bill Neal. On the dust jacket cover of the first edition that I bought, I see Bill Neal as a young happy man in his thirties. He is standing inside one of Chapel…
Alphonse-Louis Vinh
January 14, 2025
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The Bard of the South Carolina Low Country

Archibald Rutledge, a major South Carolina and national writer in the first half of the 20th century, seems to have dropped nearly out of sight.  His books are mostly available, when obtainable at all, in over-priced used remnants. Yet Rutledge was in his time  a celebrated and bestselling author of hunting and nature accounts, memoirs, and  a  poet of lasting…
Clyde Wilson
January 13, 2025
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Thomas Jefferson, Hugh Blair, and the Fine Art of Writing

As a writer of some accomplishment—over 70 published books and several hundred essays—my success in writing is due to my deep love of writing. Most of the scholars that I know have told me either that they find writing painful or at least unpleasant. That is not the case with me. There are times, and they are not infrequent despite…
M. Andrew Holowchak
January 8, 2025
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Frances Fisher Tiernan: North Carolina’s Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell is for many Americans, especially Georgians, a household name.  Her Civil War epic holds a prominent place in the modern American literary and film halls of fame, and quotes from her novel still come out of the mouths of many Americans.  In contrast, one would be hard-pressed to find a bookshelf in any home or public library that…
J. Shaw Gillis
January 7, 2025
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Crossing the River With My RC

When I was a young boy, circa six or seven, there were no monstrous interstate highways slashing across the land. The land was beautiful, or as I probably thought, at the time, natural. Interstate highways are about as natural as was Sherman’s march through Georgia. They are federal (Yankee) spending, creating great slashes through private property (eminent domain is Grendel;…
Paul H. Yarbrough
January 1, 2025
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The New South and Future South

What does the Southern tradition have to offer America in 2025? Richard Weaver wrote in his Southern Tradition at Bay that the Old South may not be a place where we would want to live, but it certainly could offer examples of how to live. That’s a pregnant statement. Southerners, more than Americans in other sections, held fast to tradition…
Brion McClanahan
December 31, 2024
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The Sword Was Their Passport

While working on an essay about LSU Press, I came across a title I wanted to buy for my library. I searched for months—nothing. I finally made a two-hour roundtrip to a university library that lends books to locals. That’s where I found Harris Gaylord Warren’s The Sword Was Their Passport. Published in 1943 by Louisiana State University Press, Warren’s…
Chase Steely
December 30, 2024
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A Christmas Day in Charlotte

"A merry Christmas and a happy New Year!" These be immortal words. They suggest happy firesides and blazing logs; the joy of little children; the repeated handshake; the ready offering of charity; the deepening of love; and a sweeter showing of spiritual life. As the words are written, the voice of the cow bell and the tin horn and the…
Charles Henry Smith
December 25, 2024
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Moravian Star

In an effort to be unique, a new ubiquity has consumed Christmas decorations across the nation – inflatable snowmen glow in every front yard, multicolored neon lights clash dramatically at property lines, and Santa’s feet stick upright out of chimneys.  In stark defiance to this trend, the city of Winston-Salem, with its demure Christmas decorations, features prominently in Southern Living…
J. Shaw Gillis
December 24, 2024
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Honorable and Brilliant Labors

A review of Honorable and Brilliant Labors, Orations of William Gilmore Simms (University of South Carolina Press, 2024), edited by John D. Miller Out of this 298 page book, 70% are Simms's orations with a small part of that the index, bibliography and an appendix that lists all of Simms's known orations. The 195 pages of Simms's work - his…
Gene Kizer, Jr.
December 20, 2024
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The Southern Gentleman Who Dominated Chess

As the secession crisis intensified in the last years of the 1850s, the most famous Southerner known on the European continent was likely not Maryland-born Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, nor Mississippi senator and future president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis, nor South Carolina poet and novelist William Gilmore Simms. Rather, that honor would almost certainly go to…
Casey Chalk
December 18, 2024
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The Last of the Romans

Philosophic in his temperament and wise in his conduct, governed in all his actions by reason and judgment, and deeply imbued with Bible images, this virtuous and patriotic man (whom Mr. Jefferson called "the last of the Romans") had long fixed the term of his political existence at the age which the Psalmist assigns for the limit of manly life:…
Thomas Hart Benton
December 17, 2024
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Democratic Principles

How sweet are the sounds from home. How soothing the consolations of a discerning wife. I was feeling bad and she knew it. My cogitations over the election news were by no means jubilant. Silent and sad, with the newspaper open on my knee, I had been looking dreamily at the flickering flames for about ten minutes while Mrs. Arp…
Charles Henry Smith
December 10, 2024
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The Simple Life

'Tis an old question, revived by a letter that wondered why anybody could be content to stay in Charlotte or smaller places when New York, Boston and other larger cities offer so much more broadening influences and so much greater facilities for ambition. The letter came from a man who has lived in New York only a year or so…
Isaac Erwin Avery
December 9, 2024
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Local Signs and Wonders

A review of Local Signs and Wonders: Essays about Belonging to a Place (Mercer University Press, 2024) by Richard Rankin. Richard Rankin’s ancestral homestead, founded in the 1760’s, is located about twenty miles west of Charlotte, North Carolina. This book is an exploration of what could be called the two dimensions of stewardship: local and cosmic. Stewardship in the local…
Caryl Johnston
December 6, 2024
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Country Music in the 20th Century

A review of Southern Story and Song: Country Music in the 20th Century (Shotwell, 2024) by Joseph R. Stromberg Readers who have enjoyed the articles posted here at Abbeville by Joseph R. Stromberg will be as excited as I was to learn he’d written a book about country music. This excellent book explores the rich cultural tapestry of Southern music,…
Tom Daniel
December 2, 2024
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Love Thanksgiving? Thank Virginia

When most Americans think of the “First Thanksgiving,” they think of the Pilgrims in Plymouth who sat down for a Harvest Festival meal with the Wampanoag Indians in 1621. The Pilgrims had arrived on the Mayflower in November of 1620 and nearly a year later celebrated the abundance of provisions that God had provided. The Thanksgiving tradition recalls to memory…
Sean McGowan
November 28, 2024
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The 2024 Election and the Southern Tradition: the Big Picture

The central issue of the 2024 election was the question, what is democracy?  The Democrats in particular claimed that they were the defenders of “democracy.”  They were sincere, although to their opponents this claim seemed the epitome of gaslighting.  Their view is that democracy is top-down, whereby elite institutions (e.g., universities, foundations, the science establishment, big business, the media, government…
Mike Goodloe
November 25, 2024
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Reinvigorating State Power in the US Senate

Donald Trump’s victory in the election for the federal presidency has provoked bold claims of a sweeping political realignment in the States: ‘The recent political landscape has been shaken to its core, revealing a seismic shift that has emerged as a result of the latest elections. The transformative power of the MAGA movement has taken center stage, with an unprecedented…
Walt Garlington
November 18, 2024
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Thomas Jefferson Speaks Loudly From His Grave

Thomas Jefferson did not share fully his religious views with anyone, though one can tease out them from various writings to intimate friends. As I have shown in The Surprisingly Simple Religious Views of Thomas Jefferson, his religion was naturalized and equivalent to the most basic ethical precepts: (1) Love and adore God and (2) love others. He was not…
M. Andrew Holowchak
October 30, 2024
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Jefferson on Liberty and Truth

The Enlightenment was an epoch of unbridled optimism—a break from centuries of often blind reliancy on authority, and the sources of authority were generally the Bible and the works of Aristotle. With the shift to understanding the universe through empirical investigation of it (Gr., empeiria = experience), reliancy on authority weakened. Science—in the sense of strict observation of the world,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
October 15, 2024
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Vision of Order

A review of Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1995), by Richard Weaver  Richard M. Weaver was one of the South’s finest thinkers. His Visions of Order was first published posthumously in 1964, and later republished in 1995. This edition has an excellent preface by Ted Smith III, who asks “how much relevance a…
Caryl Johnston
October 14, 2024
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More than Politics

What should we make of the exodus of millions of Americans from blue states to red ones, primarily in the South? In 2021, North American Van Lines reported that the Carolinas, Tennessee, Florida, Arizona, and Texas were the top destinations for movers, and the top five states for departures were Illinois, California, New Jersey, Michigan, and New York. Is this…
Casey Chalk
October 9, 2024
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I’ll Take My Stand

Thomas H. Landess walked among Giants. He wrote and talked about them too. It was April of 1968, and he had gathered a few at the University of Dallas for a reunion under the banner of the Southern Literary Festival. It was a reunion of the surviving Southern Agrarians—Andrew Lytle, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren—Lyle Lanier…
Chase Steely
October 7, 2024
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Country People and Country Party

A review of Continuities: The South in a Time of Revolution (Shotwell Publishing, 2022) by John Devanny Dr. John Devanny writes from within an outlook quite unknown to most of today’s Americans. His focus is on the South’s origins and history, its variety and complexity, and its differences from its historical antagonists headquartered in New England. As the preface by…
Joseph R. Stromberg
October 4, 2024
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The Battle of the Confederate Monuments

This essay was originally published at Mises.org. Various justifications have been advanced by those removing or destroying Confederate monuments to explain why they deem it necessary to dismantle the Confederate heritage. For example, the memorial to Zebulon Vance in Asheville, North Carolina was demolished on grounds that it was “a painful symbol of racism.” In the tumult surrounding the Black Lives Matter riots, “168…
Wanjiru Njoya
September 26, 2024
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Atlas of Antebellum Southern Agriculture

Sam Bowers Hilliard understood power—not the kind that flows from political office or great wealth, but the power of the land itself. Born in 1930, in a Georgia hamlet that bore his mother's maiden name, Hilliard grew to recognize how the soil, the crops, and the very food on Southern tables shaped the course of history. Hilliard joined the Department…
Chase Steely
September 24, 2024
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John Rutledge

John Rutledge was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in September, 1739. His father, Dr. John Rutledge, was a native of Ireland, who emigrated to South Carolina in 1735. He married Sarah Hext, a lady of liberal endowments and cultivation, who became the mother of the future jurist in the fifteenth year of her age. She was left a widow at…
William Horatio Barnes
September 18, 2024
BlogMedia Posts

The Old South and the New South

Brion McClanahan discusses the continuity between the Old South and the New South and the Jeffersonian understanding of the War for Southern Independence at the October 2015 Conference in Stone Mountain, GA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYzD2vhNE3c
Brion McClanahan
September 12, 2024
Blog

The War Against the South

Originally published at LewRockwell.com In the past few decades, the federal government has been engaged in a concerted effort to destroy the heritage of the South, and this effort has intensified under so-called “President” Joe Biden and his gang of neo-con controllers. We can be sure that if Kamala Harris takes office as his successor, these efforts will continue. After…
Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr.
September 4, 2024
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Robert E. Lee: The Marble [Christian] Man

Originally published at Truthscript.com On 7 August 2024, the Witherspoon Institute’s journal, Public Discourse, published an article by John F. Doherty entitled: “Propriety without Principle: The Cautionary Tale of Robert E. Lee.” Citing Allen C. Guelzo’s 2021 biography of Lee as his source of information, Doherty paints Robert E. Lee as an irreligious hypocrite of weak moral fiber whose virtues were apparent rather than…
Earl Starbuck
August 29, 2024
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Sally Cary, Fairfax Harrison, and F.F.V. Pedigrees

I grab my trusty pocket knife, make short work of the tape, and open the box. Inside is a book, but not one I ordered. It’s a gift, courtesy of my friend Percy Gryce, a bookman’s bookman. The Book Sally Cary: A Long Hidden Romance of Washington's Life by Wilson Miles Cary (1838-1914). Its format or size is common. Octavo…
Chase Steely
August 23, 2024
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Ghosts of Grandeur

Historic Southern antebellum homes are disappearing, and those that still remain are being reinterpreted by activist historians. Author Mike Kitchens joins us to talk about his book "Ghosts of Grandeur" and the current woke assault on Southern home museums and historic sites. https://youtu.be/7WE9RdCkFY8
Abbeville Institute
August 21, 2024
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Thomas Jefferson on Educating Republican Citizens

After publishing my book, Thomas Jefferson: Uncovering His Unique Philosophy and Vision (2014)—which had three chapters each on Jefferson’s political philosophy, his moral thinking, and his philosophy of education—I realized that I had far from exhausted what could be said on each of the subjects. Thus, I began the first of a trilogy of books on the philosophy of Thomas…
M. Andrew Holowchak
August 20, 2024
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Thoughts Among Ruins

This, Warren, is our trouble now: Not even fools could disavow Three centuries of piety Grown bare as a cottonwood tree (A timber seldom drawn and sawn And chiefly used to hang men on), So face with calm that heritage And earn contempt before the age. -Allen Tate It is on the hunt where the martial prowess is sharpened, where…
Thomas Ellen
August 19, 2024
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Pawleys Island

My maternal grandmother grew up on a South Carolina beach and has passed her love of the beach on to her grandchildren. Ever since I can remember, my family has spent a week on Pawleys Island in South Carolina. We would fly from Arizona to spend two or more months between our grandparents’ home in Virginia, Pawleys Island in South…
Vaugh Sullivan
August 14, 2024
Blog

A Hill and a Holler

Some memories are a story just waiting to be told.  And memories of family make some of the best stories.  Some of my favorite memories revolve around travel, those family outings where we hit the not so dusty trails of Dixie.  Actually, many modern highways were the byways, the pioneer trails of yesteryear.  Our travel often included extended family, with…
Brett Moffatt
August 8, 2024
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The Resistance of the South to Northern Radicalism

This piece was originally published in the New England Quarterly in 1935. In December 22, 1859, an extra train arrived at Richmond bringing over two hundred medical students from Philadelphia. It was the hegira of southern students from the North following the excitement of John Brown's raid. The faculty and students of the Richmond Medical College, the town council, and…
Clement Eaton
August 7, 2024
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How Liberal was Thomas Jefferson’s Liberalism?

Government, Thomas Jefferson all too frequently notes, is for the sake of the wellbeing of all citizens, each considered the political equal of all others and, in consequence, deserving of the same rights. Government, thus, exists for the sake of the wellbeing of all citizens, considered as individuals. Government, he often says, is of and for the people. That noted,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
July 24, 2024
Blog

The (Self)-Righteous Cause

It is common in Civil War circles to hear about the so-called “Lost Cause”, variously termed a myth or a narrative. Are those two terms synonymous? Let’s look. Dictionary.com defines myth as: “a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events.” On the other hand, using…
John Scales
July 19, 2024
Blog

A Northerner by Birth, A Southerner by Choice

When speaking at Abbeville’s “The 1607 Project,” someone from the audience came to me, after my talk—and the Abbeville audience was electric!—and said, “You really mean what you say.” It was a curious sentiment, for by implication, I could conclude that many speakers at that or other conferences merely go about the business of public speaking without investing personally in…
M. Andrew Holowchak
July 18, 2024
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“Providence” – Divine Intervention in the Life of George Washington

There is an old saying that rejects not only the concept of the “randomness” of history but of mankind’s involvement in that history. It identifies situations addressing external forces acting on human beings and in so doing influencing history itself. This maxim states that, “Man proposes but God disposes.” For there is overwhelming evidence of the existence of something other…
Valerie Protopapas
July 15, 2024
Blog

A Man of the South

With Father’s Day 2024 come and gone, I have had the opportunity to consider the coincidence that occurred that weekend – namely my watching two superb westerns from different decades, Anthony Mann’s Man of the West from 1958 and Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales from 1976.  As a longtime aficionado of the western, I should, of course, have already…
Randall Ivey
July 10, 2024
Blog

Southern Poetic Wisdom

When little sister fell down the well, We retrieved her by pulley, rope, and bucket. She, bruised, wet, learned a lesson. Maybe. Doves fly over as hunters blast away; Nothing falls but droppings in one eye. ‘I can’t see Jack-squat, Billy Bob.’ Hook from my fly-cast catches the wife’s ear lobe, And screaming like a banshee, she falls out of…
Thomas Hubert
July 9, 2024
Blog

John Tyler, Son of Virginia

From the Confederate Veteran, January 1916: John Tyler, distinguished Virginian and tenth President of the United States, has received fitting, though long-deferred, honor from the country he served. Fifty-three years after his death the United States government has erected a handsome monument at his last resting place, in the shades of beautiful Hollywood Cemetery, at Richmond, Va., that sacred and…
Abbeville Institute
July 3, 2024
Blog

Jefferson and the Four Faces of Liberty

Precisely what Jefferson means by “liberty” is a matter of considerable debate among scholars. Merrill Peterson in “Thomas Jefferson and the National Purpose” says that liberty for Jefferson was a code of restraint on sovereignty, exercised by a few or many. Thus, liberty involved minifying and decentralizing government. “He was the first to see that strength, the progress, even the…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 27, 2024
Blog

The Sabbath and the Slaves

Perhaps no topic of importance in the Old South may be handled rightly without dealing with the Peculiar Institution: slavery. The Christian Sabbath, or the Lord’s day – often referred to by Christians in the nineteenth century simply as the Sabbath – was no exception. Embedded in the Ten Commandments, the fourth commandment (according to Protestant enumeration) – to remember…
Forrest L. Marion
June 26, 2024
1607 ProjectBlogMedia Posts

Virginia First: The 1607 Project

Over the past five years, historians, journalists, and political activists have crafted seemingly conflicting narratives about the American founding. They are "seemingly conflicting" because all three center on the "proposition nation myth" of American history. According to this account, the United States was founded on the idea that all men (and women) were created equal. The "idea of equality" forms…
Brion McClanahan
June 24, 2024
Blog

A Meeting of Southern Writers

This essay by Donald Davidson was originally published in The Bookman in 1932. The footnotes and links are my contributions. Such essays are maps. In reports appearing soon after the event, the gathering of Southern writers held in late October under the auspices of the University of Virginia was variously denominated “house party,” “conference,” “convocation,” or—with even greater reserve—“occasion.” Such…
Chase Steely
June 18, 2024
Blog

Thomas Jefferson and the Other (Black) Patrick Henry

Thomas Jefferson bought the 57-acre tract of land including the Natural Bridge of Virginia in 1774—the year he produced his vitriolic Summary View of the Rights of British America—for a pittance. Except for the bridge, which Jefferson considered to be one of the natural wonders of the world, a mirabile visu, the land around the bridge was not much arable…
M. Andrew Holowchak
June 11, 2024
Blog

The South and World War II

Being Southern is a good thing. People around the world have long recognised that. Those who love the South must present a POSITIVE front, celebrate the South, and avoid being simply AGAINST. Nothing can be more irrelevant and counter-productive to the cause of the South than to get wrapped up in ideologies from the ugly history of central and eastern…
Clyde Wilson
June 6, 2024
Blog

Polish Confederates and the Principle “For Our Freedom and Yours”

The history of Poles' participation in the formation of the American Republic, especially participation in the American War of Independence, has been perfectly documented by Polish and non-Polish researchers. For example, there are extensive biographies of Tadeusz Kosciusko and Casimir Pulaski. Unfortunately the contribution of Poles in the period of the Civil War still remains a topic for broader discussion,…
Karol Mazur
June 4, 2024
Blog

In Memoriam: Jefferson Davis

To those who were not actors in the events of the period from 1860 to 1865, it is almost impossible to present a complete and vivid picture of the revolution by States which was practically inaugurated by the action of the convention of the people of South Carolina, on December 20, 1860. So much has been done by the war,…
Theodore Gaillard Barker
June 3, 2024
Blog

The 19th Century Ecclesiastical Debate Over Slavery – Part 2

When we dichotomize the 19th century ecclesiastical debate as “Southern “pro-slavery” and Northern “anti-slavery,” it must first be pointed out that these two titles are heavily nuanced in meaning. They did not mean that a virtuous North was committed to the welfare of blacks while an evil South delighted in their human bondage. Neither side believed that slavery abstractly considered…
Rod O'Barr
May 31, 2024
Blog

African-American Slavery in Historical Perspective

A review of African American Slavery in Historical Perspective (Shotwell Publishing, 2024) by Clyde N. Wilson This is an extremely important book because putting slavery in historical perspective puts the lie to the worthless presentist history regurgitated ad nauseam by academia and the fake news media. You can not learn from history when the history being taught is a fraud.…
Gene Kizer, Jr.
May 30, 2024
Blog

Jefferson v. Hamilton: A Northern versus Southern Feud?

As one enters Monticello, one is greeted by a bust of Jefferson facing a bust of Alexander Hamilton—“opposed in death as in life”—both by Italian sculptor Giuseppe Ceracchi. The statue of Hamilton is life-size, while the statue of Jefferson is a bit larger, and that suggests not merely Jefferson’s opposition, but political victory over Hamilton. What were the reasons for…
M. Andrew Holowchak
May 28, 2024
Blog

Forrest

The officer of regular troops intrusted with the duty of quickly raising levies for immediate war service is often too prone to think that his one great endeavor should be to “set them up” and so instruct them in drill as to make them look as much 1ike regulars as possible. As a matter of fact, he almost invariably fails…
Garnet Wolseley
May 23, 2024
Blog

Lynchburg’s Noiseless Musical Genius

Julia Winston Ivey, on September 15, 2020, quietly passed away at her house on Parkland Drive in Lynchburg, Virginia. She was a remarkable musical talent, an internationally lauded pianist in her prime years, yet her death created only a small stir in Hill City and her funeral, at her gravesite, was sparsely attended. The irony of her hushed passing is…
M. Andrew Holowchak
May 22, 2024
Blog

The 19th Century Ecclesiastical Debate Over Slavery – Part One

It is almost impossible for 21st century Christians, much less deeply biased contemporary historians, to comprehend that nineteenth century Southerners could, with any sincerity or justification, defend the compatibility of Christianity with the institution of slavery. For the past six decades historians have spilled much ink conjuring up images of insincere and hypocritical commitment on the part of Southern Christians’…
Rod O'Barr
May 21, 2024
Blog

Deplorables

I have lived for more than half a century in a region of Lexington County, South Carolina, known as “the Dutch Fork.” So called because it was settled in the early 1700s by German (Deutsch) farmers looking for good soil. “Fork” because it  begins  in the fork of the Broad and Saluda rivers. The original settler families are still there,…
Clyde Wilson
May 20, 2024
Blog

Cicero and the South

William Byrd II of Westover on the James River in Colonial Virginia lived a full generation before Thomas Jefferson, but they are comparable in their intellectual pursuits. Byrd had perhaps the largest library in the colonies, certainly below the Potomac River, and he began each day by reading, usually ancient authors, Greek or Roman, in the original languages. Private diaries…
Charles Roberts, MD
May 16, 2024
Blog

Did Jefferson Really “Hate” Patrick Henry?

Writes Thomas Jefferson to Leavit Harris concerning Patrick Henry (11 Oct. 1824): I never heard anything that deserved to be called by the same name with what flowed from him, and where he got that torrent of language is unconceivable. I have frequently shut my eyes while he spoke, and, when he was done, asked myself what he had said,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
May 15, 2024
Blog

Wendell Berry’s 400-Year-Old Debts

Love of cultivated land is a gift—born not from the unbridled wilds but the furrows of tilled soil. This gift, neither wrought nor feigned, cannot be bought nor swapped like an old mule, but rather, is bestowed upon us as a boon from our shared Agrarian Patrimony. Wendell Berry is a fortunate heir and shares his Southern heirloom generously through…
Chase Steely
May 10, 2024
Blog

Looking for Samuel, I Found George and Bobby…I Think

Since the 1600s the people of the Northern Neck (NNK) of Virginia and of St. Mary's County, Maryland have been connected—not separated—by the Potomac.  They have married each other; they have battled common enemies together: the British in 1776 and 1812 and the Yankees in 1861.  Though they were on the same side in The War, in later years, St.…
J.L. Bennett
May 9, 2024
Blog

The Southern Origins of Anesthesia

Some call it eureka, that moment of inspiration when an imaginative brain makes a connection no one else made. Dr. Crawford W. Long of Georgia possessed this gift when he discovered that ether could be used as an anesthetic in surgery—a long sought remedy after hundreds of years of suffering. What led to Dr. Long’s discovery? First, let’s meet the…
Lorene Leiter
May 8, 2024
Blog

The History of Our Southern People

The history of the Southern people, in its broad and significant dimensions, is still to be written. A lot of good history (and a lot of bad history) has been written about the South, but the over-arching theme of most of  this writing has been to treat the South as a peculiarity. The North is normal, the South is to…
Clyde Wilson
May 6, 2024
Blog

Wingless Chickens

The great Georgian writer of the mid-twentieth century Flannery O’Connor famously described herself as a “hillbilly Thomist,” a nod both to her Southern origins and her dedication to the medieval theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas. However much yankee intellectuals thumbed their noses at the South, the hillbilly moniker was not a little discordant given the well-educated O’Connor hailed from a…
Casey Chalk
May 1, 2024
Blog

Two-Lane South

I learned to drive in a pasture. The speed limit didn’t matter; that orange Allis Chalmers tractor could only go so fast on uneven ground. Sweetheart, my grandmother, told too many tales of reckless young boys whose turns on the lumbering machines led to disfigurement and death, so I didn’t try anything too adventurous. That is, until my mother let…
Robert M. Hicklin, Jr.
April 26, 2024
Blog

America’s Prophet

This piece was originally published at IM_1776.com. Cormac McCarthy died at his home in Santa Fe last Tuesday, June 13 (2023), at the age of 89. He was our greatest living novelist, an apocalyptic prophet and diviner of violence, and will forever stand with the likes of Melville and Faulkner as the chief American mythmaker of his time. Born in…
Lafayette Lee
April 25, 2024
Blog

Why “Democracy” Has Failed–And How to Fix It

Democracy in America has failed. In spite of the lack of any reference to “democracy” in both the American Constitution and its Declaration of Independence, the United States has institutionalized the democratic principle to become its world exemplar, which according to some intellectuals is henceforth to be the sole pattern for all governments on earth. Francis Fukuyama, a neoconservative until…
Terry Hulsey
April 24, 2024
Blog

He’s Southbound, Lord, He’s Comin’ Home to You

Dickey Betts died. If you need to read a biographical tribute, turn elsewhere.  While there are plenty of cookie-cutter articles about Dickey Betts all over the place, the perspective found here is from a fellow musician, a fellow guitarist, and a fellow Southerner who never met Dickey Betts or ever even saw him perform.  But, oh, what an influence he…
Tom Daniel
April 19, 2024
Blog

The Fasola Fellowship

I’m not deaf to the vibrant Country music chatter. Got opinions, but on social media, I made a vow: don't discuss the current thing. Yet, the discourse reminded of something. Donald Davidson was a man of tradition. He liked the old way. Saw a kinship between song meant for singing and verse meant for reading, a stance rare among his…
Chase Steely
April 15, 2024
Blog

Happy Birthday, Thomas Jefferson!

At the request of friend John Spear Smith (1785–1866, figure below), who named a newborn child after him, Thomas Jefferson, in a letter (21 Feb. 1825) that he pens some one and one-half years prior to his death, offers philosophical advice to the newborn child, Thomas Jefferson Smith. The missive takes the form of an epistolary trilogy: an advisory letter,…
M. Andrew Holowchak
April 12, 2024
Blog

Yankee Cain and Southern Seth

Southerners have often been mocked for their agrarian simplicity by Yankee-minded folks.  We know the insults well by now:  hicks, hillbillies, rednecks, and so on.  But Dixie should not be ashamed of this.  We ought rather to delight and exult in it. Richard Weaver gives us good ground for doing so in his contrast of the Northern/Yankee and Southern types:…
Walt Garlington
April 11, 2024
Blog

Republic or Democracy

Back in 1966, the conservative activist and F.B.I. operative Dan Smoot produced a short film, A Constitutional Republic, Not a Democracy.  Anybody who calls the United States a democracy, he said, is trying to subvert the Constitution of the United States — we’re not a democracy; we’re a republic. Probably because there are supposed to be two political parties here,…
Kevin Orlin Johnson
April 10, 2024
Blog

Saving a Remnant

Nothing is more indicative of the ongoing degradation of American  culture than the fate of the once noble Commonwealth of Virginia—not long ago widely admired as the mother of States and Presidents—inseparable from Patrick Henry, Washington, Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, Lee and Jackson. Now shallow, opportunistic politicians ignorant of American foundations swarm in every Southern State. In Virginia they have…
Clyde Wilson
April 9, 2024
BlogReview Posts

The Gentleman From Virginia

A review of John Randolph of Roanoke (Louisiana State University Press, 2012) by David Johnson One might assume that John Randolph of Roanoke, who may be the most singular individual in American political history, would be the subject of numerous biographies. The earliest attempt to capture something of the man was Powhatan Bouldin’s Home Reminiscences, written in 1878, a book…
John Devanny
April 8, 2024
Blog

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

A Confederate in Paris

In March 1861, Ambrose Dudley Mann, a native of Virginia, left the Confederate States of America on a diplomatic mission to Europe, where he remained for the next four years. After his country was defeated in the war, he resolved that he could never return to his native soil unless he returned to an independent South, and so he resided…
Karen Stokes
March 28, 2024
Blog

What Did Jefferson Really Look Like?

A newspaper in Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1887 and in 1902 stated that Sally Hemings’ last child, slave Eston Hemings, resembled Thomas Jefferson. Just how that resemblance was established is unclear. Eston Hemings died in 1877; Thomas Jefferson, in 1826. So, the newspaper was reporting that one person that had been dead for 10/25 years resembled another that has been dead…
M. Andrew Holowchak
March 27, 2024
Blog

The North’s Victory Unmasked

An aspect of preserving the Southern tradition is rescuing books of wisdom that have been lost and forgotten. That is the case with The United States Unmasked,  published in 1879 by Gabriel Manigault (1809—1888). Manigault was born in Charleston to distinguished patriot families on both sides and married into another such family.  After serving in the defenses of Charleston and…
Clyde Wilson
March 25, 2024
BlogReview Posts

Patriotism and the History of Prejudice

A review of The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice (Shoemaker + Company, 2022) by Wendell Berry I had heard of Wendell Berry for quite some time, and though I had an idea of what he was for—‘what I stand for is what I stand on’—I had never read him. I believe that my very first…
James Rutledge Roesch
March 21, 2024
Blog

Southern Nationalism

A leftwing scribbler on some website recently called me “a White Nationalist.” He thought that was a conclusive judgment. But I am not now and never have been a “White Nationalist.” I have long been called a Southern nationalist, but that is a different matter. The Southern people are real. White nationalism is merely a Yankee ideology, an abstraction with…
Clyde Wilson
March 19, 2024
Blog

Calhoun’s “Richest Legacy to Posterity”

From Gustavus M. Pinckney, The Life of John C. Calhoun The attentive reader will not have forgotten that in the letter of Mr. Calhoun in reference to his acceptance of the Secretaryship of State he made mention of a project which he had in mind for leisure hours in the home routine to which at that time he looked forward.…
Gustavus M. Pinckney
March 18, 2024
Blog

A Favorite Southern Trio

A few years back, I came to Louisiana for the first time. Being an Indiana Hoosier, I had no idea what dishes were native to this region, aside from gumbo and crawfish. The first Southern meal my Louisiana family introduced me to was red beans and rice. I didn’t know what to expect, but as soon as I took my…
Arianna Brindle
March 15, 2024
Blog

What’s a Road

Native Americans once traversed their paths before the founding of the nation. A teenage George Washington traveled them as a surveyor in the mid-eighteenth century. Enslaved blacks built fieldstone walls that line some of them. And Union and Confederate armies once clashed upon them. I’m talking about the gravel roads of Loudoun County in northwest Virginia. If you know anything…
Casey Chalk
March 7, 2024
Blog

Remember the Alamo

I was watching some old true crime story on one of the cable channels recently. Probably a rerun, though I don’t keep up with T.V. and its general blather. As a rule, T.V. is about as entertaining and educational as two goats eating weed grass without disturbing the dandelions. And the “news” is even worse. Anyway, this crime had taken…
Paul H. Yarbrough
March 6, 2024
Blog

The Birth of Jaffa and the Death of History

There have been a lot of things spoken of Goldwater, from lunatic to nationalist and everything in between. While most historians, on both the right and the left, tend to focus on these well placed propagandist terms, the few points that get perpetually overlooked by any analyst are the significant points of who he was, his own personal platform, how…
Justin Pederson
March 4, 2024
Blog

Jefferson on the Pleasure of Pleasure Gardening

Thomas Jefferson, like others of his day, was a patron and admirer of the fine arts, which were “fine” because they were autotelic—viz., enjoyed as ends in themselves. The number of the Fine Arts was a matter of debate in his day. To granddaughter Ellen Wayles Randolph (10 July 1805), President Jefferson writes: I must observe that neither the number…
M. Andrew Holowchak
February 27, 2024
Blog

Forgotten Southern Wisdom

Over the years I  have occasionally encountered references to Edward P. Lawton’s book The South and the Nation. I was never able to find it until recently when  I was able to get a copy from  a company in India called Skilled Books.  This reprint is nicely printed and bound without any date or copyright  information. Lawton was from Savannah,…
Clyde Wilson
February 22, 2024
Blog

Self-Evident Truths

Armies sometimes crush liberty, but they cannot conquer ideas. Jabez L. M. Curry (Lieutenant colonel, CSA, 1861-1865) From the African continent to the shores of America, the people coercively enslaved were victims of government action, inaction, or a combination of the two. Whether the government is led by a tribal chieftain or a so-called representative government, all governments are political…
Marshall DeRosa
February 21, 2024
Blog

Thomas Jefferson’s “Holy War”

In a singular letter late in life to John Wayles Eppes (6 Nov. 1813), Thomas Jefferson describes the American Revolution as a “holy war.” He writes, “If ever there was a holy war, it was that which saved our liberties and gave us independance.” The letter rather mundanely concerns Jefferson’s abhorrence of banks and paper money. The letter I consider…
M. Andrew Holowchak
February 20, 2024
Blog

Remembering an American President

From Varina Davis, Jefferson Davis: A Memoir (1890) Mr. Davis’s apparent feebleness had been accompanied by enough increase in weight to encourage my hopes of his health improving. He never stooped, but retained his fine soldierly carriage, and always walked with a light, firm step, and with apparent ease; his voice was sweet and sonorous as ever. A slight deafness…
Varina Davis
February 16, 2024
Blog

New York v. Tennessee

You’ve probably already seen the video of a mob beating up two New York City police officers. The incident happened about 10 days ago in broad daylight in Times Square, one of the most prominent public places and tourist attractions in New York. The video shows two officers apprehending a suspect who resists arrest and is wrestled to the pavement,…
John Avery Emison
February 7, 2024
BlogReview Posts

Stewards of History

Caryl Johnston is a contemporary Southern writer who has so far not received as much recognition as she merits.  That lack was partly corrected in 2021 when the Abbeville Press published her Stewards of History: Land and Time in the Story of a Southern Family. Then last year her fourth volume of verse, Storyteller in Times Square, appeared. Stewards of…
Clyde Wilson
January 31, 2024
Blog

Remembering John Taylor of Caroline

Prophet of Encroaching Tyranny John Taylor of Caroline was a man of the American Revolution. During the fight for independence, he served in the Continental Army and Virginia militia. He left the latter at the end of the war with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Military life molded his character as it did for so many other men, but the enduring…
William J. Watkins
January 24, 2024
Blog

Ol’ Fred

FRED CHAPPELL was America's greatest living writer. Of that I have no doubt, not that the modern miasma of contemporary letters offered him much serious competition.  (His only rivals for the epithet were Cormac McCarthy, now passed, and Wendell Berry, nearing ninety.) He was a master of most every major literary genre - poetry, fiction, criticism, et al. His scope…
Randall Ivey
January 18, 2024
Blog

Southerners Built Panama

Colonel William Crawford Gorgas, son of Confederate general Josiah Gorgas, Jefferson Davis’ chief of ordnance, was already a world renowned doctor before he ever set foot in Panama. In the final days of the Spanish–American War, Gorgas was Chief Sanitary Officer in Havana, where he eradicated yellow fever and malaria by identifying its transmitter: the Aedes mosquito. (Previously, people had…
Casey Chalk
January 17, 2024
Blog

The Confederate Gold, FOUND!

A review of The Rebel and the Rose: James A. Semple, Julia Gardiner Tyler, and the Lost Confederate Gold, by Wesley Millett and Gerald White, ‎Cumberland House Publishing, August 24, 2007. Millett and White have written a terrific “three-‘fer”: A wartime romance, a history of the flight from Richmond, and an economic reckoning of the Southern Treasury. They have succeeded,…
Terry Hulsey
January 4, 2024
Blog

Go South, Young Man

There is a venerable American tradition — at least as old as Alexis de Tocqueville — to contrast the energy, ingenuity, and virtue of the North with the slow, backward, hypocrisy of the South. In Tocquevile’s influential work Democracy in America, published in 1831, we read: “The banks of the Ohio River provided the final demonstration… time and again, in…
Casey Chalk
January 3, 2024
Blog

Christmas in Dixie

Editor's Note: This is our final post of 2023. I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. We will be back January 2, 2024. Until we meet again.... The older that I get, it seems the less I enjoy the Christmas season. So much is now packed into the month of December, that it is hard to…
Keith Redmon
December 27, 2023
Blog

A Southern Christmas Carol

During the Advent, or Christmas, season, I enjoy hearing and singing Advent hymns, or Christmas carols, which celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I always look forward to this every year. One which I enjoy hearing and singing was written in Northern Virginia, where I am from and where I live. The Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary…
Timothy A. Duskin
December 22, 2023
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
BlogReview Posts

Who is the Real Thomas Jefferson?

Who is the real Thomas Jefferson? Historians have attempted to answer this question since "Sage of Monticello" died in 1826. Jefferson has been the symbol of nearly every political movement in America, even if he would have disagreed with their positions. He has been described as a radical, a progressive, a liberal, an agrarian, a populist, a libertarian, a conservative,…
Brion McClanahan
December 15, 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

What Was the War About?

Names tell a lot, and that conflict had many names. The one that seems to have stuck is “The Civil War.” But is this an accurate description? Civil wars by definition are wars waged between two or more factions within a country struggling for control of the government (1). But Robert E. Lee was not fighting to take over the…
H.V. Traywick, Jr.
December 11, 2023
Blog

A Southern Memoir

Dr. Virginia Abernethy, retired from the Psychiatry Department of Vanderbilt University, is still going strong at age 90, as evidenced by her lively memoir, Born Abroad:  A Patriot’s Tale of Choice and Chance (Arktos: 2023). From a family of Virginian origins, she was, due to her father’s work, born in Havana and spent her childhood in Buenos Aires.  She still…
Clyde Wilson
December 8, 2023
Blog

Prayerful Warrior

In the years following the defeat of the Confederacy, Robert E. Lee emerged as the face of the Lost Cause. In many respects, Lee embodied a defeated South: strong, stubborn, but simply outmanned. However, this interpretation of defeat as a matter of mere numbers and arms did not rest well with many Southerners. To them, the war was a battle…
Jacob Ogan
December 7, 2023
Blog

An Affectionate Farewell

This is a footnote to my most recent offering at the Abbeville Institute regarding the sayonara being given to far too much of Southern culture, heritage and history that is now being swept away by the ever-growing tsunami of mindless social justice rage. You might well ask what could possibly have led a person who was born and largely bred…
John Marquardt
December 5, 2023
Blog

Willmoore Kendall’s Battle Lines

Few men would confuse the late Willmoore Kendall for a Southern gentleman. The son of a blind Oklahoma Southern Methodist preacher, the conservative political philosopher married three times, and carried on numerous affairs. A regular contributor to National Review, Kendall was once caught with a copy girl in the office of a colleague in NR spaces. He was an alcoholic,…
Casey Chalk
December 4, 2023
Blog

The Great Awakening in Wilson County, Tennessee

It is often said that “a watched pot doesn’t boil”.  Today I’d like to alter that saying to “A watched pot doesn’t boil over.”And I’d like to add that “A watched pressure cooker doesn’t blow up.” The idea here is to prevent a situation from getting out of hand and making a mess in the environment.  This article is to…
Barbara Marthal
November 30, 2023
Blog

What is the Future of the Southern Tradition?

What is the future of the Southern tradition? This question presents a pressing problem for Americans in the twenty-first century. To those who reduce the Southern tradition to treason and slavery, the answer would be simple: it must be eradicated. Unfortunately, these people dominate the academic and political classes in American society. The near decade long pogrom on Southern symbols…
Brion McClanahan
November 28, 2023
Blog

The South in the Interpretation of the Constitution

Editor's Note: This chapter is republished from The South in the Building of the Nation series (1909). In the making of the American Nation, the Southern states have played a conspicuous part-a part which has not received proper recognition at the hands of historians at home or abroad. This neglect of the South is largely the result of the views…
J.A.C. Chandler
November 17, 2023
Blog

“I die in the service and defense of my country!”

I just finished John Headly's book "Confederate Operations in Canada and New York."  It's a good read and provides great insight into Confederate operations in New York and other northern states. I highly recommend it. But this piece isn't about Headly. It's about John Yates Beall, acting master in the Confederate States Navy. In this book, Headly poignantly describes the…
Keith Redmon
November 16, 2023
BlogReview Posts

African Founders and Albion’s Seed

I've often been asked a variation of the same question: "If you had to choose one American history book to recommend, what would it be?" The answer is simple: David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed. I don't make this suggestion lightly. There are other fascinating and important works to consider, but Fischer presents a compelling tale of early American culture that…
Brion McClanahan
November 15, 2023
Blog

No to War

Editor's Note: On 5 April 1917, Representative Claude Kitchin of North Carolina rose and delivered a manly speech in opposition to Woodrow Wilson's call for a declaration of war against Germany. He was one of five Southern members of Congress who opposed the war resolution. Kitchin prophetically predicted that if she became involved in the war, America would be forced…
Abbeville Institute
November 13, 2023
Blog

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
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From Mayberry to Nashville

What do a popular country group and the Vanderbilt Agrarians have in common? West Virginian Arlos Smith penned the song Mayberry for the pop-country group Rascal Flatts. There are striking similarities between the Agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My Stand (ITMS) and the song Mayberry, but I couldn’t find any evidence that the work of the Agrarians had any influence on…
Brett Moffatt
November 7, 2023
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Is the American Experience Conservative?

Delivered as a lecture at the Heritage Foundation, October, 1986. Having recently urged upon my fellow conservatives the necessity for attaching a priority to distinctions and definitions, having in the Intercollegiate Review insisted that such exercises are properly antecedent to all questions of policy, I was obliged to attempt a reflection on this theme when Mr. Hart proposed it to…
M.E. Bradford
November 1, 2023
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What Led to Stonewall Jackson’s Unusual Quirks?

On a recent episode of the Flagrant podcast , comedian Shane Gillis went on a short rant about Stonewall Jackson. Gillis is a known history buff that frequently brings up history in his stand up comedy and talk show appearances. Even though this particular conversation covered various topics, the most interesting part was his take on Stonewall Jackson’s mental health:…
Michael Martin
October 26, 2023
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Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the Attraction of Policial Decency

Scholars are wont to paint antipodally Jefferson and Madison. Most depictions show, in effect, that by psychological disposition, Madison was better suited to be a Hamiltonian Federalist than a Jeffersonian Republican. I offer a few illustrations. Merrill D. Peterson, in his Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation, states that Madison had a “more penetrating mind, sharp, probing, and persistent,” while…
M. Andrew Holowchak
October 24, 2023
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The Man Who Was George Washington

There is nothing more scholastically problematic than attempts to draw comparisons between and/or among the figures of history. Such an effort can be considered even vaguely accurate only if and when the people being juxtaposed are of the same time period. In that case, at least, the circumstances surrounding them may be fairly equitable! But even that is not always…
Valerie Protopapas
October 12, 2023
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Donald Davidson and the Tennessean’s Book Page

“I can claim no ultimate wisdom in the matter. I can only say that I reviewed books in Tennessee for seven years, and during the same period persuaded a great many people to do likewise. The book page that I edited had a very modest beginning in 1924 in the Nashville Tennessean.” - Donald Davidson 1924 unfurled. The weather, customary…
Chase Steely
October 11, 2023
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Southern Memories

Much of my time growing up in the 60s South was spent with my paternal grandparents. These were some of the best times and are some of my fondest memories. My pawpaw was a mountain of a man standing nearly 6 foot 3 and weighing close to 230 pounds. He had a grip like an iron vise and with his…
Keith Redmon
October 10, 2023
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Farmers and Families and Football and Fools

I watched, sparingly (I was mostly playing chess against the computer) two football games recently (9-30-23) Ole Miss vs. L.S.U. and Miss State vs Alabama. The won-lost column for my Mississippi roots (which run deep and proud) was 1-1. Miss Southern lost to Texas State but they were not on the single channel that I, again sparingly, watched. I keep…
Paul H. Yarbrough
October 6, 2023
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Maxcy Gregg, Scientist, Sportsman, Soldier

We survivors sometimes forget the human cost of our failed War of Southern Independence.  The casualty rate for Confederate officers was about 25%.  For Union officers it was 10 percent, easily replaced by incoming foreigners. The loss of talented men---future outstanding leaders, writers, scientists, artists, scholars, builders, clergy, entrepreneurs--- was very near catastrophic for the future of the South.  The…
Clyde Wilson
October 2, 2023
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My Dad was a Joker

My dad was a joker.  It was one of his favorite words.  He had lots of favorite words and phrases.  Some of them you will be introduced to in this story.  By a joker, I mean a funny joker.  He always had something running in the background...some program on autopilot and you couldn't tell if it was bothering him or…
William Platt
September 22, 2023
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Old Men and Honor

Old men observe and imagine the fate of the "country" that was once a relatively free group of independent states of people living freely within tribal nests of local-style Jeffersonian parlors of home and family; people who loved the land and the God who provided it. Some old men have such observations. Now in time, much past, as the fortunes…
Paul H. Yarbrough
August 31, 2023
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The Southerner as Historian and Vice Versa

(*first published at First Principles Journal online, April 30, 2008) Publication of a second collection of essays by Southern historian Clyde N. Wilson -- Defending Dixie: Essays in Southern History and Culture -- provides us with an occasion for surveying Wilson’s larger contributions to American and Southern history, and to the conservative movement. A native of North Carolina in the…
Joseph R. Stromberg
August 29, 2023
Blog

Deep Southern Summer Written at Midnight

Remember. This is a fought-for land There’s blood soaked in the soil. There’s tears within its waves And wails upon the shore Its tempests veil the shrieks Still heard from years of yore. There’s terror in its shades Dark places in its woods recall Much pain unthinkable. The pain must still remain It cannot sublimate so soon. The prayers of…
James Everett Kibler
August 25, 2023