Tag

Southern Tradition

Blog

Yankee Way of War

About this time every year, cruise ship historians like to trot out articles justifying the mass slaughter of innocents in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. America had no choice but to drop the atom bombs, the basic argument goes. Mainstream media coverage in Japan tends to leave the subject, “America,” out altogether. It was war in the abstract that is to blame,…
Jason Morgan
August 14, 2026
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Inheriting Gold

Many years ago, I asked myself, “Who am I” then “what do I know about myself?”  That turned into exploration about “who I am,” which in turn, evolved into “where do I come from” and finally “who did I come from?”  I think today people are caught up so much on the first question, that the development of the idea…
Harvey Lee Nix
August 12, 2026
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Moses Waddel: The Teacher of the South

If anyone in Dixie is worthy of the title ‘Teacher of the South’, it is Reverend Moses Waddel.  A summary of the major Southern figures who attended the academy he established at Willington, South Carolina, as students would be convincing enough: ‘Among the names are William H. Crawford, a pupil in the Appling school and an assistant at Willington; John…
Walt Garlington
August 11, 2026
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The Sacred Ordinary

There is a habit in modern life of searching for meaning only in the dramatic and flamboyant. We are told to look for fulfillment in great achievements, grand adventures, public recognition, and constant reinvention. The ordinary day, by contrast, is treated as something to escape. Routine is drudgery. Repetition is boredom. Domestic life is confinement. Work is merely transactional. The…
Tom Daniel
August 6, 2026
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States Rights and Federal Powers

When debating the causes of the War to Prevent Southern Independence, sometimes a Southern partisan will argue the Confederacy fought for "States’ Rights." Partisans on the other side will almost always respond that it was states' rights to own slaves. An immediate objection to this was that States did not own slaves, people did. The second and more substantive objection…
Jonathan White
August 5, 2026
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Give Me Fiddle

Patrick Henry, otherwise known as Mister Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death, was a pretty good musician, much like his contemporary, Thomas Jefferson. But Henry did not practice scales. He did not copy violin pieces by hand into notebooks, did not build a personal library of Italian Baroque composers, and did not submit himself to the long discipline of…
Tom Daniel
July 31, 2026
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Maryland, My Maryland

I enjoy studying maps. I especially enjoy maps of the ‘what-if’ scenarios if certain courses in history played out differently, but also the constant debate regarding cultural borders within the US. I frequently analyze the border of the cultural South, as I have cause to believe the South is shrinking faster than most would want to accept. This turf war…
Matthew Conard
July 29, 2026
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NASCAR and the Spirit of the South

There is no sport more shaped entirely by its origin in the South than NASCAR. A sport built on southern tradition, southern rebellion, and the spirit of the southern common man. That “spirit” was driven by moonshiners, who were transporting moonshine during the prohibition era. These Appalachian moonshiners were not just driven by rebellion, but by survival. Moonshine was the…
Samuel Gutierrez
July 27, 2026
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Emy-Lou Biedenharn: International Singing Sensation

In the world today, there are well-known singing competitions on major television stations that help launch singers to national and international fame. For the sweet Southern gal Emy-Lou Biendenharn, born in 1902 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, those were not options.  She had a more difficult path to travel.  Yet walk it she did, and with the typical strength and grace of…
Walt Garlington
July 24, 2026
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The “Slave Power” You Say?

Old myths die hard. One of the oldest with its roots firmly in the sectional crisis of the nineteenth century is the belief in the existence of the "Slave Power." This uniquely American conspiracy theory, found mostly among the folks of the Midwest, posited that Southern slaveholders were bent on spreading the institution of slavery into the territories and even…
John Devanny
July 20, 2026
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The Anti-Federalists, America’s Unsung Heroes, Predicted Evil Empire & The Imperial Presidency

On the eve of the federal convention, and following its adjournment in September of 1787, the Anti-Federalists made the case that the Constitution makers in Philadelphia had exceeded the mandate they were given to amend the Articles of Confederation, and nothing more. The Federal Constitution augured ill for freedom, argued the Anti-Federalists. These unsung heroes had warned early Americans of…
Ilana Mercer
July 17, 2026
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Where Were Your People in 1776?

"If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree." -Michael Crichton, Timeline The quote attributed to Karl Marx, “If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded,” also applies. As does Orwell’s “Who controls the past controls the future.…
Matthew Conard
July 14, 2026
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The Meaning of the South in History Transcends 250

The number 250 is an arbitrary number for a Southerner.  The life of our people did not begin in 1776, but in 1607.  Dixie celebrated her 250th anniversary in 1857, though few probably paid it the attention it deserved due to the violence being threatened against Southrons by the Yankees at the time.  We are now in our 419th year…
Walt Garlington
July 13, 2026
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French Huguenots in Dixie

The colonial South was a stronghold of traditional Protestantism. Although religiously diverse and generally tolerant by the standards of the era, its culture was largely shaped by a distinctly Protestant worldview. Among these Protestant settlers were the French Huguenots, whose presence in the Southeast, though aggregately relatively small, left a notable imprint between 1660 and 1800. The French Huguenots were…
Cole Branham
July 10, 2026
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Dabney Was Right About Music, Too

Robert Lewis Dabney stood before the graduating class of Hampden-Sydney College in June of 1882 and told them, with the measured certainty of a man who had already watched one civilization end, that another was ending around them. He was sixty-two years old, a Presbyterian theologian, Stonewall Jackson's chief of staff and biographer, and one of the most unsparing critics…
Tom Daniel
July 9, 2026
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Rawlins Lowndes and His Prophetic Warning Against the Constitution

Rawlins Lowndes was one of the most significant and yet least remembered figures of the American founding era, a South Carolina lawyer, planter, jurist, and governor who became his state's most forceful opponent of the U.S. Constitution during the ratification debates of 1788. He is best remembered for his prophetic warning that if the Constitution were adopted, "the sun, of…
Jose Nino
July 8, 2026
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Declarations of Independence: Meanings and Memory

The two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence is an appropriate moment to reflect upon how far Americans, both elites and regular people, have strayed from the principles of the movement for American independence from Britain. At its worst, the popular culture will celebrate the country’s “birthday” with celebrity entertainers performing in “kitschy” Hollywood…
John Devanny
June 29, 2026
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Willie Jones and the Fight Against Federal Power

When the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787, North Carolina elected Willie Jones as a delegate, but he declined to accept his seat, recognizing that the gathering intended to create a centralized government that would diminish state sovereignty. A wealthy planter, radical Jeffersonian, and the foremost Anti-Federalist leader in North Carolina, Jones is remembered chiefly for blocking his state's…
Jose Nino
June 26, 2026
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The Paradox of the Lomax Recordings

Every folk song collector runs into the same problem the moment the recording machine actually starts turning: the song they are capturing has never had one fixed shape, and the machine is about to give it one anyway. A ballad sung on a porch in Kentucky on a Tuesday might run six verses. Sung again on Thursday by the same…
Tom Daniel
June 25, 2026
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Whither Leviathan

This is part 2 of my economic lamentations of 21st century America, continuing from my May 18th article ‘Modern Industrialism Is Betraying Us’. On the subject of a nation, I ask myself: what is the purpose of a nation? Is it security, economy, control, binding of a people, or some form of all these things? When so many elements of…
Matthew Conard
June 24, 2026
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Southern Writers in the Modern World

Eugenia Dorothy “Dolly” Blount Lamar was born in Jones County, Georgia in 1867 and spent most of her life in Macon, where Mercer’s spires stood across Tattnall Square from her childhood home. She was Historian-General and President-General of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, helped get Sidney Lanier into the Hall of Fame, worked for the preservation of Stratford, and…
Chase Steely
June 23, 2026
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Across the Rappahannock

The Confederate Army of 1861 went to war with music built into its structure. Every regiment was required by regulation to maintain a brass band — typically eight to twelve musicians, but authorized up to sixteen — whose duties were not ornamental. They beat the drum calls that moved men out of sleep and into formation before dawn. They played…
Tom Daniel
June 18, 2026
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Can Gen Z Save the Southern Tradition?

Gen Z? Those insane young people on Tik Tok? The ones who are all addicted to the internet and pornography? The overmedicated ones? The ones who talk funny? The ones who embrace far left idiots as heroes and manipulative villains as role models? The generation that never received a biblical education? (Was St Luke on X?) Yes. Those people. My…
Elias Ryan
June 17, 2026
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Forward the Colors!

From the beginning of my brief tenure I have tried to focus on the fact that the Confederate soldier, whose name we are to protect and whose cause we are to vindicate were and are family members. The word “Sons” in our organisation's name means something. It does not mean the offspring of a ancient “birthing parent” or progeny of…
Paul C. Graham
June 11, 2026
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The Prophetic Southern Voices Who Opposed Federal Overreach

Some of the most forceful warnings against political centralization during the founding era came from a handful of figures rooted in the southern states. Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina produced voices who saw the proposed Constitution as a blueprint for consolidated, potentially tyrannical national power. With the benefit of hindsight, their warnings about the dangers of moving authority from…
Jose Nino
June 10, 2026
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After the Cannons Have Cooled

Southern music is not a single thing. It never has been. What we casually call Southern music is in reality a family of related musical responses to history — responses that look and sound similar on the surface but serve entirely different human purposes. A song written to send men to war is doing something fundamentally different from a song…
Tom Daniel
June 9, 2026
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Strike the Tent

Phil Leigh passed away April 9, 2026. Fitting. Leigh spent much of his retirement writing about Robert E. Lee and the South and fending off attacks from the woke mob. I met Leigh over a decade ago when we redesigned the website and had a soft relaunch in April 2014. Our website designer told me that he knew a man…
Brion McClanahan
June 2, 2026
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Donald Trump, Thomas Massie, and the Tale of Two Primaries

President Donald J. Trump’s use of the primary to remove his opponents from political office was singularly successful this past primary season.  In the past, the tactic was not always successful. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, much to his later chagrin, attempted the same tactic in 1938 to remove conservative Southern Democrats who began to oppose what they viewed as the…
John Devanny
June 1, 2026
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Dixie Book of Days

The Dixie Book of Days by Matthew Page Andrews, 1912 Like many of us today I receive the most interesting news and event notifications through group chats. In one of such group chats a friend sent a picture of a book with a succinct and articulate paragraph of one of the kindest epitaphs to receive: bravery, honesty, love of truth.…
Matthew Conard
May 29, 2026
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Remembering Martin Dies, Jr.

Few political figures in the 20th century confronted communist subversion and federal overreach as aggressively as Martin Dies Jr. of Texas. Born in Colorado City, Texas on November 5, 1900, Dies emerged from the Lone Star State's conservative Democratic tradition to become one of the century's most consequential congressional investigators. His father, Martin Dies Sr., served as a Democratic congressman…
Jose Nino
May 28, 2026
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Native American Music and the South

Frequently, I have described Southern music as a blending of influences. The interaction between Scots-Irish settlers and enslaved Africans produced a musical synthesis that is audible, traceable, and well documented. One can easily point to specific features to prove it. There are ballad forms, fiddle repertory, banjo construction, and rhythmic sensibility to reasonably identify their origins in Southern music. The…
Tom Daniel
May 27, 2026
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No One is Coming to Save You

Social media has exploded in recent weeks with outrage over the approval of massive corporate data centers. While local residents have overwhelmingly opposed these projects, county commissioners and state legislators have turned a blind eye. Incidents like this fuel a growing sensation that events and institutions are accelerating completely beyond the control of ordinary citizens. The convergence of rapid technological…
Nicole Williams
May 22, 2026
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Modern Industrialism Is Betraying Us

We are near 100 years after I'll Take My Stand emerged into the zeitgeist – a salvo at the leviathan hyper industrial economic system rapidly encroaching into all regions of the United States. The 12 Southern authors could perhaps divine what level of societal destabilization would happen by the year 2030 at the trajectory in 1930, but I'd wager modern…
Matthew Conard
May 18, 2026
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Calculating the Value of Union

At our March 2026 conference on the Declaration of Independence, Daniel Miller, President of the Texas Nationalist Movement, explained how he asks one simple question when confronted by doubters and naysayers on secession: If your State was currently independent and with all that you know about the current government in Washington D.C., would you join the Union today? He said…
Brion McClanahan
May 15, 2026
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The Rebel Outlaw

There’s much more to the story of Josey Wales than what you saw in the hit movie starring Clint Eastwood. The novel is an underrated gold mine of adventure, Southern history, and human pathos. The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales by Forrest Carter was published in 1972, and later republished as Gone to Texas. The movie The Outlaw Josey Wales was…
Mike C. Tuggle
May 14, 2026
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A Government of Kudzu

One of my favorite writers, who has long passed, Charley Reese, wrote an editorial for the Orlando Sentinel 25 years ago. I believe it was his final effort for the O.S. It is in no way dated. It could have been written yesterday, and it would fit perfectly with the current horrid simulation in Washington, D.C of the so-called government…
Paul H. Yarbrough
May 12, 2026
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Lessons on Liberty from the States’ Rights Democrats

In the 1940s, the Democratic Party was fractured by a dispute that eventually split the party into factions. On the surface, as described by the New York Times in 1939, the issue concerned the specifics of the New Deal. The moderates or “conservatives” supported limited federal interventions, while the “liberals” were pushing for a much more expansive interventionist program. The…
Wanjiru Njoya
May 7, 2026
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The South Will Always Do It Again

I live in Alabama, and I see what’s happening to the South with my own eyes. Through the Abbeville Institute, I also stay connected with fellow Southern thinkers, so I read about the same things happening elsewhere. We are not experiencing cultural mass hysteria, because what’s happening is real. Institutional erosion, demographic churn, homogenized media, and the steady replacement of…
Tom Daniel
May 1, 2026
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Lee Returns to Richmond

Originally published at A Memoir of the Occupation Richmond, Virginia April 15, 1985 It was raining again. Grey clouds scudding the city’s ruins standing in stark silhouette against the colorless sky. Jagged shards of warehouse riding from the ruined James River waterfront; the business and residential districts block after block of fire-blackened brick, the Tredegar Iron Works no more than…
Enoch Cade
April 30, 2026
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Reflections on the Alamo and Texas Independence

(Continued from Part I) After the fall of the Alamo in San Antonio on March 6, 1836, a disconsolate but resolved General Sam Houston ordered the torching and evacuation of Gonzales, so as to deny resources to the advancing Mexican forces. He then ordered a strategic withdrawal of his own army, as well as that of Colonel James W. Fannin…
Miles Foltermann
April 29, 2026
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What Makes A Historian?

Some readers have encouraged me to identify as a historian, despite my not having a degree in history. For a long time, I have been reluctant to do so, thinking it would be both presumptuous and misleading, but I have recently changed my mind. Here is why. I think the very first seed was planted when I was interviewed by…
Jeb Smith
April 21, 2026
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Bring Back the Southern Gentleman

Originally published at 1819News.com There is a man disappearing. Not suddenly – the way a candle gutters – but slowly, the way a word falls out of a language. No one notices until someone reaches for it and finds only air. I knew him once. We all did, or thought we did, which amounts to the same thing in a…
Allen Mendenhall
April 16, 2026
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Jefferson Could Play

We love to affectionately remember Thomas Jefferson as a mind detached from the body. Many accounts present him as a man of paper, of correspondence, of carefully arranged ideas set down in elegant prose. The familiar image is that of the “Sage of Monticello,” seated at a writing desk, producing language that would echo across the centuries. That image is…
Tom Daniel
April 14, 2026
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The Tempo of a Civilization

Why does Southern music move the way it does? I’m not talking about a particular instrument it favors or a particular chord progression it follows. I’m talking about why Southern music leans into such a smooth shuffle groove instead of velocity, why it settles back instead of lunging forward, and why it stretches instead of snaps. And why, if one…
Tom Daniel
April 10, 2026
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A Southern Future?

This piece was originally published at Reckonin.com Rather than continuing my detailed history of the Southern people I wish to comment on our situation at the moment, 2026, and prospects for the future. We have never been in greater danger of losing our identity as of the South. The population has changed. There are rust belt refugees. Some of these…
Clyde Wilson
April 9, 2026
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Cultural Reawakening is Not Impossible

Powerful people have conspired to erase Southern culture over the last several decades, many, but not all, of them of Northern extraction.  George Orwell would recognize the methods used.  Many historical truths have been thrown down the Memory Hole, while the honorable men of Dixie – Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, John C. Calhoun, and many others – are subjected…
Walt Garlington
April 6, 2026
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The Sound of Southern Easter

The South has produced many distinctive musical traditions, but few are as recognizable or as beloved as the Southern gospel quartet. I’ve written many essays about Sacred Harp and gospel, but I have inexcusably written very little about the Southern gospel quartet. And what better time of year than Easter to celebrate one of the most iconic sounds of the…
Tom Daniel
April 3, 2026
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American History in Full

Early on one frosty morning in February I found myself driving down a country road in east central North Carolina, looking for the other half of American history. It had rained the night before and snowed hard a few days before that. As I pulled into a gravel parking lot the trees all around stood out sharp against the clear,…
Jason Morgan
March 24, 2026
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The Era of Good Feelings–1920-1970

Originally published at Reckonin.com My synopsis of the history of the Southern people will henceforward be speculative. We may not have sufficient perspective now on the more recent past. There may be important undercurrents that are not noticed yet. I have called the half century after World War I an era of good feelings because, despite “Civil Rights” and other…
Clyde Wilson
March 20, 2026
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The Heroic Fr. Mullon

Originally published at MostCertainlyBeane. I’ve lived in the New Orleans area now for 21 years, and I have been to many of the area’s beautiful churches. But I had not been to historic St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church on Camp Street until yesterday. It is the congregation (and burial place) of a personal hero: the Rev. Fr. James Ignatius Mullon…
Rev. Larry Beane
March 18, 2026
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Victory

The regime occupying Washington, D. C., having launched its latest war of conquest, where may a Southerner look for consolation in a world gone insane?  The Psalmist answers: ‘From whence shall my help come? My help comes from the LORD, Who made heaven and earth’ (Psalm 121:1, 2). So has it often been in the South, that our people seek…
Walt Garlington
March 13, 2026
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The Case for Christian Localism

Originally published at From the Desk of Jon Harris. The reason for favoring the proximate, or local, over the national and international stems from the nature of society itself. Robert Lewis Dabney said that “Government is not the creator but the creature of human society.”1 Instead, society preexists government, and communities make up society. It is on the community level…
Jonathan Harris
March 12, 2026
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The Carried Song

If I were a Yankee, I could likely make an outrageous claim and expect it to be believed on the strength of its articulation alone. Yankees, of course, possess the advantage of literacy, and literacy, in modern cultural shorthand, is synonymous with intelligence. As a Southerner, I don’t enjoy that rhetorical luxury. Everything I say must be prefaced, situated, and…
Tom Daniel
March 11, 2026
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Spencer Roane and the Richmond Junto

The party of Washington, Adams, and Hamilton were swept out of power. The election of 1800 saw the triumph of Jefferson’s Republicans and the complete decimation of the Federalists, a party that would never again control the White House, or either house of Congress, and would cease to exist after the 1816 presidential election. After a contentious battle in the…
Ryan Walters
March 9, 2026
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Townes Van Zandt

Townes Van Zandt was an American singer-songwriter born in 1944 in Fort Worth, Texas, whose work occupies a quiet but enduring place in Southern music. His songs sit at the crossroads of folk, country, and blues without ever settling comfortably into any of them, largely because he showed little interest in belonging to pre-set categories. Born of Dutch ancestry and…
Tom Daniel
March 6, 2026
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Kin & Covenant: America’s Clan Culture

The American South has always been a collection of tight-knit communities rooted in family. The earliest settlers were often relatives or from neighboring European villages.  From the very beginning, this was the case almost unilaterally in America. Families immigrated together and moved in unified collectives across desired locales across the colonies. The first families of Virginia were mostly descended from…
Cole Branham
March 4, 2026
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The South and the American Empire

A Review of Joseph R. Stromberg, The South and the American Empire: Essays (Shotwell Publishing, 2026) Those familiar with the work of Joseph Stromberg know the mastery Stromberg has over the secondary literature in a diversity of academic fields. In the preface, Clyde Wilson states, “Joseph Stromberg is the consummate scholar for all seasons.  . . . is many essays…
John Devanny
March 2, 2026
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Thank You For Your Service

This proposal by an outgoing homosexual Democratic Party Virginia legislator to remove three statues - one of which is of a former governor (two times over!) of the Commonwealth - from the State Capitol grounds, is hardly surprising. Both Republicans and Democrats are guilty of historical cleansing, but Democrats are certainly worse in terms of Orwellian historical revisionism - and…
Rev. Larry Beane
February 27, 2026
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Quantrill: The Truth at Last

If you have seen the 1976 Clint Eastwood film “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” you may remember that it opens when the hero, a peaceful Missouri farmer, has his home destroyed and his wife killed by Kansas Jayhawkers.  He then joins the Southern guerilla fighters. This was the reality for thousands of Southerners living in western Missouri. An even better film,…
Clyde Wilson
February 24, 2026
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The Wrong Conclusions

This article addresses the actions of eleven Southern States in the middle of the 19th Century vis a vis the actions presently taking place in and by a number of States and urban areas including the motives and legality of such actions by both groups involved. This small study is being done in order to address what has become a…
Valerie Protopapas
February 23, 2026
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Minnesota Confederates?

Originally published at Reckonin.com Public officials in Minnesota - governor, attorney general, and mayor - are resisting enforcement of legitimate immigration law and encouraging their citizens to physically interfere with federal law enforcement. They have absurdly and perversely used States’ Rights arguments to justify their actions. There has even been ridiculous mention of the 10th Amendment which has been a…
Clyde Wilson
February 17, 2026
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Jefferson’s True Love

On January 1, 1772, Jefferson took as his wife the widow of Bathurst Skelton, Martha Wayles Skelton, at The Forest—the residence of John Wayles, father of Jefferson’s wife. Once married, the two set out for the long ride to Monticello. They drove their carriage in a light snow which became denser as they entered the Virginian countryside of Albemarle County.…
M. Andrew Holowchak
February 15, 2026
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It Really Is Blue

Originally published at Reckonin.com If you spend any time at all online, you're aware of the proliferation of artificial intelligence-created content. Tools exist which have made AI now easily accessible, free or cheap to use. This powerful tool is in the hands of the general public with virtually no oversight in place, and as you might imagine, the content being…
Anne Wilson Smith
February 13, 2026
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Bookmen South of Richmond

In October of 1949, Bernard Mannes Baruch walked into the Virginia State Library in Richmond with letters. One hundred fifty-two of them, written in a hand any student of the War would recognize, the neat, right-sloping script of Robert E. Lee. They were addressed to Jefferson Davis between 1862 and 1865, dispatched from field tents and hurried through the lines.…
Chase Steely
February 10, 2026
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“Our Confederacy”

The socialist-democrat party’s leaders—particularly Rep. Pelosi—have taken to referring to “our democracy.” The term serves as a cudgel against political opponents in the de-civilizers’ attempts to justify or garner support for whatever unethical, unlawful, or unhelpful activities they seek to advance. How many of them—or even ordinary American citizens—realize that in the antebellum period it was not uncommon to encounter…
Forrest L. Marion
February 5, 2026
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The Political Theory of Thomas Jefferson

A review of Luigi Marco Bassani’s Liberty, State, & Union: The Political Theory of Thomas Jefferson (Mercer, 2010). I am always appreciative when I can read the title of some book and it gives me some idea of the content of the book and its thesis. That might seem like a claim, mundane and perhaps even foolish. Are not all titles…
M. Andrew Holowchak
February 4, 2026
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Front Porches

When people talk about the history of American music, they almost always picture a stage, with a spotlight and a performer separated from an audience by footlights and distance. We imagine these grand, almost sacred spaces designed for reverence and applause. Of course, those places definitely matter, but they come late in the story. Southern music did not begin on…
Tom Daniel
February 3, 2026
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Two Secessionists

Most Americans continue to believe that Southerners invented secession (and nullification) as a defensive tactic to preserve slavery, and by "most Americans" I include so-called "conservatives" like Francis Sempa at The American Spectator and Hayden Daniel at The Federalist. According to this narrative, secession and nullification were little more than treasonous and petulant responses to justifiable federal laws. Both Sempa…
Brion McClanahan
February 2, 2026
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Southern Conservatism vs. Ideology

American conservatism and Southern conservatism are different. This statement may seem a little confusing since the South is part of America and, besides a brief period in the 1860s, has never existed separately from the United States. However, the society which developed south of Mason and Dixon’s line has a history and tradition stretching far back into the colonial days…
A.A. Wayne
January 23, 2026
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Conflicting Visions of America

Originally published at the Alabama Gazette. “The contest is really for empire on the side of the North, and for independence on that of the South, and in this respect we recognize an exact analogy between the North and the Government of George III, and the South and the Thirteen Revolted Provinces. These opinions may be wrong but they are…
John M. Taylor
January 22, 2026
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I Don’t Want Christmas to End

I Don’t Want Christmas to End, the 2021 Christmas album by Zach Williams, doesn’t feel as much seasonal as it feels Southern. Recorded at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Zach Williams’ first full-length holiday record does a lot more than borrow the iconography of classic American music as it absorbs the essence of the iconic studio that shaped American…
Tom Daniel
January 20, 2026
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Remembering Robert E. Lee

When Yale history professor David Blight wrote Race and Reunion in 2001, he argued that his attempt to discuss how Americans “remembered” the Civil War offered a new interpretation of the conflict. He termed it “memory studies.” Blight thought that Southerners—and for a time Northerners as well—remembered it wrong, and they did so consciously: Reconciliation joined arms with white supremacy…
Brion McClanahan
January 19, 2026
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Regional Roots in a Global Age

In the twenty-first century, global interconnectedness has become the dominant paradigm of social, economic, and political life. Cosmopolitan ideals, such as global citizenship, transnational governance, and the celebration of universal human rights, have been championed as markers of progress and modernity. Yet, this enthusiasm for a borderless world often comes at the expense of local and regional identities, which are…
Clifford A. Bates, Jr.
January 16, 2026
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The Long Battle Against the South Enters 2026

There have rarely been long-lasting Eras of Good Feelings in the United States.  Clashes between the various cultures existing within the union have more often than not been the norm – clashes over tariffs, wars, abortion, slavery, monetary policy, over the very nature of the union itself. Those clashes are not by any means absent as a new year is…
Walt Garlington
January 15, 2026
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Calhoun’s Doctrine of the Concurrent Majority

Originally published at Mises.org In the absence of effective checks on government power, all governments tend towards tyranny. This explains why John C. Calhoun defended the constitutional principle of limited government, emphasizing the importance of restraining the power of the majority. Calhoun argued that the aim of a constitution is not merely to confer power, but also to restrain it,…
Wanjiru Njoya
January 13, 2026
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Economic Problems of the Southeast

Originally published at Folkchain.org The remains of the Dutch-owned American ENKA plant cover the land in Lowland, Tennessee, like a steel skeleton picked clean. The smokestacks rise red against the sky, two of them, maybe a hundred fifty feet high. The parking lot has cracked enough to let a little wilderness in, an archipelago of grass and weeds pushing up…
Chase Steely
January 12, 2026
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Uncomfortable Truths for the Righteous Cause Myth

The following are uncomfortable truths for "Righteous Cause Mythologists:" 1. Africans created, organized, and supplied the international slave trade without any European involvement or direction, and Northers profited heavily from the institution. 2. Southerners established most of the early abolition societies in the United States. 3. "Jim Crow" segregation developed in Connecticut and was pervasive in New England in the…
Brion McClanahan
January 9, 2026
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An Open Letter to the University of the South

The University of the South appears poised to remove many, if not all, Confederate names and images from its campus and memory because they may smack of Southern treason/secession and slavery. Such removal is a poorly conceived idea. First, secession (i.e., "independence") is probably the one, true and great gift that America has offered Mankind. Second, slavery is an American,…
W.E. Shofner
January 6, 2026
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The Foreign Policy Wisdom America Ignored from John C. Calhoun

Few American statesmen traveled a more remarkable foreign policy journey than South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun (1782-1850). The young War Hawk who promised to conquer Canada in four weeks became the elder statesman warning that conquest would destroy the republic itself. Such a foreign policy transformation would seem foreign to present-day public officials, who are completely enthralled by the…
Jose Nino
January 5, 2026
Blog

What Does it Mean to be “Southern”?

What does it mean to be “Southern”? This question has vexed Americans since the founding. Every American knew that sectional differences existed. George Mason, for example, worried that the “Eastern States” would plunder the agricultural States further south. He drafted an amendment that would have prevented “navigation laws,” i.e. protective tariffs, for that reason. Gouverneur Morris openly suggested that if…
Brion McClanahan
December 30, 2025
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An Ode to the Magnificent Memory of CSA General Robert E. Lee

A noble son of Old Virginia, of which she ought to be always purely proud and say she knew, Was the ever honorable cavalier by the notable name of Robert E. Lee who decided to, Resist Northern tyranny, by fighting/or states' rights, native land. and to ably assure and see, That the Southern people might remain free, if only the…
Joseph A. Settanni
December 29, 2025
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Eggnog Nationalism

Originally published at Folk Chain of Memory. Winter often brought reprieve in the wars of the past, but not in the Eggnog War. Unlike the fashionable moral ambiguities peddled by our gender-ambiguous storytellers, this war permits no compromise. Here we find no fashionable shades of gray. We’re not flipping houses. The Eggnog Question divides as clearly as foundations, rock against…
Chase Steely
December 24, 2025
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Liberty and the Plow: Defending Our Rights Against Federal Overreach

Originally published at Medium.com By Agricola, a Freeholder of the Republic “Liberty is preserved not by distant power, but by limits placed upon it.” As a third generation agrarian in the Western United States, I inherit not only the soil worked by my family but also the principles they instilled in me — chief among them, the sanctity of private…
Darcy Lammers
December 23, 2025
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A Vaudeville of Devils

This piece was originally published at A Memoir of the Occupation. (Wars in the age of mass democracy are waged over ideas, a wise man once said (maybe Collingwood, though I can’t find the quote). So, yes: I’m happy to grant that slavery was a cause of the War Between the States. Or, rather, the portrait of slavery conjured by…
Enoch Cade
December 22, 2025
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The Matrix, MAGA, and the Southern Tradition

As with many technological developments in American history, such as the internet itself, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being introduced with little occasion for the populace to be informed as to its potential impact or any opportunity for them to weigh in with their concerns.  Such is life in the Republic of Technology, aka The Machine.  Rather, the entire debate is…
Mike Goodloe
December 19, 2025
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The Forgotten Voyagers

In the shadowed corners of American history lies a story rarely told, a narrative of colonists who crossed an ocean twice to forge communities in the swamps and plains of the Deep South. These were the Isleños, a people whose very name whispers of distant shores and forgotten tongues. The Spanish word for "Islander" would come to identify an entire…
Jose Nino
December 18, 2025
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Not Gone–Just Blowing with the Wind

In the movie Gone with the Wind, just after the credits were presented there was a forward line as follows: “There was a land of cavaliers and cotton fields called the old south. Here in this pretty land gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last to be seen of knights and their ladies fair; of master and of…
Paul H. Yarbrough
December 17, 2025
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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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
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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
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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
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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
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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