The Battle of Athens, Tennessee
On August 1, 1946, a group of Southern World War Two veterans in Athens, Tennessee, fought and won the only successful armed insurrection in the United States since the War of Independence. These brave men… »
The Colored Sacred Harp
I have written here before about the history and mechanics of Sacred Harp singing, shape-notes, and Singing Schools. James Kibler has delivered some truly excellent talks about Singing Billy Walker and the origins of Amazing… »
The Strange Career of Segregation
In the beginning, there was no segregation, certainly not in the sense that we commonly use that term today. Consider in evidence our Southern distinctiveness, which is rooted in a folk culture compounded of black… »
Rebuilding from the Rubble
‘ . . . you know only A heap of broken images . . .’ –T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land I. Destruction The description of the South as a land that has fallen into… »
Southern Populism and the South’s Agrarian Identity
In what passes for political and cultural discourse today, the term “populist” is something of a pejorative, conjuring up images in the mind of the cultural and academic elite of dangerous folks with pitchforks and… »
Don’t Remove Confederate Monuments
This essay was presented at the 2019 Abbeville Institute Summer School on the New South. In 1965 Texas novelist William Humphrey wrote: If the Civil War is more alive to the Southerner than the Northerner… »
Strom Thurmond, the “Dixiecrats,” and Southern Identity
This essay was presented at our 2019 Summer School on The New South. James Strom Thurmond, or Strom, was born on December 5, 1902 in Edgefield, South Carolina. This historic county was also the home… »
Where the Grapes of Wrath are Stored
This essay was presented at our 2019 Summer School on the New South. Fundamentalism is often viewed as the most Southern of religions. Yet this is not so. It was an alien seed planted in… »
Punished with Poverty
A review of Punished with Poverty: The Suffering South-Prosperity to Poverty & the Continuing Struggle (Shotwell, 2016) by James Ronald and Walter Donald Kennedy This is one of the most important works of American history… »
No Eulogies
In I Kings 21, we see that Naboth did not feel that he had the right to sell the family land no matter how much money King Ahab offered. The land was not his except… »
