The Neo-Puritan War on Christmas
“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” – H. L. Mencken “Let any man of contrary opinion open his mouth to persuade them [the Puritans], they close up their ears, his reasons… »
The Land We Love
A review of The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage (Scuppernong Press, 2018) by Boyd Cathey I must confess that I feel a bit awkward about reviewing Dr. Boyd Cathey’s outstanding anthology, The… »
What Does the Fracturing of the American Identity Mean for the Southern Tradition?
The Abbeville Institute conducted three conferences this year on the fracturing of American national identity and what means for the Southern tradition and the Southern people. The general public knows America is coming apart and… »
Southern Music is American Music
Why do Southerners continue to fall into that trap where we only talk about the years1861-1865? There are almost 400 years of Southern culture to talk about, yet we keep limiting ourselves to just four… »
The Tragedy of Land Use in the South
For all of the pontificating of the virtues of the South, we have increasingly seen our agrarian landscape polluted by strip malls and environmental contamination. I make the case that neither of these things are… »
What Country Legend Roy Clark’s Death Symbolizes for America in 2018
The news came Thursday, November 15, that country music legend, Virginia-born Roy Clark had passed away at age 85. For those either too young to know who Clark was, or who perhaps never cottoned to… »
Why Aren’t Americans Interested in History?
The study of history cannot be neatly contained behind the tall foreboding doors of an ivory tower nor swept under the rugs of dusty corner offices housing stacks of paper. It bleeds into other fields… »
Was the Old South Feudal?
Was the Old South Feudal? Eugene Genovese wrote several works on antebellum slavery that essentially argued the Old South was neither feudal nor capitalist. His book Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in… »
Southern Memories of the Good Ol’ Days
Having traveled in all fifty states, I must admit there are certain areas of this great country that continue to draw me back, time and again, to enjoy their natural beauty, pleasing climate, and their… »
The Old South’s Poor Whites
There was a time, before universal white male suffrage and the closing of the frontier, when the poor whites of the South were considered shiftless and without caste. If we were to look at the… »
