Monthly Archives

January 2017

Blog

Never the North, Always the South

"I think every heritage has things that are good about it, every heritage has things that are harmful about it," replied Representative Tom Price recently to a question from Senator Tim Kaine. "And I'm happy to answer the specific question. I think slavery was an abomination." Price was being interviewed for Donald Trump’s choice for Secretary of Health and Human…
Paul H. Yarbrough
January 31, 2017
Blog

Calexit: California, Adios!

It seems that out in California an impressively large number of people are petitioning for a referendum on secession.  While I don’t think much of their motive, I say more power to them. The motivation is, of course, fear by California leftists and foreigners that the 2016 federal election has deprived them of the excessive influence they have exercised over…
Clyde Wilson
January 30, 2017
Podcast

Podcast Episode 56

Editor's note: McClanahan misspoke at the beginning of the podcast. This is episode 56, not 55. The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Jan 23-27, 2017. Topics: Southern women, Ashley Judd, Southern literature. https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-56
Brion McClanahan
January 28, 2017
Review Posts

Octavia Walton Le Vert

Fredrika Bremer calls the subject of this sketch her "sweet Rose of Florida." She certainly is a "Rose that all are praising." It would require the scope of a full biography to change this rose into a bud, and then, petal by petal, to unfold the bud again to the rose; after all, we might not find the dew-drop at…
Julia Deane Freeman
January 27, 2017
Blog

My Fantasy Visit with Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty once said that "Each writer must find out for himself, I imagine, on what strange basis he lives with his own stories." This has always struck me as a particularly profound observation about not only the writer's life, but "life" in general, the "stories" we all live. Eudora Welty. One of America's all-time great writers. One of America's…
Wayne Hogan
January 26, 2017
Blog

A Bow to the Ladies

A review of Understanding Mary Lee Settle, by George Garrett, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 1988, 187 pages. One useful way to distinguish between types of novelists is to characterize them as either intensive or extensive. An intensive novel, much the more com­mon variety in modern times, deals with a small segment of individual experi­ence and consciousness, wringing from…
Clyde Wilson
January 25, 2017
Review Posts

Forgotten Heroines of the Confederacy

Millions know Scarlett O'Hara's fictional story. Yet few among even the staunchest Southerners know the true stories of Confederate heroines like Molly Tynes, Lola Sanchez, Lottie and Ginnie Moon, Erneline Pigott, Robbie Woodruff, Antonia Ford, Nancy Hart and Alice Thompson. Some of these women en¬joyed a measure of local recognition, but others had to cloak their deeds in secrecy for…
Anne Funderburg
January 24, 2017
Blog

Ashley Judd Gets Nasty

  “Treat a woman like a lady, And your lady like a queen….” Charlie Daniels Ashley Judd’s recitation of “I’m a Nasty Woman” at the “women’s” march on Washington D.C. splashed across every media outlet in America. Judd proudly proclaimed to be a feminist and then launched into a verbal diatribe against “racism, fraud, conflict of interest, homophobia, sexual assault,…
Brion McClanahan
January 23, 2017
Podcast

Podcast Episode 55

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Jan 16-20, 2017. Topics: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Southern History, Dixie, Political Correctness https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-55
Brion McClanahan
January 22, 2017
Blog

The Dixie Curse

In the tradition of all authority to trample love and devotion, an outsider (or perhaps a group of) has decided to cut into the heart of a people’s birthright. Ross Bjork, University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) athletic director has in all his Kansas wisdom arbitrarily and highhandedly told the world that no renditions of the grand old song, “Dixie,” will…
Paul H. Yarbrough
January 20, 2017
Blog

Robert E. Lee: American Hero

Several years ago, leftist blowhard Richard Cohen at the Washington Post wrote that Robert E. Lee “deserves no honor — no college, no highway, no high school. In the awful war (620,000 dead) that began 150 years ago this month, he fought on the wrong side for the wrong cause. It’s time for Virginia and the South to honor the…
Brion McClanahan
January 19, 2017
Blog

Recovering Southern History

Every historian has a viewpoint, shaped by his own background, values, and perception of the present. The relationship between background and viewpoint is not necessarily simple. As in the case of Supreme Court nominees, one cannot always predict in advance in what direction a historians background, modified by research and thought, will lead. At any rate, we properly measure a…
Clyde Wilson
January 18, 2017
Review Posts

Stonewall: By Name and Nature

Stonewall lay dying of his wounds at Chancellorsville — "the most successful movement of my life," he murmured, and then remembered to give full credit to God. "I feel His hand led me." He had smashed Fighting Joe Hooker and 134,000 invaders of Virginia with 60,000 Confederates. Jackson didn't mention General Robert E. Lee who was with the reserves that…
Holmes Alexander
January 17, 2017
Blog

This is Mosby

V.P. Hughes, A Thousand Points of Truth: The History and Humanity of Colonel John Singleton Mosby in Newsprint (XLIBRIS, 2016). Given command over a semi-independent unit of partisan rangers in the Army of Northern Virginia, a dashing young Confederate major led a cavalry raid at the Fairfax county courthouse, deep behind Federal lines. With just a handful of men and…
James Rutledge Roesch
January 16, 2017
Podcast

Podcast Episode 54

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Jan 9-13, 2017. Topics: The Southern Tradition, C.S. Lewis, 19th Century Politics, Donald Trump, Southern Culture https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-54
Brion McClanahan
January 15, 2017
Blog

The Window on the West

Editor's note: This piece was published less than ten years (1983) before the end of communist control of Romania. Bradford's assessment of the Romanian people well applies to the South, a region that had been defeated and "reconstructed" but still retained much of its cultural vibrancy, albeit suppressed and ridiculed by the political class. It also serves as a stark…
M.E. Bradford
January 13, 2017
Blog

Papa Daws

Three long ringing signals from I the driver's horn, and the hunt was over. I quit my stand and met Dad on the road back of our line. We had both seen a doe that had kept us on our toes for a while, but otherwise, the drive had been uneventful. We fell quiet and listened. Then Dad asked if…
Henry D. Boykin II
January 12, 2017
Blog

Differences

How much better off the American people would be if they could learn the difference between: *investors and speculators *the Constitution ratified by the people of the States and the one promulgated by federal judges *education and training *necessary taxation and an oppressive burden *national defense and foreign interventionism *law enforcement and war *justifiable borrowing and destructive, irresponsible debt *entertainment…
Clyde Wilson
January 11, 2017
Review Posts

Old Western Man: C.S. Lewis and the Old South

I write not as an expert to tell you of my thought but to explain a particular concept of Lewis's and my own application of it to the Old South. Almost everyone knows something about C.S. Lewis as a writer of extremely readable children's books (about the land of Narnia that can be entered through the back of an old…
Sheldon Vanauken
January 10, 2017
Blog

Dan Sickles and the First Presidential Cover-Up

In our time, we think we know a lot about presidential cover-ups. There was Nixon's Watergate, of course. Some of us remember Lyndon Johnson's problems with Bobby Baker. And President Kennedy had his secret girlfriends. All of these, however, are minor matters compared to the granddaddy of them all, the biggest presidential cover-up in American history, the murder of Barton…
William H. Hunter
January 9, 2017
Podcast

Podcast Episode 53

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Jan 2-6, 2017 Topics: Secession, Southwestern History, the Southern Tradition, Federalism, Old Republicans https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-53
Brion McClanahan
January 8, 2017
Blog

Things as They Are

William S. Belko, Philip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian America: An Old Republican in King Andrew’s Court (The University of Alabama Press, 2016). Sometimes a professional historian gets it right. William Belko has produced a quality tome that both expands and enhances our understanding of American history. While most academics write about the same subjects and regurgitate fashionable theories with “new”…
Brion McClanahan
January 6, 2017
Blog

A State of Mind

On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia offered a resolution to the Second Continental Congress, then meeting in Philadelphia, which began with the epic demand, “ That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.”   After a month of heated deliberation, the Congress finally adopted Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence which…
John Marquardt
January 5, 2017
Blog

Tar Heel’s Revenge

  An article by a Canadian historian in a recent issue of the North Carolina Historical Review lays to rest an old canard—the charge that during the War for Southern Independence North Carolina soldiers were notable for desertion. After an exhaustive study of all available records, Professor Richard Reid concluded that it simply is not so. North Carolina had more…
Clyde Wilson
January 4, 2017
Review Posts

J. Evetts Haley and the Mind of the South

American historians often write of a contrast between the South, a closed reactionary society, and the West, free and open and characteristically American. The dichotomy thus presented is a false one. The West is the South. That is, to the extent that the West is a theatre for heroic action, rather than just a place to start a new business,…
Guy Story Brown
January 3, 2017
Blog

See ya–Signed C.S.A.

A fellow by the name of Marcus Ruiz Evans was on Fox’s Tucker Carlson program recently. He offered his stance on secession vis-à-vis California’s consideration. His position stood apropos for the Golden Bears because the Supreme Court in its Texas vs White decision of 1869 had offered a loophole bearing on the people’s consent to secede. This bears, of course,…
Paul H. Yarbrough
January 2, 2017