Monthly Archives

February 2018

Blog

Who’s Going to Fill Their Shoes?

When I was very young, I recall my father telling me of George "No-Show" Jones, a country music legend. The moniker, I was told, was given after Jones failed to play a concert in some town in Texas. He was said to be seen riding a motorcycle in the opposite direction of his "postponed" performance, with a very attractive blonde…
Christopher J. Carter
February 28, 2018
Review Posts

Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States

A review of Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States (Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2014) by Gene Kizer, Jr. In all my growing up years I was taught that the War Between the States was fought over slavery. That's what the "history" books, so called, told us and it is certainly what the "news media" has screamed…
Al Benson
February 27, 2018
Blog

Spencer Roane

“It has been our happiness to believe, that in the partition of powers between the general and State governments, the former possessed only such as were expressly granted, or passed therewith as necessary incidents, while all the residuary powers were reserved by the latter.” Spencer Roane Had one-time friends John Adams and Thomas Jefferson not had such a high-profile and…
Joe Wolverton
February 26, 2018
Podcast

Podcast Episode 109

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Feb 19-23, 2018 Topics: the War, Reconstruction, North over South, Southern politics https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-109
Brion McClanahan
February 24, 2018
Blog

A City Upon a Hill

Recently, Business Insider editor, MSNBC contributor, and public-radio personality Josh Barro called the left’s war on American culture “annoying.” He explained that “Liberals have supplanted conservatives as moralizing busybodies.” New York Magazine‘s Jonathan Chait even tweeted support of Barro’s “sensible thoughts,” calling out the Democrats’ supposedly new-found misadventure of “liberal sanctimony.” Funny that in all his talk condemning such “moralizing,” neo-liberal Barro went on to further pontificate about the Dems suffering “from a cultural disconnect…
Dissident Mama
February 23, 2018
Blog

Washington and Lee: Southerners

Abbeville Institute scholar Dr. William Wilson presents a talk on the congruity between Washington and Lee at our 2016 Abbeville Institute Summer School. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkgsJc9KCyQ
William Wilson
February 22, 2018
Blog

Judas and Jeff

  Judas failed in his purpose because he failed to recognize the coming of Christ for what it was: The coming of God with His presentation, gift, of grace. Judas followed Christ, as an apostle, never seeming to understand why Christ came or even who He was, thus carrying him to treachery and his own death and condemnation by God…
Paul H. Yarbrough
February 21, 2018
Review Posts

Souls of Lions

A review of R. E. Mitchell. Souls of Lions (Bloomington, Indiana: iUniverse LLC, 2014). Very seldom do I review novels, even historical ones. But R. E. Mitchell’s volume, Souls of Lions, after just a few pages, captured my attention and kept me glued to my couch seat for several days until I had finished it…and with its surprising and fascinating…
Boyd Cathey
February 20, 2018
Blog

“True Grit” as a Reconstruction Story

Although labeled a Western, True Grit is also a novel about Reconstruction in Arkansas and the Indian Territory that would become eastern Oklahoma. The Reconstruction aspects are more evident in the novel, which turns fifty years old this year, than in the movies. The story is about fourteen year old Mattie Ross who leaves her mother, sister and little brother at home…
Philip Leigh
February 19, 2018
Podcast

Podcast Episode 108

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Feb 12-16, 2018. Topics: Political Correctness, Southern poetry, Southern literature, the War. https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-108
Brion McClanahan
February 17, 2018
Blog

Lies James Loewen Tells Us

Propaganda. It’s a well-known word defined as “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.” And, I might add, used for the purpose of demonizing and destroying one’s enemies. The South has had more than its fair share of time in the crosshairs of Yankee propaganda, and…
Ryan Walters
February 16, 2018
Blog

Northern Lies about the Burning of Columbia

When you hear or read about the burning of Columbia, General Sherman’s principal target in South Carolina, you are often told that the origin of the fire is a historical mystery that can't be conclusively solved, or that the fires were actually initiated by the evacuating Confederate troops, or even by the citizens of Columbia themselves—none of which is true.…
Karen Stokes
February 15, 2018
Blog

Southern Art and Design Doesn’t Matter…Unless You’re on the Left.

For as many years as I’ve been an artist, I’ve seen numerous Southerners, Christians, libertarians and other traditionalist-minded folks wring their hands over people subscribing to this or that tenant of leftist ideology, but then turn around and market their own ideas in just about the most boring manner possible. Because if there’s anything the left has done exceptionally well,…
Lewis Liberman
February 14, 2018
Review Posts

“‘Finished in Beauty’ and in Memories”: Catharine Savage Brosman’s Book of Hours

A review-essay on A Memory of Manaus: Poems by Catharine Savage Brosman. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2017. A Memory of Manaus, Catharine Brosman’s eleventh full-length collection of poetry, confirms her rightful place in the front rank of contemporary American poets. Working skillfully in both traditional forms and in tightly controlled free verse, Brosman is among that very small number…
David Middleton
February 13, 2018
Blog

The South’s Stockholm Syndrome

The Stockholm Syndrome is a condition where captives or hostages develop a psychological attachment and loyalty to their captors.  Psychologists often describe this syndrome as a “survival strategy.”    This strategy is employed by captives when all hope for returning to a normal life appears to be lost.  By befriending one’s all-powerful captors, life is preserved within the new “normal” order. …
Walter D. (Donnie) Kennedy
February 12, 2018
Podcast

Podcast Episode 107

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Feb 5-9, 2018 Topics: Southern film, Southern humor, Southern literature, Political Correctness, Southern politics. https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-107
Brion McClanahan
February 10, 2018
Blog

Gator McKlusky

Everyone wanted to be Southern in the 1970s. The rejuvenated interest in Southern music from bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Charlies Daniels, and the Allman Brothers (and the unknown Southern influence in the "Motown" sound) was just one component of a larger pro-Southern, working class, populist movement. Southerners had been made consciously Southern again after over a decade of national attention,…
Brion McClanahan
February 9, 2018
Blog

Purging Graveyards for Progress

Yes, give me a land with a grave in each spot And names in the graves that shall not be forgot; Yes, give me the land of the wreck and the tomb-- There is grandeur in graves--there is glory in gloom The new Kulturekampf, having already eyed and attacked the more visible elements of Dixie identity in prominent places across…
Christopher J. Carter
February 8, 2018
Blog

Georgia Scenes

When Georgia Scenes came from an Augusta, Georgia press in 1835, the literary world realized (to varying degrees) that here was a new kind of book. It took a discerning critic like Edgar Allan Poe to recognize so immediately that its “verisimilitude” was an outstanding trait. What was so radically new about the work was its author’s intention not to…
James Everett Kibler
February 7, 2018
Review Posts

Remember Mississippi

A review of Remember Mississippi: How Chris McDaniel Exposed the GOP Establishment and Inspired a Revolution (WND, 2017) by Ryan S. Walters. Ryan S. Walters, who is book review editor for Abbeville Institute and editor of Mississippi Conservative Daily, has produced a highly readable biography of his close friend, Chris McDaniel. For those who may not remember, McDaniel is the…
Paul Gottfried
February 6, 2018
Blog

In the Eye of the Beholder

Once upon a time in America, in a far different and far more gentle age, it was possible for four young men from Memphis, Tennessee, to appear at a performance in a Northern city dressed as Confederate officers and sing a song entitled “Save Your Confederate Money Boys, the South Shall Rise Again” without being booed off the stage. Not…
John Marquardt
February 5, 2018
Podcast

Podcast Episode 106

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Jan 29-Feb 2, 2018. Topics: Sectionalism, Secession, Southern Economics, the War, Political Correctness https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-106
Brion McClanahan
February 3, 2018
Blog

Killed for the Flag

Anthony Hervey was born in Water Valley, Mississippi in 1965. He grew up in Oxford, served in the military for a short period, then went on to the University of Mississippi, where he studied sociology and Afro Studies. He then traveled to London, England where he studied Race & Ethnicity at the University of London and served as an intern…
Michael Martin
February 2, 2018
Blog

Southern Speech

A little while ago, I spent some time at Colonial Williamsburg as a tourist. While my wife was getting dressed for dinner our first evening, I happened to watch a short film on TV entitled Portrait of a Patriot, which, I learned, was piped into all of the area hotels and motels. Briefly, the film is set in and around…
Roger W. Cole
February 1, 2018