Monthly Archives

March 2020

Review Posts

Roots of a Revolutionary Ideology

A review of Progressivism: The Strange History of a Radical Idea (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) by Bradley C.S. Watson At the height of the Progressive Movement in 1914, William P. Merrill published a poem he called “The Day of the People Is Dawning.” The liberal Presbyterian minister and ally of Andrew Carnegie’s world peace movement bid farewell to…
Richard M. Gamble
March 31, 2020
Blog

Richard Weaver, the Coronavirus, and the Strenuous Life

In Ideas Have Consequences (1948), Richard Weaver described comfort as the god of modern man.  Even in our post-modern times, mass man continues to kneel at the altar of comfort though he occasionally does obeisance to lesser gods such as equality and wokeness.  Weaver’s writings challenged man to exchange the ease promised by technological advancement for a strenuous and romantic…
William J. Watkins
March 30, 2020
Podcast

Podcast Episode 210

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, March 23-27, 2020 Topics: Political Correctness, the Southern Tradition, Southern Film https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-210
Brion McClanahan
March 28, 2020
Blog

#TakeEmDown Comes to Yankeetown

From Dylann Roof to Harvey Weinstein Many of us predicted it.  The war on American monuments and memorials wouldn’t stop with just stop with Confederate ones.  It wasn’t hard to figure out, but the answer was always, ‘yeah, but they’re not going after Northern “civil war” monuments. And of course we said, “what about the 54th MA Infantry monument” which…
Lola Sanchez
March 27, 2020
Blog

A Southerner’s Movie Guide, Part XV

21.   Faulkner in Film   Southern viewers must naturally be interested in what Hollywood has done with America’s greatest 20th century writer, William Faulkner of Mississippi. **Intruder in the Dust (1949).  Perhaps the most faithful of all Faulkner’s work on film, and a realistic portrayal of Southern life in the early 20th century.  An old lady (Elizabeth Patterson) and two boys,…
Clyde Wilson
March 26, 2020
Blog

The Duty of the Hour

The first thing I learned about Lieutenant-General Nathan Bedford Forrest was that he had twenty-nine horses shot out from under him in battle; in my fifth-grade social studies class, I remember thinking to myself that the most dangerous thing one could be was one of Forrest’s horses. The unconquerable Tennessean was bold, severe, and uncompromising in the discharge of his…
Neil Kumar
March 25, 2020
Review Posts

Individual Responsibility and Guilt

A review of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) by Susan Neiman Susan Neiman is a philosopher who has written well-regarded books on Kant and on the problem of evil. Last year she published a book with an unusual title: Learning From the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil.  Neiman…
David Gordon
March 24, 2020
Blog

Can the Southern Tradition Save America?

“Where you gonna be when half of California riots? Where you gonna run to when the lights go out? I won’t be hangin’ out in California, I won’t try it. Buddy I’ll be up and headed South.” Jamey Johnson The Wuhan virus has sparked a renewed interest in the Southern tradition. No one is saying that, but it’s true. Donald…
Brion McClanahan
March 23, 2020
Podcast

Podcast Episode 209

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, March 16-20, 2020 Topics: Political Correctness, John C. Calhoun, Agrarianism, Southern Tradition https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-209
Brion McClanahan
March 21, 2020
Blog

Violence Breeds Violence

Estimates of the number of South Vietnamese civilian casualties during the U.S. war in Vietnam vary. A U.S. Dept. of Defense estimate put the numbers at 1.2 million, including 195,000 killed.  In 1975, a U.S. Senate sub-committee put the total at 1.4 million casualties, including 415,000 killed. The majority of those killed were women and children. In 1995, the Vietnamese…
Norman Black
March 20, 2020
Blog

A Southerner’s Movie Guide, Part XIV

19.  Our Speech The experts will tell you that there is more than one Southern accent.  This is true, but they all gather together as a marker of Southern that has been widely recognised for a long time---like barbecue.   For Hollywood a Southern accent usually is outre’, a sign of ignorance or villainy as discussed in preceding chapters. On the…
Clyde Wilson
March 19, 2020
Blog

Federalists Still Attack Calhoun

John C. Calhoun was the last eloquent political philosopher to stand against the ideology and intentions of the Federalists. He was the last to stand firmly in the halls of the Senate and articulate exactly what it would mean to allow power to become centralized under an unconstrained federal government. He died in 1850.  His words are ignored and personage…
Barry Clark
March 18, 2020
Review Posts

Kentucky Hobbits

A review of The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom That Tolkien Got, and the West Forgot (Ignatius Press, 2014), by Jonathan Witt and Jay W. Richards. Russell Kirk often said that his true formation as a conservative had more to do with reading the novels of Sir Walter Scott than anything else. We also know from James Kibler’s work,…
Garrett Agajanian
March 17, 2020
Blog

All the Fake News That’s Fit to Print

As explained yesterday, Washington Post reporter Courtland Milloy maligned my “Defending Confederate Monuments” speech presented on Lee-Jackson Day in Lexington, Virginia. He asked that I send him a copy while we were sitting together in the front audience row during the preliminaries. I emailed it before I took the podium. After my speech he thanked me and said, “I will be in touch.” But…
Philip Leigh
March 16, 2020
Podcast

Podcast Episode 208

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, March 9-13, 2020 Topics: The Lost Cause Myth, Southern Film, Righteous Cause Mythology https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-208
Brion McClanahan
March 14, 2020
Blog

The Economy, Stupid

Just as the Earth revolves on its axis each day and travels around the Sun in an equally regular pattern, so has world history tended to be cyclical in nature throughout the centuries, with many episodes seemingly being repeated countless times over.  In many cases the basic cause behind such recurring cataclysmic events as war, radical changes in political systems…
John Marquardt
March 13, 2020
Blog

A Southerner’s Movie Guide, Part XIII

18.  World War II and Other Wars “To deliver examples to posterity, and to regulate the opinion of future times, is no slight or trivial undertaking;  nor is it easy to commit  more atrocious treason against the great republic of humanity, than by falsifying its records and misguiding its decrees.”      –Dr. Samuel Johnson American wars are started by bankers and…
Clyde Wilson
March 12, 2020
Blog

A Forgotten Spiritual Hero

Daniel Baker (1791-1857) is all but forgotten today, but in the first half of the nineteenth century this Presbyterian minister was a well-known and profoundly influential evangelist in America.  Born in Midway, Georgia, he was educated at Hampden Sydney College in Virginia and at Princeton.  He held several pastorates, including one in Savannah, Georgia, but spent most of his life…
Karen Stokes
March 11, 2020
Review Posts

The Myth of the Lost Cause

A review of The Myth of the Lost Cause: Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North Won (Regnery History, 2015 ) by Edward Bonekemper The late Edward H. Bonekemper III had a bachelor’s degree from Muhlenberg College and a master's degree in American history from Old Dominion University. He also had a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School. He retired…
John C. Whatley
March 10, 2020
Blog

A Skeleton in the Yankee Progressive Closet

The common impression about the Klan is that it is a Southern anti-Black White Supremacist group and that the group’s characteristics and methods have been consistent since its inception.  As anyone with more than a superficial knowledge of history knows, this is far from true, yet modern historians and commentators, many of the neo-conservative variety, seemingly purposely perpetuate these myths. …
James (Jim) Pederson
March 9, 2020
Podcast

Podcast Episode 207

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, March 2-6, 2020 Topics: Secession, Southern Tradition, Agrariansim, Conservation https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-207
Brion McClanahan
March 8, 2020
Blog

Bernie Sanders and Simon Legree: Real and Imaginary

Bernie Sanders wants to bring back slavery. This raises the question: can he have the 13th Amendment repealed? Who says that it hasn’t already been repealed? Bernie says, among other Communistic pronouncements, that “health care is a right.” Well, if that is so, then someone: doctor, nurse, medic, etc must provide it. That is unless Bernie, the Commie, means that…
Paul H. Yarbrough
March 6, 2020
Blog

A Southerner’s Movie Guide, Part XII

16.  EXECRABLES. The Worst Movies about the South: A Small Selection The competition here is fierce. We can only provide a sample of some of the worst.  A few examples out of a vast field, many of them presenting a ludicrously distorted South.  (X)  The Southerner (1945). This movie was made by a famous French director while a refugee in…
Clyde Wilson
March 5, 2020
Review Posts

A Mass for the Resurrection

A review of Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence (ISI Books, 1999) edited by Herbert Agar and Allen Tate In graduate school, I was assigned by the resident “New South” historian I’ll Take My Stand by Twelve Southerners as my final paper.  I eagerly accepted the project.  This was in my back-yard, so to speak.  I had read…
Brion McClanahan
March 3, 2020
Blog

An Environmental Right

I started my political journey on what I thought to be the Left. Books like Klein’s The Shock Doctrine resonated with me, as did films like American Beauty and Revolutionary Road. My favorite childhood films were Atlantis and The Iron Giant. All of these works are part of a long line of salient critiques of the deracinated culture of consumption…
Neil Kumar
March 2, 2020