Virginia, more than any other state, forged what most people throughout the world considered to be an “American” culture. She was the home of presidents, jurists, and statesmen, explorers and adventurers, and some of the greatest military heroes in American history. Her sons established the first permanent English foothold in America, blazed trails to the west, mapped the seas, drafted the founding documents, crafted our debates over the powers of the Supreme Court and the general government, provided the foundation for the Bill of Rights, established representative government, dominated the origins of American music, free religion, and the writing of history, and birthed the first American heroes. America, as we know it, would not exist without Virginia. This is a positive narrative of the American experience designed to wrest control of the American story from both “conservative” and “progressive” historians and their gloomy, ideologically driven New England narrative. Virginia should be the American sun, the “lamp of experience” in a world of destructive political and historical innovation. As Lyon Gardiner Tyler writes in his opening essay “Virginia First”: “The United States of America are mere words of description. They are not a name. The rightful and historic name of this great republic is Virginia. We must get back to it if the country’s name is to have any real significance.”

Year Published: 2024
Editor: Brion McClanahan

THE 16 BRADFORD ESSAYS INCLUDED HERE range over a variety of Faulkner’s literary productions, though the emphasis lies especially on the shorter fiction—both widely known and studied stories like “Barn Burning” and lesser-known texts like “Golden Land.” Thematically, the essays reflect, of course, Bradford’s own personal predilections, though there is no doubt that the recurring themes were also central to Faulkner’s aims as a writer: the profound gravity of the past as it informs the present; the “peculiar” and tragic—even mythic— trajectory of Southern history; the powerful sense of place and attachment to the land; the importance not only of the old Southern hierarchies—especially the legacy of the antebellum planter class—but also of the yeomanry or “plain folk”; and the preeminent moral importance of endurance.

Year Published: 2024
Author: M.E. Bradford
Editor: Jack Trotter

Faulkner the Southerner is the first biography to place Faulkner in the context of his Southern culture and the continuity of Southern letters. Doing so helps prevent glaring misreadings of his fiction. The book’s thirteen chapters explore Faulkner’s humor, sense of honor, rootedness in place, criticism of the machine culture, and racial attitudes. It treats Faulkner the raconteur, successful farmer, sensitive preservationist, conservative, and Southern traditionalist in the patterns of the English gentry.

Year Published: 2023
Author: James E. Kibler

How Radical Republican Antislavery Rhetoric and Violence Precipitated Secession, October 1859-April 1861

The southern states democratically voted to leave the Union in 1860-61. Why southern voters (the majority of whom did not own slaves) should wish to leave the Union is still hotly debated. This book explores a series of acts of antislavery violence between October 1859 and April 1861, committed by northerners, supported by Republicans, and winked at by the Republican Party (Harper’s Ferry, northern prior support for the raid, northern post-facto endorsement of John Brown, the Helper book, the Texas troubles). When a Republican was elected to the White House in 1860, southerners interpreted that as an endorsement of antislavery violence, so they voted to leave the Union.

Published: 2022
Author: D Jonathan White

This is the first book-length treatment of the South’s veneration of the classics and how it has distinguished her literature and culture for four centuries. In this much enlarged second edition, Kibler includes authors from the colonial era through James Dickey to broaden his findings, and expands the treatment of British cultural ties by showing how the South and agrarian English Gentry were shaped from classical models.

Year Published: 2023
Author: James Everett Kibler

This is a study of American political thought between the secession from Britain and the War Between the States. This period was a struggle between the Jeffersonian and the Hamiltonian visions of America. The Jeffersonians favored a highly decentralized federation of sovereign states, whereas the Hamiltonians favored a highly centralized state with a veto on state legislation.

Year Published: 2021
Author: Luigi Marco Bassani, Ph.D

Johnston describes the impact of race, slavery, civil rights and religion in one Southern family over five generations. The core figure of the book is General John Hartwell Cocke (1780-1866) a Virginia planter, antislavery advocate and younger friend and contemporary of Thomas Jefferson. The book tells the story of the General’s life and family, his conversion to Christianity and his moral objections to slavery. On a solid business and practical foundation the General carried our an emancipation project that lasted for twenty years before the onset of the Civil War.

Year Published: 2021
Author: Caryl Johnston

America was born out of a revolution, the ideals of which became the foundation of conservatism, principles that were best espoused by Thomas Jefferson. Until Lincoln’s election in 1860, America was a Jeffersonian Republic. But after Lincoln’s counter-revolution, which transformed the Union, Jeffersonian political thought all but disappeared. Yet in the 1880s and 1890s it made a brief comeback with Grover Cleveland, the Thomas Jefferson of the Gilded Age, who tried to return the country to the Age of Jefferson. Cleveland, though, would be the last of these Jeffersonian political fathers and the last president to uphold these traditional American values. By studying Cleveland’s policies and ideals, we can relearn those forgotten lessons of ancient times and restore the American republic of republics.

Published: 2021
Author: Ryan Walters

WHAT WE HAVE KNOWN as “the South” has been for four centuries a major part of the American identity. This is true whether measured by population, territory, history, or culture, high and folk. In 2002 a group of scholars led by Donald Livingston founded the Abbeville Institute to combat intellectually the ongoing campaign to eliminate the South from “America,” a campaign now dominant in public discourse.

Year Published: 2019
Contributors: David Aiken, Boyd D. Cathey, William Cawthon, Tom Daniel, John Devanny, Richard Gamble, Paul Gottfried, Paul C. Graham, Ben “Cooter” Jones, Thomas H. Landess, Donald Livingston, Brion McClanahan, Michael Martin, James Rutledge Roesch, Carey Roberts, Samuel C. Smith, Karen Stokes, Ryan Walters, Clyde N. Wilson, and Aaron Wolf

According to American folklore, the North rose in righteous determination to support Lincoln after the firing on Fort Sumter. The only opposition to the war “to save the Union,” so the story goes, was from a few sneaking, traitorous “Copperheads.” In fact, opposition to the war in the North was much more extensive, more respectable, and more patriotic in inspiration than has been allowed. This has been one of the best kept secrets in American history. In this ground-breaking work, a number of scholars begin uncovering some of the forgotten aspects of American reaction to the great crisis of 1861-1865

Year Published: 2014
Edited by: D. Jonathan White