The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institutes, Feb 25-Mar 1, 2019 Topics: Southern culture, Southern tradition, Jeffersonian tradition https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-159
Brion McClanahanMarch 2, 2019
Southeast Virginia is a region rich in history, from the earliest colonial times to today’s modern military. Cape Henry welcomes visitors today, just as it did the Virginia Company colonists in 1607, just before they settled at Jamestown. First Landing State Park commemorates where the colonists first entered Chesapeake Bay, seeking a site for settlement. One of Virginia’s oldest and…
Brett MoffattMarch 1, 2019
The so-called Civil Rights movement began in the mid-1950s with goals of ending segregation and discrimination. Over the decades it has evolved from “correcting” certain aspects of society, into a virtual restructure of society. What began as a movement became a revolution. Technological advances in communications made this revolution possible – a revolution similar to the Protestant Reformation. It is…
Gail JarvisFebruary 28, 2019
Right wing radio personalities need no excuse to engage in South-bashing, but the recent events in the Old Dominion have given them free rein to indulge in their passion non-stop. Governor Ralph Northam’s perceived hatred of “the other” quickly overshadowed his chilling, matter of fact endorsement of proposed legislation establishing new and ghoulish abortion protocols in his state, and with…
J.L. BennettFebruary 27, 2019
A review of Jefferson and the Virginians: Democracy, Constitutions, and Empire (LSU Press, 2018) by Peter Onuf Historian Peter S. Onuf first saw the light as a Connecticut Yankee. Powerful of intellect even in his teens, he met the American Revolution as the subject of serious study in a Johns Hopkins graduate seminar (in which he was the sole undergraduate)…
Kevin R.C. GutzmanFebruary 26, 2019
Pat Caddell died on February 16. Several major news outlets ran stories about his influence in both the Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump campaigns. Everyone understood Caddell's role as the voice of the "outsider." A colleague at the College of Charleston, where Caddell served in the Political Science department for the last couple of years, said that Caddell hated everything…
Brion McClanahanFebruary 25, 2019
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institutes Feb 18-22, 2019 Topics: Southern tradition, New South, Southern politics, American presidents https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-158
Brion McClanahanFebruary 23, 2019
“I plainly perceive that the time will come when a shirt shall not be washed without an excise.”— Representative James Jackson of Georgia, speech against the Whiskey Tax delivered on January 5, 1791 in the House of Representatives As with so many other episodes in early American history, the true story of the so-called Whiskey Rebellion has been purposefully scrubbed…
Joe WolvertonFebruary 22, 2019
It was an indelible moment, one that has resonated with me up to the present day. My father and I had gone to whatever permutation of Wal-Mart existed at that time in Union County in late 1982. (Maybe it was still Edwards then, maybe Big K; the chronology is no longer clear so many years later.) He was a supervisor…
Randall IveyFebruary 21, 2019
“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Among Catholic students of political thought, few figures are more liable to provoke vigorous debate than does that famous dictum’s author, Cambridge history lecturer John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, a.k.a., the First Lord Acton, Catholic godfather of classical liberalism. Where Acton’s critics identify classical liberalism as a theory incompatible with the Catholic faith,…
Jerry SalyerFebruary 20, 2019
A review of Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty (The Independent Institute, 2014) by Ivan Eland The annual veneration of American monarchy--"Presidents Day"--has passed again. While still officially called "Washington's Birthday" by the general government, the American public has embraced the idea of honoring the executive branch by shopping for furniture, jewelry, or cars. George W.…
Brion McClanahanFebruary 19, 2019
In the popular imagination the South is viewed as a region typified by racism, poverty, and ignorance save a few special islands, such as Chapel Hill and Charlotte, which lay in the archipelago of enlightenment. There are some cracks in this edifice of Yankee bigotry, but when political and cultural wars become heated, the edifice is trotted out once more…
John DevannyFebruary 18, 2019
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institutes, Feb 11-15, 2019 Topics: Southern history, Political Correctness, Abraham Lincoln, Neoconservatives https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-157
Brion McClanahanFebruary 16, 2019
In this age of political correctness it may surprise people that there were three TV series that portrayed Confederates in a good light. All three are very good and all the episodes of two of the series are available on DVD, and some of the episodes of the other series is available. The first series is Yancy Derringer. Yancy Derringer…
Jeff WolvertonFebruary 15, 2019
I usually don’t engage in online arguments and discussions because I know I’m not the smartest cookie in the jar, and I’m afraid that I might open my mouth and prove that point. That being said, there comes a time when you see evidence of such full scale lunacy, you just can’t continue to remain silent. The controversy over Virginia…
Barbara MarthalFebruary 14, 2019
Given what is occurring in our society and culture, the ever increasing frenzy and hysteria associated with what is called “the women’s movement” and the ever-changing, always-increasing “racism test,” a review of the basics, a return to and familiarity with our history, is incumbent on us if we are to survive as a nation. Yet, the real problem is that…
Boyd CatheyFebruary 13, 2019
A Review of Historical Consciousness, or The Remembered Past (Schocken Books, 1985) by John Lukacs In the introduction to the new edition of his Historical Consciousness (first published in 1968), Professor John Lukacs observes of the body of academic historians, circa 1960’s: “They were interested in their profession, without paying much, if any, interest to the nature of their profession.” If…
Clyde WilsonFebruary 12, 2019
There is an old Chinese curse the English translation of which is “May you live in interesting times.” The implication of the curse, of course, is that it is better to live in seemingly dull and tranquil times, times in which little occurs that would threaten to upset the peaceful daily rhythm of the accursed’s life. Let us set aside…
Houston MiddletonFebruary 11, 2019
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Feb 4-8, 2019. Topics: Secession, Southern History, Political Correctness, Alexander Hamilton https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-156
Brion McClanahanFebruary 9, 2019
Even among the most Grant-partial historians there’s no denying that Ulysses Grant and his wife owned slaves prior to the Civil War. In fact, “Ulysses Grant” is the correct answer to a crafty American history trivia question that asks: “Can you name the last slaveholding President?” As growing political correctness causes our culture to increasingly condemn historical figures connected with…
Philip LeighFebruary 8, 2019
“The revenue of the state is the state.” Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution Washington D. C. finds itself in the midst of an entertaining, nay consuming, Kabuki theatre. The federal government has “shut down” its non-essential functions, re-opened the same, and promised to do it all over again in a few weeks, raising the question as to why…
John DevannyFebruary 7, 2019
Presented at the Lee-Jackson Banquet, Finley’s Brigade Camp 1614 - Tallahassee, Florida, 19 January 2019 Prologue It seemed like just another day at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, for the vice chancellor of student affairs, Paula Knudson, until the phone calls, student visitors, and official “hate and bias” reports began to pour in. A truck—a semi-tractor trailer truck to…
Paul C. GrahamFebruary 6, 2019
A Review of The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent (Knopf Publishing Company, 1990) by Robert Caro "I have read his bandit gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: 'As ye deal with my pretensions, so with you my wrath shall deal; Let the faithless son of Freedom crush the patriot with his heel; Lo, Greed is marching on.'"…
Charles GoolsbyFebruary 5, 2019
Watching NBC’s TODAY program on Tuesday, January 23, 2019, there was anchor Savannah Guthrie demanding to know if Covington, Kentucky, Catholic High School student, Nick Sandman, wished to “apologize” for his “actions” in front of the Lincoln Memorial when confronted by Indian activist, Nathan Phillips, on January 19. The scarcely-concealed bias that characterized Guthrie’s question and the continuing media narrative—proven…
Boyd CatheyFebruary 4, 2019
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Jan 25-Feb 1, 2019. Topics: Decentralization, Southern Tradition, Political Correctness https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-155
Brion McClanahanFebruary 2, 2019
Texas will turn blue before it’s over with its local Neocons in charge. Former sports announcer and Bankrupt, now Lt. Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick has decided that his historical acumen can bring Texas forward into the true modern way of thinking. That is, the South is and always had been a bunch of ignorant savages. But no more. If…
Paul H. YarbroughFebruary 1, 2019
In the ongoing war against Southern Confederate heritage, we need to be cognizant of the academic pressures against it. As y'all know, UNC Chapel Hill recently tore down Silent Sam. This is going on throughout all the great Southern schools. As a professional scholar, I was a member of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature; the Southern Historical…
Alphonse-Louis VinhJanuary 31, 2019
Suffering from a nasty bacterial infection, the insomnia induced by a lamp kept lit in his cell at all hours, and the very real possibility of being hanged by a kangaroo court, Jefferson Davis drew strength during his postbellum imprisonment from a certain slender little volume that was once renowned throughout Christendom – the The Imitation of Christ. The Imitation…
Jerry SalyerJanuary 30, 2019
A review of Snowflake Buddies: ABC Leftism for Kids (Shotwell, 2018) by Lewis Liberman It is said that the one thing Satan cannot stand is mockery. The primal sin is pride, and a swollen ego can handle intellectual assaults; what evil cannot handle is someone making fun of it. Contemporary Leftism is an evil system, for it prides itself in…
Michael PottsJanuary 29, 2019
The Southern political tradition, in practice and theory, is one of its most valuable contributions to America and the world. The one constant theme of that tradition from 1776–through Jefferson, Madison, John Taylor, St George Tucker, Abel Upshur, John C. Calhoun, the Nashville Agrarians, Richard Weaver, M. E. Bradford, down to the scholars of the Abbeville Institute–is a systematic critique…
Donald LivingstonJanuary 28, 2019
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Jan 21-25, 2019 Topics: Reconciliation, Robert E. Lee, Political Correctness, John C. Calhoun, Confederate Symbols https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-154
Brion McClanahanJanuary 26, 2019
I hope that no one who reads this paper will suppose that I have any feeling in the matter. I am only correcting errors in Northern writers, and I trust that, after more than half a century since the war between the States, this may be done without exciting any sectional bias. On the other hand, I have no idea…
Lyon G. TylerJanuary 25, 2019
When Jefferson County Circuit Judge Michael Graffeo issued a ruling on the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act just minutes before his term expired last week, he upended the entire understanding and meaning of the original Constitution and the relationship between the States, the cities, and the general government. More importantly, though Graffeo's decision will probably--not definitely--be overturned, the ruling provides a…
Brion McClanahanJanuary 24, 2019
The dominant powers in American discourse today have succeeded in confining the South to a dark little corner of history labeled “Slavery and Treason.” This is already governing the public sphere of the Civil War Sesquicentennial. Such an approach not only libels the South, it is a fatal distortion of American history in general, and, I dare say, even of…
Clyde WilsonJanuary 23, 2019
A review of A Thousand Points of Truth: The History and Humanity of Col. John Singleton Mosby in Newsprint (ExLibris, 2016) by V.P. Hughes Valerie Protopapas (who writes under her maiden name V.P. Hughes) has given us a massive work on Confederate guerilla fighter, Colonel John Singleton Mosby (1833-1916). Her tome, which reaches over eight-hundred pages, is made up of…
Paul GottfriedJanuary 22, 2019
The White House, Washington, January 16, 1907. To the Hon. Hilary A. Herbert, Chairman, Chief Justice Seth Shepherd, President Edwin Alderman, Judge Charles B. Howry, General Marcus J. Wright, Mr. William A. Gordon, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, Mr. Joseph Wilmer, And others of the Committee of Arrangement for the Celebration of the Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of General Robert…
Theodore RooseveltJanuary 21, 2019
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Jan 14-18, 2019 Topics: The Southern tradition, Neoconservatives, Yankees, the War https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-153
Brion McClanahanJanuary 19, 2019
The South is and always been conservative. But with the constant hammer of political correctness and political falsehood (redundant?) pounded on it, it has waffled among many who brand it as evil. Punchy from the blows, it has sought to defend itself in the wrong places: In presentism and with Republicans. Republican and Air Force veteran Mike Hill, the first…
Paul H. YarbroughJanuary 18, 2019
On the stump in New Boston, New Hampshire in early January 1852, Franklin Pierce gave a long oration during which free-soil hecklers forced him to address his ideas on slavery. “He was not in favor of it,” the Concord Independent Democrat reported. “He had never seen a slave without being sick at heart. Slavery was contrary to the Constitution in some…
Michael J. ConnollyJanuary 17, 2019
The presidential election of 2016 gave promise to be a watershed in American politics. Donald Trump appeared, a non-politician and rich enough to support his own campaign without selling himself to the usual special interests. He collected all the right enemies. He deflated a whole platoon of Republican celebrities down to their actual pigmy size. He vanquished them by something…
Clyde WilsonJanuary 16, 2019
A review of Catholics’ Lost Cause: South Carolina Catholics and the American South, 1820-1861 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2018) by Adam L. Tate Some thirty odd years ago, scholars began to peer into the world of immigrants in the South with not a little attention devoted to Catholics. What they found surprised them. Immigrants in the South adjusted to…
John DevannyJanuary 15, 2019
Many years ago the historian Francis Parkman wrote a passage in one of his narratives which impresses me as full of wisdom and prophecy. After a brilliant characterization of the colonies as they existed on the eve of the Revolution, he said, “The essential antagonism of Virginia and New England was afterwards to become, and to remain, an element of…
Richard M. WeaverJanuary 14, 2019
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Jan 7-11, 2019 Topics: The War, Political Correctness, Southern Art, Southern Literature https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-152
Brion McClanahanJanuary 12, 2019
One summer day in Paris, France, just a year after the Great War, a former French military officer, not yet nineteen years of age was invited by his father to have a chat. Slim, handsome, and gifted, the young man knew it was time for the big talk concerning his future now that peace had returned. To help him make…
Alphonse-Louis VinhJanuary 11, 2019
When one grows old one tends to resent wasting time and there is nothing that wastes time quite so much as efforts to counter the claims and assertions surrounding the American “Civil War” Of course, the first of these is that the conflict was not a “civil war.” But those who insist upon that label continue to do so despite…
Valerie ProtopapasJanuary 10, 2019
The destruction of Confederate monuments and the slandering of all things Confederate is in vogue in contemporary mainline media, academia, and the political establishment. The destruction of Confederate monuments by radical mobs is similar to the radical Taliban’s destruction of Buddhist monuments and the Soviet Union’s denial of public expressions of native culture in the Baltic states—all are examples of…
James Ronald KennedyJanuary 9, 2019
A review of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999) by Allen C. Guelzo. Presidential hopeful John McCain recently stated that he was of “the party of Lincoln, not Bob Jones.” This could be taken in ways the gentleman from Arizona never intended. For it was not Bob Jones who said “I am not nor ever have been in…
Samuel C. SmithJanuary 8, 2019
None knew it then, but in 1915, Southern agrarian influence on the movies was at its height. The film trade had just left Fort Lee, New Jersey, only to land in the equally piously named Mount Lee, California. Of course, the latter’s new name was Hollywood, due to its Kansas prohibitionist developers, but it was also the same name as…
Norman StewartJanuary 7, 2019
Oh! a wonderful stream is the river of Time, As it runs through the realm of tears, With a faultless rhythm, and musical rhyme, And a broader sweep, and a surge sublime, And blends with the ocean of years! How the winters are drifting like flakes of snow, And summers like buds between, And the ears in the sheaf, —…
Philo HendersonDecember 31, 2018
On one fine evening, in which winter’s chill hung in the air and the stars sparkled merrily in the heavens above, a happy song of the season could be heard faintly weaving it’s way through the trees and rolling hills surrounding the humble home of Uncle Remus. “Ho my Riley, in this happy Christmas time, the black folks shake their clothes,…
Lewis LibermanDecember 25, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Dec 17-21, 2018 Topics: Southern symbols, Political Correctness, Secession, Southern tradition https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-151
Brion McClanahanDecember 22, 2018
In 1875, Rev. Moses Drury Hoge stood before 40,000 people in Richmond, Virginia, at the foot of the newly dedicated statue of Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, and delivered what one historian called the "noblest oration of his later life." He believed that in the future, the path to that statue would be "trodden" by the feet of travelers from "the…
Brion McClanahanDecember 21, 2018
William Plumer Jacobs (1842-1917), a native of Yorkville, South Carolina, was a Presbyterian minister and scholar whose entire life has been called “a singular consecration to work and service in behalf of his fellow men.” He is closely identified with the town of Clinton, where he pastored a church and founded the Thornwell Orphanage and the Presbyterian College of South…
Karen StokesDecember 20, 2018
“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 , they close up their ears, his reasons they weigh not . . . . They are impermeable to argument and have their answers well drilled.” – Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical…
John DevannyDecember 19, 2018
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 Land We Love: The South and its Heritage. I am, as the reader may notice, mentioned in the preface, along with Clyde Wilson, as one…
Paul GottfriedDecember 18, 2018
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 that they're anxious about it, but most don't understand why because our political leaders and the national media generally suppress its origins. We wanted to…
Donald LivingstonDecember 17, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Dec 10-14, 2018 Topics: Political Correctness, Southern History, Southern Culture, Southern Music, Southern Sport https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-150
Brion McClanahanDecember 15, 2018
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 of them. And it doesn’t matter how much of an expert someone becomes about Fredericksburg, Yankees will always have that same ace-in-the-hole comeback, “You lost.” But…
Tom DanielDecember 14, 2018
Two of the poems I most admire are very short. One is simply a name - Shoeless Joe Jackson. Read it aloud and feel the assonance and alliteration. The other is a phrase Say it ain't so, Joe, delivered sadly, with its final rhyme. There is a mythic quality in both of these poems. The name, Shoeless Joe Jackson; the…
Ray MerlockDecember 13, 2018
President Trump recently used his executive powers to designate a national monument to honor African Americans’ role as soldiers during the War Between the States. The monument will be a 380-acre site in Kentucky to commemorate Camp Nelson, which was one of the largest recruitment stations for the United States Colored Troops. The unfortunate reality is that the monument will…
Michael MartinDecember 12, 2018
A review of Recovering the Past: A Historian's Memoir (University Press of Kansas, 2004) by Forrest McDonald “History is marble, and remains forever cold, even under the most artistic hand, unless life is breathed into it by the imagination. Then the marble becomes flesh and blood—then it feels, it thinks, it moves, and is immortal.” —Charles Gayarré (1805-1895) It is…
Stephen M. KlugewiczDecember 11, 2018
In November 2018 Will Hiott, Director and Curator of Historic Properties at Clemson University, included a thinly disguised political paper from Clemson University History Professor Rhondda Robinson Thomas as part a packet distributed to Historic Properties Advisory Committee members. The essay has no relevance to ongoing volunteer efforts toward the Preservation of Historic campus buildings and is nothing more than…
Andrew P. CalhounDecember 10, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Dec 3-7, 2018 Topics: Agrarianism, United States Constitution, John Marshall, Andrew Johnson, Thomas Johnson https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-149
Brion McClanahanDecember 8, 2018
Thomas Johnson was born in Calvert County, Maryland, on his father's lands near the mouth of St. Leonard's Creek. He was the son of Thomas and Dorcas Sedgwick Johnson and the grandson of Thomas Johnson, barrister, who was the first of the line to reside in Maryland, having fled there after running away with a chancery ward. All of these…
M.E. BradfordDecember 7, 2018
Andrew Johnson was born into poverty in rural North Carolina. His father died after saving some town locals from drowning and left the family to fend for themselves in a two-room shack. A young Andrew began working as a tailor’s apprentice and developed an appreciation for the laboring class early on. Johnson was poorly educated and learned how to write…
Michael MartinDecember 6, 2018
On November 10, 2018, the Abbeville Institute hosted an event called The Revival of Nullification and Secession in Dallas, TX. The purpose was to educate people on the means by which we can escape the hatred and hostility that is consuming not only headlines, but our very souls. The population of these United States is split pretty much equally in…
Suzanne ShermanDecember 5, 2018
A review of John Marshall: The Man Who Made the Supreme Court (Basic Books, 2018) by Richard Brookhiser John Marshall presents a curious problem for Southern history. How can a man, born and bred in the same State, who breathed the same air and shared the same blood with Thomas Jefferson, have been such an ardent nationalist? The same question…
Brion McClanahanDecember 4, 2018
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 inherently Southern in character, and as I believe, are contributing negatives to the soul and character of our region. We must work to correct these…
Nicole WilliamsDecember 3, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Nov 26-30, 2018 Topics: Robert E. Lee, Southern music, Southern culture, the War https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-148
Brion McClanahanDecember 1, 2018
The King of Rock and Roll brought himself up by his bootstraps, served Uncle Sam as a soldier and before his early demise came he had made an honest fortune for himself and many others. For that, he is belittled by those who hardly knew him. “A little nod to the good old days, back when black visionaries could invent…
Paul H. YarbroughNovember 30, 2018
Yesterday The Washington Post published an Op-Ed by former General Stanley McChrystal in which he boasted of removing a long-displayed Robert E. Lee painting from his home to “send it on its way to a local landfill for burial.” It is but one of perhaps a dozen Post articles during the last three years disparaging Lee, Confederate monuments and Southern heritage. All condemn Lee…
Philip LeighNovember 29, 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 “country” music, for a whole generation, for twenty-four years, he was in many ways the heart and soul of the popular country music variety television…
Boyd CatheyNovember 28, 2018
A review of Slavery, Secession, & Civil War: Views from the United Kingdom and Europe, 1856-1865 (Scarecrow Press, 2007) by Charles Adams. At long last Charles Adams’s new book, Slavery, Secession, & Civil War: Views from the United Kingdom and Europe, 1856-1865, has been published. I’ve been anxiously waiting for this book for about five years. The book contains about…
Thomas DiLorenzoNovember 27, 2018
As the brilliant American military victory in the Persian Gulf approaches its second anniversary, the focus has shifted from the emotions of homecoming celebrations to the seriousness of lessons learned and lessons validated. While the ingredients of victory are a combination of many factors, from logistics to training to armament, history has shown that one of the most important elements…
Jeffrey AddicottNovember 26, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Nov 19-23, 2018. Topics: Southern literature, black slaveowners, historical myths https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-147
Brion McClanahanNovember 24, 2018
In the spirit of historical course correction, I herewith submit some thoughts to those who may find themselves in an American Revolution between 1774 and 1783. 1. Rule number one. Don’t cooperate with any leaders, even if you appointed them. If you do, such cooperation will later be taken as proof that you were just obeying the commands of some…
Joseph R. StrombergNovember 23, 2018
Citizens of Dixie…. This is a call to arms, or rather, a call to your legs and feet. Get up off that couch! If you don’t have family plans, ballgame, school play, or church event- get out and tour Dixie! Take a few hours, a day, or a weekend, and see the beauty and history of Dixie. Start local; tour…
Brett MoffattNovember 22, 2018
The opinion has been often stated that Edgar Allan Poe was bizarre and amoral; that he was a lover of morbid beauty only; that he was unrelated to worldly circumstances-aloof from the affairs of the world; that his epitaph might well be: “Out of space-out of time.” But it is dangerous to attempt to separate any historical figure from his…
Robert E. MerryNovember 21, 2018
A review of Andrew Durnford, A Black Sugar Planter in the Antebellum South by David O. Whitten, (Transaction Publishers, 1995). I In the year 1800 the Viceroyalty of New Spain was still intact, and Louisiana still part of the Spanish Empire. So, too, was Mexico, Texas, all the Southwest of today's America, north to Kansas and clear to the West Coast…
Vito MussomeliNovember 20, 2018
From the front porch, Jakob Emig could look across fields where his winter wheat greened nicely. An old man now, with sons gone off to war, he lived mainly in a woman's world of married daughters and daughters-in-law on farms scattered nearby. He himself lived alone, widowed now for two years, hard work during war-time finally having taken its toll…
James Everett KiblerNovember 19, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Nov 12-16, 2018 Topics: Secession, Nullification, Federalism, American Imperialism, Southern Culture, Southern Literature https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-146
Brion McClanahanNovember 17, 2018
We are threatened by a powerful, dangerous, conspiracy of evil men. The conspiracy is the enemy of free institutions and civil liberties, of democracy and free speech; it is the enemy of religion. It is cruel and oppressive to its subjects. Its economic system is unfree and inefficient, condemning its people to poverty and deprivation. It has a relentless determination…
Ludwell H. JohnsonNovember 16, 2018
Secession? Nullification? A second Civil War in the presently not-so United States of America? According to a historic and highly fascinating Abbeville Institute event that took place November 9 and 10, 2018 in Dallas, Texas, a number of influential American thinkers, political figures and activists gathered to discuss how peaceful secession and nullification could very well be one of the most important…
Matthew SilberNovember 15, 2018
Nationalist Jeff Sessions gets canned and a nullifier takes his job. This is actually an odd twist of fate. A friend of mine knows Sessions personally, and he continually expressed disappointment at Sessions's actions as AG. Jeff Sessions is from Alabama and is named after two famous Confederate heroes, Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard. His replacement, Matthew Whitaker, hails from…
Brion McClanahanNovember 14, 2018
A review of four novels by Dr. James Everett Kibler, Jr: Walking Toward Home (Pelican Publishing, 2004), Memory’s Keep (Pelican Publishing, 2006), The Education of Chauncey Doolittle (Pelican Publishing, 2008), and Tiller (Shotwell Publishing, 2016). At the heart of every good work of fiction are characters that are believable and a real or imagined setting that allows readers to inhabit,…
Robin Spencer LattimoreNovember 13, 2018
Prehistoric warfare was total war in which victors normally killed all enemy women, children, and adult males, according to groundbreaking research published by Lawrence H. Keeley, in his book War Before Civilization1. Keeley wrote that primitive war was always a struggle between societies and their economies, and warriors carried out that struggle. Rome fielded great armies, in historical time, and…
Norman BlackNovember 12, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Nov 5-9, 2018. Topics: History, Southern Culture, Political Correctness https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-145
Brion McClanahanNovember 10, 2018
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 as it serves to inform both individual and group identity. It gives context to the current world and helps one understand their place in it…
Jonathan HarrisNovember 9, 2018
I recently traveled with ten undergraduate students to the Conference on Faith and History (CFH) held at Calvin College, Grand Rapids Michigan. This was an exciting and enriching trip for our students. They, along with other history students from across the country, presented research papers at the undergraduate portion of the conference. For the past fifteen years I have attended…
Samuel C. SmithNovember 8, 2018
I grew up in Summerville, South Carolina, just a few miles from historic Charleston. This quiet little town is separated from the Holy City by some plantations, swamps, and marsh but shares the same fascination with local history. Folklore states that Summerville is the birthplace of sweet tea, the source being a newspaper article from 1890 that lists the menu…
Michael MartinNovember 7, 2018
A review of “An Arch Rebel Like Myself;” Dan Showalter and the Civil War in California and Texas, by by Gene Armistead and Robert D. Arconti (North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2018). Discussion of the War for Southern Independence often includes facts about who were the last to lay down their arms. It is commonly argued that Gen. Stand Waite’s…
Daniel PetersNovember 6, 2018
When National Socialism came to power in Germany in 1933, it sought an ethnic and cultural cleansing of the country. Jewish culture and art was not considered fully human and underwent a purge. Once Nazi Germany started World War II in 1939, it also sought the same purge for all of Europe. Art considered Germanic was confiscated from all over…
Timothy A. DuskinNovember 5, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Oct 29 - Nov 2, 2018 Topics: Southern political tradition, Lincoln https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-144
Brion McClanahanNovember 3, 2018
The latest in Lincoln polemics comes courtesy of Rich Lowry, editor of National Review. In the latest issue of the latter, Lowry both promotes his new work and takes aim at those of our 16th president’s detractors that are to Lowry’s political right—the “Lincoln haters.” The “Lincoln haters,” Lowry insists, are limited “mostly, but not entirely,” to a libertarian “fringe”…
Jack KerwickNovember 2, 2018
Retired General Stanley McChrystal who never led troops in a winning war bravely threw out a picture of Robert E. Lee because his wife apparently made him do so. As a defense of the action he went into a brief explanation that he no longer considered Lee one of the great leaders. Lee, he said was a great soldier for…
Paul H. YarbroughNovember 1, 2018
Pro-Southern writers have long been suspicious of Victor Davis Hanson, given his association with the neoconservative ascendance of the Bush II era. Yet unlike most of his former colleagues, the California classicist seems to have learned something from the dramatic transformations of recent years. His book Mexifornia marked his enlistment in the unfashionable cause of border control, in part because…
Jerry SalyerOctober 31, 2018
A review of From Founding Fathers to Fire-Eaters: The Constitutional Doctrine of States’ Rights in the Old South (Columbia, SC: Shotwell Publishing, 2018) by James Rutledge Roesch. Mr. James Rutledge Roesch is doing God’s work with the publication of his book, From Founding Fathers to Fire-Eaters: The Constitutional Doctrine of States’ Rights in the Old South. Riding to the sound…
John DevannyOctober 30, 2018
Greetings fellow neo-Confederates. You have been right all along. How do I know this? Hillary Clinton said so, and if the smartest woman in the world said it, then it has to be true. Of course, she did not directly call herself a "neo-Confederate," but the progressives have rediscovered federalism and by default have vindicated every evil "neo-Confederate" in America.…
Brion McClanahanOctober 29, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institutes, Oct 22-26, 2018. Topics: Secession, Nullification, Federalism, Lincoln, the Southern Tradition https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-143
Brion McClanahanOctober 27, 2018
In 21st–century America, it’s difficult to imagine life without the ability to access information at an electronic click or command. But it was not always so. Two centuries ago, outside of New England, many small towns and rural communities lacked the institutions and the formally educated individuals (especially higher-learning institutions and pastors) that might have been expected to provide the…
Forrest L. MarionOctober 26, 2018
Constitutional Violation: Amendment One. Freedom of Speech Denied. Vallandigham Imprisoned in Ohio. “From the beginning to the end of these proceedings law and justice were set at naught;…the President should have rescinded the sentence and released Vallandigham:…a large portion of the Republican press of the east condemned Vallandigham’s arrest and the tribunal before which he was arraigned.” James Ford Rhodes, historian and…
John M. TaylorOctober 25, 2018
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 the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism and earlier writings on slave economies postulated that the Southern mode of production was pre-capitalist and utilized a type…
Michael MartinOctober 24, 2018
A review of Lincoln: As He Really Was by Charles T. Pace (Shotwell Publishing, 2018). Abraham Lincoln was American’s Robespierre, but his crimes only reflected the character flaws he had while in office. Dr. Charles T. Pace, a medical doctor from Greenville, North Carolina, has written a masterful political biography of Lincoln. He portrays Lincoln as a “politician’s politician, a…
Michael PottsOctober 23, 2018
“Politics makes for strange bedfellows.” The 2016 Presidential election of Donald Trump produced the wedding of Bible Belt social conservatives and a flamboyant New York Billionaire with a legitimately questionable history of less than “Christian” moral social values. But the wedding of these “strange bedfellows” appears to be working out quite well—at least for the time being. As presidential politics…
James Ronald KennedyOctober 22, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Oct 15-19, 2018 Topics: Decentralization, Secession, Nullification, Culture War, Political Correctness, Agrarianism https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-142
Brion McClanahanOctober 20, 2018
Despite the establishment attempts to throttle free speech—most recently actions taken by PayPal, by Google, by Facebook, by Amazon and by other major Internet sites to both block access to sites that these lords of the Net consider to be “racist, sexist, extremist, Neo-Confederate and far right,” and to prevent Internet financial transactions for them—still there are intrepid souls out…
Boyd CatheyOctober 19, 2018
In the past few weeks two major interrelated events took place in these once United States of America that should serve as a warning for all Americans. First, after the most contentious confirmation process for a Supreme Court justice in over 100 years, America has displayed its political-cultural division to the world and second, the ever-growing campaign of cultural genocide…
Walter D. (Donnie) KennedyOctober 18, 2018
“History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Attributed to Mark Twain Americans at their best are a pragmatic “can do” folk, be it “Yankee ingenuity” or good old fashioned “get ‘r done.” We are at our worst when we stray from this pragmatic bent into the misty fields of sacerdotal ideology, which is to say when we ascribe…
John DevannyOctober 17, 2018
A review of Taking Root: The Nature Writing of William and Adam Summer of Pomaria by James Kibler (editor) and Wendell Berry (Foreword) (University of South Carolina Press, 2017). Perhaps land is more important to the Southern tradition than any other aspect of the region’s experience. Historians continue to grapple with questions that ask how Southerners understood land and nature.…
Alan HarrelsonOctober 16, 2018
On June 20, 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Crawford: “If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation ... to a continuance in union, I have no hesitation in saying, ‘Let us separate.’” Jefferson thought secession can be a good thing. Lincoln in his first inaugural presented secession as something always bad: “Secession,” he said, “is…
Donald LivingstonOctober 15, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Oct 8-12, 2018. Topics: Southern Founders, Andrew Jackson, Poor Whites of the Old and New South. https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-141
Brion McClanahanOctober 13, 2018
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 historical sites. The most fascinating place I’ve traveled is the tiny village of Barrow, Alaska, the northern most of cities in the United States. However,…
Cary LindsayOctober 12, 2018
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 South as a hierarchical system, it could be argued that the poor whites were a kind of pariah. There’s a common misconception that all whites…
Michael MartinOctober 11, 2018
Mel Bradford's outstanding tome A Better Guide Than Reason lifted that phrase from a speech John Dickinson made during the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. Dickinson worried that the delegates to what we now call the "Constitutional Convention" were insistent on crafting a document that would reinvent the government of the United States, something James Madison proposed with his now famous…
Brion McClanahanOctober 10, 2018
A review of In Defense of Andrew Jackson by Brad Birzer (Regnery History, 2018). Andrew Jackson, who Davy Crockett famously mocked as “the great man in the white house,” occupies an entire epoch in American history. In almost every conceivable way, he was a classic paradox – a benevolent crusader to his friends, and a despotic tyrant to his enemies.…
Dave BennerOctober 9, 2018
Why does congress have hearings for people who are paraded through their judiciary committee- noise for examination as to their qualifications. Quality of what? Those jobs, for example the Supreme Court Justices, certainly only require little more than a reasonably educated person. And the people examining these people seemingly requires virtually no intelligence at all. It is a monstrous show…
Paul H. YarbroughOctober 8, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Oct 1-5, 2018. Topics: The New South and Nu South, Ty Cobb, Southern history, Southern culture. https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-140
Brion McClanahanOctober 6, 2018
A Short Story of a Dystopian America To my fellow Associates: My name is Diversity-26, although my family and friends knew me as John before the Great Purge of Christianity. Today, as part of my punishment, I have been required to give you my story and beg you all for forgiveness for having disrupted your safe and happy lives. According…
Lewis LibermanOctober 5, 2018
In some ways, historians are like anyone else: they hate to make mistakes. But if you write enough, sooner or later, you will make a mistake—I assure you. I certainly have, but I have been more fortunate than most. Sometimes, mistakes benefit you. What I suppose are my two most significant errors to date came more than two decades apart,…
Samuel W. MitchamOctober 4, 2018
The following is a letter-to-the-editor of the Charleston, SC Post and Courier September 15, 2018 defending the crew of the CSS Hunley. It applies to all Confederates soldiers. Dear Editor of The Post and Courier, A letter writer on September 12, 2018 is adamant that the proposed museum for the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley should not be incorporated into…
Gene Kizer, Jr.October 3, 2018
A Review of Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, by Charles Leerhsen, (Simon & Schuster, 2015). Baseball fans familiar with major league records remember Ty Cobb for his .366 lifetime batting average during the dead-ball era. Some may even remember that he held more than 90 baseball records. During his career, Cobb was the idol of millions of fans and received…
Norman BlackOctober 2, 2018
“Nashville’s going to be a progressive, diverse city and there’s nothing that you can do about it. Millennials moving from up north and foreigners immigrating from across the border have changed the city’s population and thus changed the city’s way of life – for the better. Nashville isn’t a Southern city anymore and is never going to be a Southern…
James Rutledge RoeschOctober 1, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Sept 17-28, 2018 Topics: Federalism, Southern Culture, Southern History https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-139
Brion McClanahanSeptember 29, 2018
The whole 20th century was a horrible time for the friends of tradition: the mild rule of Europe’s Christian monarchs - Habsburgs, Romanovs, and others - was replaced by the ruthless Communists and later the despotism of the European Union, amongst other totalitarian ‘isms’; Mao overthrew Confucius in China; the natural rhythms of the agrarian life in many places of…
Walt GarlingtonSeptember 28, 2018
There is a dichotomy to how people view Jesse James. While some have viewed him as a murdering thief, others have argued that he was like a modern-day Robin Hood. To really understand the man requires an examination of his life and an honest analysis of the events that shaped him in Missouri. WHO WAS JESSE JAMES? Jesse James was…
Michael MartinSeptember 27, 2018
Writing about the “Great Triumvirate” of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun during the third Nullification controversy in America of 1828-1832, and in particular about the Webster-Hayne debate of 1830, the late Prof. Merrill D. Peterson made this telling point: “In the course of answering Hayne point by point, Webster unfolded a conception of the Union and the Constitution that stood in stark…
W. Kirk WoodSeptember 26, 2018
A Review of The Election of 1860: “A Campaign Fraught with Consequences” by Michael F. Holt (University Press of Kansas, 2017). Chapter One of Michael F. Holt’s contribution to the corpulent body of work covering the election of 1860 is called “Republican Storm Rising” and it was political perfect storm that blew Abraham Lincoln into the White House. One of,…
Joe WolvertonSeptember 25, 2018
The 1850s is viewed by most scholars as the crucial decade of the sectional crisis that resulted in the War Between the States. The Great Triumvirate of John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster had passed from the scene. These giants were replaced by lesser lights, and “the war came” as Mr. Lincoln claimed. As historical explanations go, there…
John DevannySeptember 24, 2018
Back in 1958, when I was fifteen years old, I made the most critical and important decision in my youthful life. I made the choice any all-American fifteen-year-old farm boy would have made. It was time for me to get my first kiss from a girl. You see, I had a crush on Mary Sue! Mary Sue and her brother…
Cary LindsaySeptember 21, 2018
Some claim offense by the red white and blue image of the Confederate Battle flag and demand its immediate removal from public places. Others embrace it and fly it proudly. Why would in individual chose one side over the other? Here are some possible reasons. 1. Christianity A prominent feature of the Confederate Battle Flag is the “X” emblazoned boldly…
Lola SanchezSeptember 20, 2018
Editor's Note: The text is taken from Tom Skeyhill's, His Own Life Story And War Diary, a collection of interviews Skeyhill conducted with World War I Medal of Honor recipient Alvin C. York of Pall Mall, TN in the 1920s. I ain’t had much of the larnin’ that comes out of books. I’m a-trying to overcome that, but it ain’t…
Alvin C. YorkSeptember 19, 2018
A review of The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 by Saul Cornell (University of North Carolina Press, 1999). The Anti-Federalists who opposed ratification of the Constitution have not fared well among American historians and political , scientists. Nothing reveals more starkly the near-complete disinterest in Anti-Federalist thought than a bibliographical check of books and essays on…
James McClellanSeptember 18, 2018
Proposals to turn national programs over to the states are abound in Washington. The failure of federal programs over the past 60 years demonstrates that centralized solutions to local problems are ineffective. Federalism—the constitutional distribution of power between the states and national government— is once again on the agenda. Lessons regarding centralization have been learned the hard way. For example,…
William J. WatkinsSeptember 17, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Sept 10-14, 2018. Topics: Southern literature, the War, Southern music, Bobby Horton https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-138
Brion McClanahanSeptember 15, 2018
Galactic Imperium News Service (GINS) Special Report: Will Democrats and Republicans in America finally set aside their differences and save the world through the imperial aspirations of big government, a robust Presidential ruler and visionary leaders like Abraham Lincoln? Such are the much heralded promises made surrounding Dinesh D’Lousa’s most recent unveiling of his controversial film, Myth of a Nation:…
Lewis LibermanSeptember 14, 2018
“Why don’t you get a tractor? You could get more done.” “Don’t need more done.” “But you could get it done faster.” “Faster than what?” “Faster than that mule goes.” The Yankee machine man really wanted to sell this down-south farm boy a tractor on account of the boy seemed to really be struggling with the mule (whom the boy…
Paul H. YarbroughSeptember 13, 2018
Constitutional Violation: Amendment One: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. “Freedom of speech and freedom of the press, precious relics of…
John M. TaylorSeptember 12, 2018
A review of My Own Darling Wife: Letters from a Confederate Volunteer by Andrew P. Calhoun (Shotwell Publishing, 2018). This is not just a book of family letters from the War Between the States. You will learn more about the typical Confederate soldier in these 208 pages than in most books. The author of these letters is John Francis Calhoun,…
John C. WhatleySeptember 11, 2018
When the evolution of presidential power in early American history is discussed, it is sometimes alleged that the Louisiana Purchase was a particularly unconstitutional act and an example of presidential malfeasance. According to this line of reasoning, President Thomas Jefferson expanded the bounds of the presidency and betrayed his republican inclinations by favoring desired outcomes over executive restraint. Those that…
Dave BennerSeptember 10, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, Sept 3-7, 2018 Topics: Secession, nullification, federalism, Thomas Jefferson, United States Constitution. https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-137
Brion McClanahanSeptember 8, 2018
On October 31, 1910—seven years after the Wright Brother’s first airplane flight of less than a minute—seventy-five thousand spectators gathered at Belmont Park to watch a day of competition among pioneering aviators. Events culminated with a thirty-six mile round trip race between Belmont Park to the Statue of Liberty. Only three aviators attempted the trip, which had about one million…
Philip LeighSeptember 7, 2018
Much of John C. Calhoun’s criticism stems from his 1837 speech in the Senate where he stated slavery was “a positive good.” This quote is often paraded as evidence of Southern racism and is used in attempts diminish Calhoun’s legacy. Quite possibly no other politician, aside from Lincoln, is so often misrepresented and misunderstood. The reason is that nowadays, we…
Michael MartinSeptember 6, 2018
The punitive “preclearance” regime under the Voting Rights Act (“VRA”) of 1965, imposed on seven “covered” southern states and a number of counties in two others, was essentially invalidated by the U.S. Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. The lifting of this incubus freed the previously “covered” states and emboldened others to introduce legislation, notably a requirement…
Michael ArnheimSeptember 5, 2018
A review of The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson by David N. Mayer (University of Virginia Press, 1994). Thomas Jefferson’s reputation is that of a great thinker. He is popularly (and I believe wrongly, but that is a different matter) believed to have been the greatest thinker among American’s Revolutionaries. It is as a writer and as an unofficial pontifex…
Kevin R.C. GutzmanSeptember 4, 2018
Many of us in the South have maintained our faith in the Constitutional right of nullification and secession despite the efforts of massed, bloody, Yankee bayonets. But is the talk about nullification and secession an earnest effort to put forward solutions to an out of control, Deep State, supreme federal government or is it merely an exercise in heady political…
James Ronald KennedySeptember 3, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, August 27-31, 2018 Topics: Fake History, Political Correctness, Alexander Stephens, Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, the War https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-136
Brion McClanahanSeptember 1, 2018
The “Fake News” appellation has been applied to just about every outlet that presents itself as something on the order of a news outlet, manned (yes--the word) by what are christened as journalists. The ill-use of the “J-Word” provides enough tidings for an essay a yard and a half long, but that is another write for another day (Charly Reese…
Paul H. YarbroughAugust 31, 2018
There is a tendency for each generation to assume its opinions are the ultimate correct opinions. But each generation's beliefs are typically modified by succeeding generations. Unfortunately, societal structures are sometimes altered based on contemporary notions that lose credence over time. This is the case with Social Justice Warriors in this generation. They demand that whatever doesn't suit present-day social…
Gail JarvisAugust 30, 2018
In June 2017, The Atlantic published a hit-piece on Robert E. Lee titled "The Myth of the Kindly General Lee." The article made the rounds on Leftist echo chamber social media accounts and quickly found favor with the popular Leftist Twitter historians, a collection of "distinguished professors," some without a substantial publication record, who like to trumpet their status as "actual…
Brion McClanahanAugust 29, 2018
A Review of Union At All Costs: From Confederation to Consolidation by John M. Taylor (Booklocker, 2016). Most of the time, finding historical gems requires a lot of work and often long hours of arduous research. On rare occasions, they just fall into your lap. It is even more unusual for someone to simply drop one onto your plate. However,…
Samuel W. MitchamAugust 28, 2018
Most mainstream historians point to the “Cornerstone” speech by Alexander Stephens as the clearest piece of evidence that slavery and white supremacy alone were the reasons for Southern secession. After all, most transcriptions show Stephens having stated that the Confederate government was founded on the “great physical, philosophical, and moral truth” of white superiority. A major quote that the historians…
Michael MartinAugust 27, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, August 20-24, 2018. Topics: Jimmy Carter, Silent Sam, Confederate Monuments, Slavery, Political Correctness, Abraham Lincoln https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-135
Brion McClanahanAugust 25, 2018
There is a 1909 “Lincoln penny” attached to the probe arm of Curiosity, a unit of currency, as it were, stuck to its palm. On the face of it, this doesn’t seem such a remarkable idea, but on the coin there are three inscriptions: “In God We Trust,” “Liberty,” and the date. That money should precede us in the exploration…
Malcolm McNeillAugust 24, 2018
On Monday night, August 20, 2018, approximately 200 to 250 raucous demonstrators gathered in a mob on the campus of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and proceeded to tear down the century-old statue, “Silent Sam,” a monument memorializing the over 250 university students who fought and died during the War Between the States. University police, whose primary goal is…
Boyd CatheyAugust 23, 2018
In September of 1961, I left my job at a basket factory in Wilmington, North Carolina and hitch-hiked up to Chapel Hill to become a student there. I followed in the path of UNC’s very first student, a boy named Hinton James, who had famously walked those roads up from Pender County back in 1789. As befits the first student…
Ben JonesAugust 22, 2018
A review Slave and Free on Virginia’s Eastern Shore by Kirk Mariner (Onancok, VA: Miona Publications, 2014). The book can be purchased by emailing Miona Publications. One of the ironies that plague the proponents of the “South is about slavery and slavery is about the South” school of history is the lack of knowledge we possess regarding the everyday lives and social…
John DevannyAugust 21, 2018
Jimmy Carter may have been the last Jeffersonian to be president. A recent article in the Washington Post labeled him the "Un-Celebrity President." In either case, Carter is a reflection of a people and a place. He is the most authentic man elected president since Calvin Coolidge, and like Coolidge a true Christian gentleman. At the very minimum, Carter represented the…
Brion McClanahanAugust 20, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, August 13-17, 2018. Topics: Reconciliation, Southern music, Southern culture, agrarianism, Ronnie Van Zant, Wendell Berry https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-134
Brion McClanahanAugust 18, 2018
I was saddened to hear that Phil Harris had died. I knew the man. You might say we were old friends. As a matter of fact, we first met in 1954 in Monterey, California. I was attending the Army Language School, learning Russian, and Phil was playing in the Bing Crosby Pro-Am tournament. His professional partner was Dutch Harrison, a…
Thomas LandessAugust 17, 2018
Because we live in such a hurried time, we hear countless “noises” but have little time to appreciate actual “sounds.” Sound is a sensation that you can feel, not just something you can hear. To understand this idea, consider how some musicians have actually played concerts for the deaf, who cannot hear the music but still feel the vibrations. These…
Michael MartinAugust 16, 2018
In October 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the executive mansion. This was an unprecedented move. No African-American had ever been asked to dine with the president, and while neither Roosevelt or his staff said much of the event, it was surely done in the spirit of reconciliation and Roosevelt's desire to be "the people's…
Brion McClanahanAugust 15, 2018
A review of What Are People For? by Wendell Berry (North Point Press, 1990) "We should love life," Dostoyevski once said, "more than the idea of life." It is this concreteness, this rootedness, that seemingly inspirits the life and writings of Wendell Berry, whose most recent collection of essays, What Are People For?, further establishes him as one of the…
Tom RashAugust 14, 2018
The 1970’s were an interesting time in the South. The 1970's were the last time Southerners could be Southern without feeling the need to apologize for, or be ironic about, their Southern identity. In fact, in the 1970's, it seemed to actually go a little beyond this. We shouldn’t push this too far, but in 1970’s America there seemed to…
Jeff RogersAugust 13, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, August 6-10, 2018 Topics: the War, Political Correctness, Neoconservatives, Reconstruction, Southern Culture, Southern Literature. https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-133
Brion McClanahanAugust 11, 2018
In the book The Mystery of the Wonder-Worker of Ostrog, the main character, Mladjen, a fictional representation of the modern Serb uprooted from his traditions by the lingering effects of Communism (who is very much akin to many of those inhabiting the New South, shorn of so much of their past by the all-too-present effects of Communism’s alter-ego, Capitalism), has…
Walt GarlingtonAugust 10, 2018
In a PBS interview seven years ago historian and Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust identified slavery as the cause of the Civil War. “Historians are pretty united on the cause of the Civil War being slavery,” she said before adding, . . . “when the various states announced their plans for secession, they uniformly said that the main motivating factor was…
Philip LeighAugust 9, 2018
Southward Returning To you, Virginia, Tennessee, To Georgia’s red roads, to the past That binds the delta and the sea, Your Southern sons return at last. No more the always going forth From ruin and our old regret, No more the sundering of faiths By some who taught us to forget. For us, the long remembering Of all our hearts…
Donald DavidsonAugust 8, 2018
A review of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David Blight (Harvard University Press, 2001). In Race and Reunion, historian David Blight recounts the first fifty years after the Civil War in order to describe how Americans of all backgrounds remembered the experiences and lessons of the conflict. He contends that three distinct visions of Civil War memory…
Josh PhillipsAugust 7, 2018
In case you haven’t heard, there is a new “conservative” film out; it is titled “Death of a Nation: Can We Save America a Second Time?” It’s director and screenwriter is Dinesh D’Souza, the somewhat pompous, word-measuring figure who occasionally shows up on Fox to talk in pious tones about “conservatism.” He is the movie producer who, by his own…
Boyd CatheyAugust 6, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, July 30 - Aug 3, 2018 Topics: the War, Abraham Lincoln, myth-making, Southern culture, Southern history. https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-132
Brion McClanahanAugust 4, 2018
Sometime around 1939, Lead Belly sang the song Daddy I’m Coming Back to You, which features the interesting lyrics: “I’m dreaming tonight of an old Southern town, the best friend I ever had...I’ve had my way, but now I’ll stay, I long for you and for home.” The song was a tribute to Jimmie Rodgers, who is often considered one…
Michael MartinAugust 3, 2018
“Living in Washington, you can't take politics too seriously. I draw the line at honesty. I have no time for political hacks who say things they don't believe because they get paid to.” Tucker Carlson My opinion on Trump’s election is that those who voted for him (by states, as required) was because those people who voted knew, and know,…
Paul H. YarbroughAugust 2, 2018
Whether it's the Civil War, War Between the States, the War for Southern Independence or Lincoln's War, this extremely important period of American history continues to resonate powerfully over 150 years later. And with American Veterans monuments and artwork being censored and removed throughout the country, some might even say that Reconstruction and the fight over Jeffersonian ideals vs. Hamiltonianism never…
Lewis LibermanAugust 1, 2018
A review of Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North by Jennifer L. Weber (Oxford University Press, 2007). They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case it is worth much more: 217 pages of them. The text comes wrapped in a handsome dust jacket, colored black and gold and featuring an arresting…
H. A. Scott TraskJuly 31, 2018
This essay is Chapter 13 in Mr. Taylor's Union At All Costs: From Confederation to Consolidation (2016). “I supported President Lincoln. I believed his war policy would be the only way to save the country, but I see my mistake. I visited Washington a few weeks ago, and I saw the corruption of the present administration—and so long as Abraham…
John M. TaylorJuly 30, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, July 23-27, 2018 Topics: the War, Southern history, Southern politics, Yankee myths https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-131
Brion McClanahanJuly 28, 2018
The War Between the States is called by many names, the most genteel being “The Late Unpleasantness.” The low country districts of South Carolina, including the environs of Charleston, is the geographic origin of this title for America’s most bloody and divisive conflict. There is a deeper significance to the term than a polite and refined attempt to soften an…
John DevannyJuly 27, 2018
Following the senseless racial murders at a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015, Hollywood’s moonshining Duke boys from fictitious Hazzard County, and more particularly their 1969 Dodge Charger “General Lee,” replete with a Confederate Battle Flag painted on its roof, were placed on the growing list of Southern images to be erased from public view. Not only were scheduled reruns…
John MarquardtJuly 26, 2018
The leading authority on this aspect of affirmative action is Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action (2014), in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (by a plurality) that it is permissible for a state to ban affirmative action. The case arose out of a voter-approved initiative amending the constitution of Michigan that made affirmative action illegal in public education,…
Michael ArnheimJuly 25, 2018
A review of Maximilian and Carlota: Europe’s Last Empire in Mexico by Mary Margaret McAllen (Trinity University Press, 2014). Leaving forever the land of your fathers is painful, yet many Southerners turned further south, contemplating that choice on the eve of their destruction by the North. With most of their wealth bound to the land, what resource could they find…
Terry HulseyJuly 24, 2018
The Tricentennial celebration of New Orleans has stirred much interest into different facets of the city’s history. The search for the quintessential old New Orleans novel yields few results. The rich culture of New Orleans makes it one of America’s great cities. The Crescent City has served as muse for a litany of writers, accomplished and rising, yet it remains a near impossible place…
Abbeville InstituteJuly 23, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, July 16-20, 2018 Topics: Neoconservatives, Southern identity, Southern culture, the War New banjo introduction by Barrow Wheary. https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-130
Brion McClanahanJuly 22, 2018
Southerners confronted by Northerners touring our section are made aware of the difference in their speech from ours. They approach us speaking a form of English known outside the United States as "American." We of the South also like to consider ourselves American; however, it has long been an accepted belief that we Southerners have an accent. And not just…
Laurie HibbettJuly 20, 2018
Last November, when President Bush issued an executive order establishing a system of military commissions to punish non-citizens, I asked myself, as no doubt countless other Americans did, “But what about Ex Parte Milligan (1866)?” Surely George W. and his Dad had studied this landmark Supreme Court decision in the course of those searching discussions of American history they must…
Ludwell H. JohnsonJuly 19, 2018
James Iredell was born at Lewes, Sussex County, England. He was the eldest of the five sons of Francis Iredell, a Bristol merchant, and Margaret McCulloh Iredell, originally of Dublin. Young James came to the New World in 1768 because, after his father suffered a stroke in the mid-1760’s, it was necessary for the boy to leave school and accept…
M.E. BradfordJuly 18, 2018
A review of Vicksburg: The Bloody Siege that Turned the Tide of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. (Regnery History, 2018). On the eve of the War for Southern Independence an article was published in The New York Times which unequivocally announced why the North had to invade and conquer the South. The author of the article declared, “The…
Walter D. (Donnie) KennedyJuly 17, 2018
There are many examples of heroism that illustrate spiritedness in America’s history. Indeed, the American Revolution was won because of the indomitable spirit of the Patriots and a growing unwillingness of the British to put down the campaign for independence. The same spirit was present a century later during the War between the States. It is routinely acknowledged that Confederate…
Benjamin AlexanderJuly 16, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, July 9-13, 2018 Topics: Southern independence, Southern culture, Southern architecture, the War, Sam Houston https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-129
Brion McClanahanJuly 14, 2018
They were standing at the ledge. Their view mirrored a panorama of buildings and smoke stacks. Great edifices, heaving asymmetrically, skewed with monster cylinders venting plumes of expended energy. The farms, the land, scarcely discernible, were hiding from the crowding machines in ambient spaces where life of life and lives of lives grappled and struggled for survival. The agrarians had…
Paul H. YarbroughJuly 13, 2018
"Lincoln, under no circumstances, would I vote for ... So, I say, stand by the 'Constitution and the Union', and so long as the laws are enacted and administered according to the Constitution we are safe ..." (emphasis added) Letter from Sam Houston to Colonel A. Daly, August 14, 1860 The 1860 Election was still 3 months in the future and…
Vito MussomeliJuly 12, 2018
In the film version of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, after Atlanta has been burned and Scarlett O’Hara is fleeing to Tara, there is a scene where she arrives at neighboring Twelve Oaks Plantation to find it burned by Yankee troops and in ruins. The mansion’s once-grand double staircase is open to the night sky, and a cow appears…
Robin Spencer LattimoreJuly 11, 2018
A review of America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation, by David Goldfield (Bloomsbury Press, 2011). Whether or not the American Civil War might have been avoided has long been a subject of debate among historians. Some, like Allan Nevins and Charles and Mary Beard, saw the war as “an irrepressible conflict,” in the words of Abraham Lincoln’s…
Stephen M. KlugewiczJuly 10, 2018
Is the South today a captive nation? Most Southerners would never consider the question—most likely because they would deem the issue to be absurd. But is it inane to ask such a question—is it forbidden in politically correct America to ask such a “confrontational” question? Conservatives would immediately dismiss such rhetorical questions as being unpatriotic or even treasonous—after all, everyone…
James Ronald KennedyJuly 9, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, July 2-6, 2018 Topics: Independence, secession, the War, Political Correctness, Southern religion, Southern founding https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-128
Brion McClanahanJuly 7, 2018
In his important 1994 work, Revival and Revivalism: The Making and Marring of American Evangelicalism, 1750-1858, the Rev. Iain H. Murray examined the periods in American church history known as the first and second awakenings. Focusing mainly on the spiritual movements in the North, Murray argued persuasively that in general the First Awakening period of the mid-18th century was characterized…
Forrest L. MarionJuly 6, 2018
I try to collect all the business that I must do in Raleigh into one day. One trip a week into North Carolina’s increasingly cosmopolitanized and rapidly de-Southernized capital city is about all I can take these days: it’s become too much like just about any other homogenized, faceless metropolis in any other part of the country. Most of Raleigh’s…
Boyd CatheyJuly 5, 2018
The bloody conflict of 1861 to 1865 is often called the Civil War, but most Southerners regarded it as a war for independence and self-government. Many if not most Confederate soldiers and officers who fought in it had fathers or grandfathers who served in the first American war of independence, and they were mindful of their heritage. Southerners were proud…
Karen StokesJuly 4, 2018
A review of The Confederate Cherokees: John Drew's Regiment of Mounted Rifles by W. Craig Gaines (LSU Press, 2017). When most people think of Confederate Cherokees, the name Stand Watie immediately comes to mind. This book is not about Stand Watie’s troops but about John Drew’s Regiment of Mounted Rifles. It is also not so much about Confederate Cherokees as…
John C. WhatleyJuly 3, 2018
Richard Henry Lee was a patriot, Anti-Federalist, and statesman from his “country,” Virginia. He led the charge for independence in 1776 and was a powerful figure in Virginia political life. He served one term as president of the Continental Congress and was elected a United States Senator from Virginia immediately after the ratification of the Constitution. His role in the…
Brion McClanahanJuly 2, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, June 25-29, 2018. Topics: Southern history, perception, United States Constitution, Southern culture. https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-127
Brion McClanahanJune 30, 2018
The diagram below graphs the number of Confederate statues erected between 1870 and 1980. Since the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) compiled the data, they suggest the memorials were most frequently put in place during periods of flagrant anti-black sentiment in the South. In short they imply that racism was the prime motive for Confederate monument-building. In truth, however, more…
Philip LeighJune 29, 2018
The Electoral College, a bulwark of federalism, is under attack. Straightforward abolition of the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment, which is most unlikely to be passed in the foreseeable future. But the Electoral College now faces a more serious, insidious threat from the so-called National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC,) which purports to operate through the Electoral College…
Michael ArnheimJune 28, 2018
One of the foremost scholars of the Southern Cause lives in New Market, Virginia. He has never written a book, authored a scholarly thesis, or lectured at a university. Instead, he built a museum – a rather impressive museum – dedicated to historical truth and brimming with valuable period artifacts. Having visited just about all the “Civil War” and Confederate…
Louis T. MarchJune 27, 2018
A review of The Art of the Old South: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture & the Products of Craftsmen (1560-1860) by Jessie Poesch (Harrison Press, 1989). The Art of the Old South encompasses architecture, painting, sculpture, and the products of craftsmen. We are given a tour of a great variety of private and public buildings-from the formal mansions and elegant townhouses that followed…
Jeff WolvertonJune 26, 2018
On June 19, 1865, Union forces arrived in Galveston, Texas and declared to the population of that state that the Emancipation Proclamation had freed its slaves. Called "Juneteenth," it was initially celebrated in Texas, but it is now recognized in one way or another by 45 states and the District of Columbia. But what is it a celebration of? President…
Timothy A. DuskinJune 25, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, June 18-22, 2018. Topics: Dixie, the South in pop culture, Confederate symbols, Robert E. Lee https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-126
Brion McClanahanJune 23, 2018
Sound was the first victim of the attack on southern heritage. In October 1971, the University of Georgia’s “Dixie Redcoat Marching Band” dropped the word “Dixie” from its name and discontinued playing the song “Dixie” after the National Anthem. Many people, even to this day, will argue that “Dixie” was played and perpetuated to uphold white supremacy. But the tradition…
Michael MartinJune 22, 2018
First of all, I wish to state that I teach history. I do not try to erase it, and I do not desecrate graves, like the “politically correct” did in Memphis and elsewhere. I understand why corrupt political nonentities like the mayors of Memphis and New Orleans would want Confederate statues removed. They want to divert the voters’ attention from…
Samuel W. MitchamJune 21, 2018
There are neither Confederate monuments to be torn down in Japan nor Battle Flags to be lowered . . . but if there were, there could well be some Japanese who might wish to protest such symbols. While my wife Rieko would certainly not be among them, when she was attending high school one of her standard 1953 English text…
John MarquardtJune 20, 2018
When you think of America’s so-called “Civil War”, rock music may not be one of the first things that come to mind. However, as one of the most deadly wars in American history, with Missouri being the 3rd bloodiest of all the states (in terms of war-related deaths and human rights atrocities), the War Between the States continues to resonate…
Matthew SilberJune 19, 2018
Were Robert E. Lee and the Confederates “traitors” who violated their oaths to the Constitution and attempted to destroy the American nation? Or, were they defenders of that Constitution and of Western Christian civilization? Over the past 158 years those questions have been posed and answers offered countless times. For over a century since Appomattox the majority opinion among writers…
Boyd CatheyJune 18, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, June 11-15, 2018 Topics: Treason, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Secession https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-125
Brion McClanahanJune 16, 2018
Fort Sumter was the beginning not only of a bloody conflict, but it forged a generation of war correspondents that would culminate in live action reporting one-hundred and thirty years later. These faltering beginnings by the Civil War correspondents would reach their highest form during the Desert Storm war. During this action, Americans saw on prime time television the missiles…
Norman E. RourkeJune 15, 2018
It was Wednesday, April 19, 1865. The Confederate States of America lay prostrate under the twin plagues of starvation and despair. Richmond had fallen and Lee’s surrendered Army of Northern Virginia was heading home. Four years of near constant fighting had depleted the South’s resources and killed a generation of its sons. On the military front, General William T. Sherman…
David E. JohnsonJune 14, 2018
“Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent.” —Revelation 2:5 The Attack on Confederate Monuments is a subspecies of what Richard M. Weaver called the “attack on memory.” To understand why the attack on…
Aaron WolfJune 13, 2018
A review of With Malice Toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era by William A. Blair (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) and Secession on Trial: The Treason Prosecution of Jefferson Davis by Cynthia Nicoletti (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Was the act of secession in 1860-61 treason? This is one of the more important and lasting questions…
Brion McClanahanJune 12, 2018
The quote below indirectly warns about the implications of Confederate statue removals and the censorship of Southern interpretations regarding the Civil War and Reconstruction. Kundera is presently a French novelist born in Brno when the city was located in Czechoslovakia. He lived through both Nazi and Communist totalitarianism before fleeing to France in 1975. His books were banned in…
Philip LeighJune 11, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, June 4-8, 2018 Topics: West Virginia myth, war crimes myth, Pilgrims myth, Righteous Cause Myth, incorporation myth https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-124
Brion McClanahanJune 9, 2018
The Phoenix, Arizona city council has been forced by self-declared “Satanists” to cease opening its meetings with prayer. The Arizona Republic reports the details of the events leading to this decision: “Followers of the Satanic Temple, a group promoting religious agnosticism, had been scheduled to give the prayer at the council's Feb. 17 meeting. News of the planned Satanic invocation…
Joe WolvertonJune 8, 2018
History is the propaganda of the victorious. - Voltaire According to an explanation of “The Lost Cause” from the web site of the Virginia Historical Society: Former Confederates crafted a historical interpretation of the Civil War to reconcile the prewar society they admired and the devastation that accompanied southern defeat. The “Lost Cause” narrative was developed by former Confederates who…
H.V. Traywick, Jr.June 7, 2018
Picture it. A book store in Madison, Wisconsin, in the mid-’90s. Quite the unlikely place you’d expect to be exposed to the true history of the Pilgrims being totalitarian religionists, not the freedom-seeking refugees in funny hats, bonnets, and buckled-shoes we hear about in grade school. This took place at a book signing and lecture, not given by a historian,…
Dissident MamaJune 6, 2018
Originally published at amazon.com, 30 September 2009. A Review of War Crimes Against Southern Civilians by Walter Brian Cisco (Pelican, 2007). Walter Brian Cisco is lifelong scholar of American Civil War history, a professional writer, and researcher with many respected publications on the subject including States Rights Gist: A South Carolina General of the Civil War, Taking a Stand: Portraits from…
Stephen HendrickJune 5, 2018
Confederate West Virginia has always been an enigma. A bright fellow riding through Monroe County was intrigued by the Confederate monument in a field near Union. This biker-hiker-writer Michael Abraham wondered why. For clues, he went straight to local historians ‘Bud’ Robertson and Stuart McGeehee. In his thoughtful book, The Spine of the Virginias (2010, Pocahontas Press; Blacksburg, Virginia) he…
Frank BallJune 4, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, May 28-June 1, 2018 Topics: Treasury of Virtue, Confederate monuments, Political Correctness, Robert E. Lee https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-123
Brion McClanahanJune 3, 2018
I've always been fascinated by those tricky slogans politicians and social activists use to dupe the public. These cleverly crafted catchphrases are short, simple, easily understood and tend to stick with people. A currently popular catchphrase is “The wrong side of history” which has been defined as: “Having policies or practices that are perceived as not progressive or enlightened; behaving…
Gail JarvisJune 1, 2018
Our culture has, of late, become rather fixated on the idea that every historical figure in our past should have anticipated how moral worldviews would evolve after his or her death. Now, clearly, this is impossible. Picasso and Hemingway, to take two great artists who were also generally terrible people, could not (and should not) have thought about how their…
R.M. StanglerMay 31, 2018
After the Charleston shooting in 2015, all across the old Confederacy memorials, monuments, flags and other symbols of the South’s Confederate history came under renewed and severe assault. It seemed that the last vestiges of that heritage might be swept away in a paroxysm of politically-driven outrage and media-hyped efforts to purge the landscape of those symbols. In many ways…
Boyd CatheyMay 30, 2018
A review of Division and Reunion: America, 1848-1877, by Ludwell H. Johnson, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1978. 301 pages; and The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolitionist Movement, by Otto Scott, New York: Times Books, 1979, 375 pages. It was Flannery O'Connor who remarked, in one of her short essays, that people will believe anything about the…
Clyde WilsonMay 29, 2018
“When you are up to your hindquarters in alligators—it is hard to remember that your intentions were to drain the swamp.” This old country-boy saying seems most appropriate for President Trump as he attempts to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C. The continuing efforts of the ruling elite in Washington to destroy a lawfully elected president because “their” anointed candidate…
James Ronald KennedyMay 28, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, May 21-25, 2018 Topics: Yankees, Nationalism, Southern Tradition https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-122
Brion McClanahanMay 26, 2018
Given that the Star Wars franchise seems to have degenerated into yet another vehicle for the transmission of political-correctness, it seems a little ironic that the newest installment of the series will revolve around the one character with an undeniable connection to the South -- Han Solo. George Lucas's wisecracking smuggler borrowed some of his best lines from the cynical…
Jerry SalyerMay 25, 2018
When the majority of people think of the Ku Klux Klan, there undoubtedly comes to mind a relic of post-Confederate racism that has now morphed into dangerous groups of rabidly anti-Black Southerners dressed in white hoods, burning crosses and waving Confederate Battle Flags. However, the real story of the White Knights of the Invisible Empire, as they were also referred…
John MarquardtMay 24, 2018
This spring thousands of graduates coming out of the high schools and colleges across the South will be hearing a similar message: Go far! Dream big! Succeed! Break the mold! But we hope they will not listen to it. We hope they will do the opposite: Stay home, dream small, be content, be unknown. The duty of the young is…
Walt GarlingtonMay 23, 2018
A review of The 14th Amendment and the Incorporation Doctrine by David Benner (Minneapolis: Life and Liberty Publishing Group, 2017) Even though I have always been a strong advocate of states’ rights and sovereignty, and for safeguarding the federal system, the “incorporation doctrine” had always troubled me. What is meant by the “incorporation doctrine”? The application, by the federal courts,…
Ryan WaltersMay 22, 2018
I recently traveled to Texas to speak about South Africa, at the Free Speech Forum of the Texas A & M University. To travel from the Pacific Northwest all the way to College Station, Texas, without experiencing more of the Lone Star State was not an option. So, after driving from Austin eastward to College Station (where I was hosted…
Ilana MercerMay 21, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, May 14-18, 2018 Topics: Southern tradition, Yankees, Confederate symbols, Jeffersonianism, Southern identity https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-121
Brion McClanahanMay 19, 2018
After reading Richard Weaver’s monumental work Ideas Have Consequences last semester I was struck with one characterization of the “ideal man” that has since been shaping the way I look at my own academic future. For a young seminary student like myself pursuing “Christ-likeness” was a given, but my eyes were never fully open to what that meant in relation…
Jonathan HarrisMay 18, 2018
When New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu succeeded in removing three Confederate monuments, he said those three statues to Lee, Beauregard and Davis represented “terrorism.” “. . . hey were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city,” he added. Mayor Ron Nirenberg of San Antonio…
Thomas J. CraneMay 17, 2018
“It was my first introduction to damn Yankees,” my oldest sister remarked of her first semester at James Madison University in the fall of 1982. It was here, at this university nestled in the mountains of Virginia and named after one of the state’s most famous sons, that her Northern dormitory suite-mates were horrified by such flagrant abuse of their…
Dissident MamaMay 16, 2018
A review of For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization by Charles Adams (Madison Books, 2001). Why can’t American Presidents learn that if you raise taxes on the American people they will vote you out? George Bush crashed because he raised taxes, and Bill Clinton will go down as soon as the people get…
William J. QuirkMay 15, 2018
What exactly does it mean to be a Southerner in the 21st Century? Is it spending countless hours finding out who your Confederate ancestor is and joining up with the local Sons of Confederate Veterans? Or is it driving around town with a Confederate flag bumper sticker on the back of your pickup truck? Or maybe it’s being “that guy”…
Lewis LibermanMay 14, 2018
The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, May 7-11, 2018. Topics: Southern culture, Southern history, the War, "Memory Studies" https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-120
Brion McClanahanMay 12, 2018
Is there a genuine analogy between the secession of South Carolina from the USA and the secession of Lithuania from the USSR? Or between the actions of Lincoln and Gorbachev? The press either ignores the parallels or asserts that the two secessions are somehow different. Of course they're different; but an analogy stresses what different things have in common. World…
Sheldon VanaukenMay 11, 2018
Mel Bradford has argued that no individual has exerted more influence upon the development of a profession of letters this century in the South than Donald Davidson. The poet, essayist, and social critic is well known to most literary scholars and historians of the South; however, Davidson’s critique of the Southern experience remains largely unappreciated. Several years ago the author…
H. Lee Cheek, Jr.May 10, 2018
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