2,676 words
Thomas Nelson Page
The Old Dominion: Her Making and Her Manners
1908
In compiling his famous 1908 essay collection The Old Dominion: Her Making and Her Manners, author Thomas Nelson Page seemed to have several goals in mind. Of course, offering a brief history of the Commonwealth of Virginia was one. He also quite clearly wished to rehabilitate the good name of his home state (more…)
Janice Drew, Vandalized Plymouth Rock
1,310 words
The Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock 400 years ago. Sadly for the occasion, unknown vandals defaced the actual Plymouth rock and other monuments dedicated to the Pilgrims’ arrival.
9,401 words
Stanley Crouch
Kansas City Lightning: The Rise & Times of Charlie Parker
HarperCollins, 2013
“The double consciousness so fundamental to jazz: the burdens of the soul met by the optimism of the groove.” — Stanley Crouch (more…)
2,062 words
The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project is the future of American education.
Buffalo Public Schools announced this month that the essay series will now be mandatory for its students and other school districts are soon to follow. The news was greeted with grumbles from acclaimed historians and conservatives, who despise 1619 Project’s attacks on sunny liberal view of American history. (more…)
2,640 words
Edmund Morgan
American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
New York: W.W. Norton, 1975
Jill Lepore
The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity
New York: Vintage, 1999
The Dissident Right must take back American history. (more…)
3,082 words
Jill Lepore
This America: The Case for the Nation
New York: W. W. Norton, 2019
The theme of This America isn’t what Jill Lepore thinks it is.
Jill Lepore is a Harvard Professor of American History, and an incredibly prolific author – twenty-five books, and many essays in The New Yorker – with a fluid, appealing writing style. (more…)
1,189 words
David McCullough
The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019
David McCullough’s latest book tells the story of the pioneers who settled the Northwest Territory (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and most of Minnesota), mostly focusing on Ohio and spanning the signing of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 up to 1853. (more…)
2,572 words
In modern America, image is everything. Even war. Therefore, the United States Army is rolling out new uniforms reminiscent of something old—the iconic “pinks and greens” of the World War II “Greatest Generation.”
Probably not by coincidence,” The New York Times explained, “that’s what the Army was wearing the last time the nation celebrated total victory in a major war.” (more…)
1,156 words / 7:35
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If there is a singular, inarguable principle that lies at the heart of America, it is liberty. The “Statue of Liberty” is perhaps our most iconic landmark, and the “Liberty Bell” in Philadelphia is one of our oldest national symbols. (more…)
11:25
Original article here
1,955 words
There is no holiday or tradition that is both solemn and deeply intertwined in the unique historical American ethnicity and spiritualism as Thanksgiving. The holiday has several meanings. The first is religious. The Mayflower Pilgrims celebrated their survival in Plymouth Colony with a feast and give thanks to God for their blessings. Today, deep within American culture Thanksgiving still carries the impulse to give thanks to the Almighty for one’s blessings during the year. (more…)
2,629 words
One great work of American history is David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. It has altered how a great many Americans see their country and their regional origins. It makes the Civil War easier to understand as well as the Red State/Blue State divide. It helps clear up why Southerners say “y’all” and in New Jersey they sometimes say, “youse.” David Hackett Fischer has followed up the ideas in Albion’s Seed in other works and other historians have built upon Fischer’s ideas.
John Singleton Copley, Portrait of Paul Revere, 1768
1,500 words / 10:54
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Many patriotic Americans object to White Nationalism because they are told it is “un-American.” America, they say, was always a multiracial society, dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” Therefore, the White Nationalist idea of a society that bases citizenship on race is alien to the American tradition. (more…)
2,617 words
Michael O. Cushman
Our Southern Nation: Its Origin and Future
New York: American Anglican Press, 2015
David Hackett Fischer and Colin Woodard are two authors who have each told the story (with Albion’s Seed and American Nations, respectively) of the regional movement of various peoples into the United States of America, and of how the conflicts between them have shaped the nature of modern American life on a grand scale. (more…)
3,112 words
Editor’s Note:
In honor of Banned Books Week, we are pleased to publish James Dunphy’s article on Madison Grant’s The Conquest of a Continent, a book targeted by the Anti-Defamation League to be stifled, lest it give white Americans “nativist” ideas.
1,312 words
Jim Webb
Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America
New York: Broadway Books, 2004
Former Virginia Senator (2007-2013), Secretary of the Navy (1988-1989), Marine, and unapologetic Vietnam War veteran Jim Webb launched a quixotic bid for the Democratic presidential nomination last year, withdrawing in a few months. (more…)
6,066 words
Editor’s Note:
Originally published on February 17, 2005, this review remains to my mind one of the most memorable pieces ever to appear at VNN.
Jim Webb
Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America
New York: Broadway Books, 2004
6,905 words
Nicholas Guyatt
Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation
New York: Basic Books, 2016
Throughout history, whites have tended to feel a need to dissect the philosophical implications and practical consequences of their actions. Passion and emotion are rarely the driving forces behind white historical movement. (more…)
3,221 words
Part 3 of 3
Apropos of Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York and London: Routledge, 1995)
Thomas Nast cartoon asserting the equal worth of Irish and blacks
3,660 words
Part 2 of 3
Apropos of Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York and London: Routledge, 1995)
What are here called the ‘whiteness historians’ ought not to be confused with ‘Whiteness Studies’ (WS) or ‘critical race studies’ (or certain other new ‘disciplines’ favored by ‘the New Know-Nothings’), (more…)
4,478 words
One of Thomas Nast’s 19th-century anti-Irish cartoons
Part 1 of 3
Apropos of Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White
‘We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English’. — Winston Churchill
Plymouth Colony, 1620–1691
1,970 words
Plymouth Colony and the Massachusetts Bay Colony were two distinct Puritan commonwealths. Because this fact is not widely known, it is useful to understand some of the distinctions.
John Singleton Copley, “The Copley Family,” 1776
2,532 words
In the United States and England there has long existed the loose idea of a white social aristocracy arising from birth, old money, and social position that exercises a kind of fascination over people’s minds.
768 words
Author’s Note:
The following short excerpt is from a forthcoming essay titled ‘How the Irish Became White’, which makes an ethnonationalist critique of the ‘whiteness historians’ (Ignatiev, Roedeger, Allen, etc.) and their treatment of Irish-America.
5,146 words
Philip F. Gura
American Transcendentalism: A History
New York: Hill and Wang, 2007
Philip Gura’s American Transcendentalism provides a valuable insight into a nineteenth-century leftist intellectual elite in the United States. This is of considerable interest because Transcendentalism was a movement entirely untouched by the predominantly Jewish milieu of the twentieth-century left in America. (more…)
Wyndham Lewis, Portrait of Ezra Pound
7,875 words
This is not a SHORT History of the Economy of the United States. For forty years I have schooled myself, not to write the Economic History of the U.S. or any other country, but to write an epic poem which begins “In the Dark Forest,” (more…)
Graphic by Harold Arthur McNeill
time: 61:45/6,734 words
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Segment One
Greg Johnson reads “The End of Globalization” (12:00 minutes) (more…)
Norman Rockwell, “The Problem We All Live With,” 1963
4,057 words
Part 3 of 3
The Rising Tide of Color
The Civil Rights Movement opened doors for some African-Americans, especially those with some European ancestry. (more…)
Thomas Hart Benton, “Bootleggers,” 1927
2,860 words
Part 2 of 2
The First World War and the Great Depression
In 1912 Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, became president for eight years when regular and Progressive Republicans split. (more…)
Grant Wood, "Parson Weems' Fable," 1939
3,537 words
Part 1 of 3
Political Philosophy and Human Genetic Diversity
Western political philosophy tends toward moral and political universalism: the idea that norms are valid for all human beings. (more…)
