Tag: American South

3,063 words

Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the First World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things. And it is very necessary, if you are going to understand the American character in the twentieth century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the mid-nineteenth century. It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads. — Shelby Foote (more…)

Hinton Rowan Helper

2,272 words

Hinton Rowan Helper was a curious and fascinating figure from nineteenth-century American history. Although mostly forgotten today, he was one of the most important and discussed men in the nation during the lead-up to the Civil War. As an unswerving race realist and white patriot at a time when whites were by far the dominant racial group in North America, he was (and probably still is) ahead of his time. (more…)

5,170 words

Four years ago I reread Gone with the Wind (1936), the bestselling novel about the Civil War and Reconstruction South.

I hadn’t intended to, but I did. I’d loathed it in my teens, and deeply regretted the time I’d wasted reading the 1,000-plus page tome — Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and famous four-hour motion picture adaptation (which I also disliked) notwithstanding.

This strong aversion had nothing to do with race, which was not on my radar screen, or ideology, or North versus South, or slavery, or anything of that nature. (more…)

1,568 words

I may not have change for a dollar, but I sure know how to break a buck!

Let’s face it, people, it just wouldn’t be “Black Hisseray Monf” without a sober look at Black America’s favorite gay interracial BDSM story.

The Willie Lynch Letter has been promoted for years as a legitimate historical source about the brutality of the eighteenth-century slave trade. (more…)

Archie Lee shares a bottle of liquor with one of his employees in Baby Doll (1956).

2,002 words

In a recent essay about playwright Tennessee Williams and Greek-American director Elia Kazan’s flagrantly anti-Southern motion picture Baby Doll (1956), I observed in passing that blacks are present as furniture, but there is no major subplot involving them. (more…)

3,353 words

It was a sweltering July afternoon at the Malvern Hill battle site — more than 150 years gone since it had been the scene of General Robert E. Lee’s debut in the 1862 Seven Days campaign. It was the conclusion of his defense of Richmond from the numerically-superior Army of the Potomac, led by George McClellan. (more…)

106 words / 2:05:21

Saturday’s installment of the new and improved Writers’ Bloc, hosted by Nick Jeelvy, is now available for listening and download. His guest is Counter-Currents’ own regular writer, Kathryn S. They focus on the ante-bellum Southern writer George Fitzhugh’s classic defense of slavery, Sociology for the South. Topics discussed include:

00:03:00 George Fitzhugh’s style
00:06:00 Is slavery good? (more…)

Richard M. Weaver

671 words

America wasn’t always a liberal country. The founders drew more upon classical republicanism than liberalism. In the nineteenth century, the populist movement was decidedly anti-liberal. But the founders and the populists were never consistently anti-liberal, because consistency is the province of intellectuals, not statesmen.

America never had a genuinely anti-liberal intellectual movement until the Southern Agrarians of the 1920s and 1930s. (The North American New Right is America’s second anti-liberal intellectual movement.) (more…)

Richard M. Weaver

671 words

America wasn’t always a liberal country. The founders drew more upon classical republicanism than liberalism. In the nineteenth century, the populist movement was decidedly anti-liberal. But the founders and the populists were never consistently anti-liberal, because consistency is the province of intellectuals, not statesmen.

America never had a genuinely anti-liberal intellectual movement until the Southern Agrarians of the 1920s and 1930s. (The North American New Right is America’s second anti-liberal intellectual movement.) (more…)

William Faulkner

4,880 words

A novelist can have tremendous influence beyond his own time if he depicts major historical trends and invents characters that react in conflicting ways to these trends. If a story is vivid enough, readers might come to identify with or even emulate such characters, since the historical pressures bearing down on them bear down on the readers as well. William Faulkner accomplishes such a feat in his 1942 novel of interrelated short stories, Go Down, Moses.

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James Brown’s 1990 mug shot.

2,591 words

I tell you, it hit me like a lead hammer. Knocked the wind right out of me. I sure wasn’t expecting that when I went to Facebook the day after Martin Luther King Day I’d find that several of my friends had posted laudatory bits in tribute to the serial plagiarizing, serial fornicating commie. I can’t get over it. I’m totally bummed out.

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4,734 words

Shortly after the Civil War, the American South found itself in ruins. Much has been written about the devastation of the war and the indignities and strife which followed during Reconstruction. Beyond the poverty and oppression and the rapid demise of the old regime with its “outdated” culture of honor, loyalty, and heroism, the inheritors of the former Confederacy found themselves without defense in the national and international courts of moral opinion. (more…)