Archie Lee shares a bottle of liquor with one of his employees in Baby Doll (1956).
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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.
James Brown’s 1990 mug shot.
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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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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…)
1,989 words
Anyone familiar with 19th-century American history will recognize John C. Calhoun as the man who, more than anyone else, represented the antebellum South. He, along with John Randolph of Roanoke, Virginia, provided much of the intellectual heft behind the character and institutions of the South and defined its position as a distinct economic and cultural region within the greater Union.
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The dying words of John C. Calhoun have always stuck with me, and not in a good way. On his deathbed in 1850, the former vice president and ardent advocate of slavery and states’ rights reportedly lamented, “The South! The poor South!” (more…)
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I wanted the full experience, so I went to go see The Birth of a Nation (2016) in a black neighborhood. That in and of itself was actually pretty entertaining. For starters, I don’t think I’ve ever seen more people browsing their sailfoams during a movie. There was always extra light emanating from somewhere in the theater. Black people are also extremely loud, so loud in fact that an employee, also black, had to come in and tell people to be quiet during the movie. (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…)