Tag: the American South

Ilya Yefimovitch Repin, The Zaporozhye Cossacks Write a Mocking Letter to the Turkish Sultan, 1880-81

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Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

As I hope I’ve shown in the first part of this series, embarrassment and/or humor are operative with virtually all people under all circumstances. The heart of clown world in the present is no exception; indeed, these elements played a big part in bringing our mad, mad world about, as I can attest from personal experience, having been in high school during the early years of the Global War on Terror and the ironically-named USA PATRIOT Act that gave it teeth. (more…)

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Southern writing may be the last American literature in that it has retained a true Anglo-Saxon base in terms of its authors, themes, and relation to history — specifically, white history.

Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend, published in 2015 and winning a justly-earned Pulitzer Prize for best novel, has a real command of writing, and her prose is a roller coaster dipping and rising from sad to exuberant that keeps you reading. (more…)

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Brian Fairbanks
Wizards: David Duke, America’s Wildest Election, and the Rise of the Far Right
Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2022

Brian Fairbanks is a Louisiana-based journalist who seems to be an ordinary liberal, looking for a Great Society-style social safety net. He has recently published a book about Louisiana’s 1991 gubernatorial election in which David Duke, a white advocate, nearly became Governor. (more…)

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Susan Neiman
Learning From the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: New York, 2019

Germans are notorious for their ethno-masochism. Their official identity is built on guilt and the need for atonement. Germans can only look back at their past with shame; pride is impossible. More Germans are challenging the national guilt cult, but it is still enshrined by the government and the culture. (more…)

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The American South provides all kinds of excellent demonstrations for the white liberal’s suppressed, smug, victim-blaming attitudes towards marginalized peoples for their own poor outcomes and problems. Let me be clear: I’m not talking about the idea that rural “white trash” are the one group liberals feel free to openly stereotype and scapegoat, which Jim Goad explored in his Redneck Manifesto almost 20 years ago now.

No, I’m talking about liberals literally being racist towards blacks . . . and literally being too damn stupid to even realize it.  (more…)

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Harper Lee
Go Set a Watchman: A Novel
Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2015

“I almost don’t care what the critics say as long as I can write another one.”[1]

“Mockingbird is a classic, but you’ve probably read it before, and it’s no more relevant to your future legal career than 12 Angry Men is to picking a jury. (more…)

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Harper Lee
Go Set a Watchman: A Novel
Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2015

As nearly everyone knows by now, Atticus Finch, that steadfast attorney from Maycomb, Alabama, led the local Citizens’ Council in the 1950s. When agitators from the NAACP and Communist Party came south to stir up trouble after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision, he fought the good fight for segregation. (more…)

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One of these days Harper Lee is going to kick off and have great big posthumous laugh at our expense. Bwah-hah-hah! Because right there in her Last Notes and Testament, we will find an answer to that puzzlement that has troubled the publishing biz for a half-century or more.

Namely, why didn’t Harper Lee write any more novels after To Kill a Mockingbird?

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Übersetzt von Deep Roots

English original here

Weißentum ist zumeist im Sinne eines “Anti-Schwarzentums” definiert worden, (more…)

“The Stainless Banner”: The Second National Flag (1863–65) of the Confederate States of America had a pure white field

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For the prequel to this article, see “The Confederate Revolution.”

In a short book published in 1971, University of Georgia history professor Emory M. Thomas examined The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience.

The Confederate revolution, Thomas maintains, occurred in two stages.  (more…)

The “Confederate flag” (Battle flag of the Army of Tennessee)

The Confederate rebellion can be viewed as a revolutionary attempt at regional secession from the Union with the objective of establishing an independent state. (more…)

T. S. Eliot, September 26, 1888–January 4, 1965

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Part 2 of 2

Editor’s Note:

T. S. Eliot was born on September 26, 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri. In honor of his birthday, we are publishing this essay by Kerry Bolton, the second and final part of which appears below.

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