Marcel Duchamp, Mona Lisa with Moustache, 1919.
5,752 words
I’m a recent transplant in this city. And as far as cities go, this one isn’t terrible. We live just over the hill from Erie, one of those giant inland seas carved from North America’s heartland, and it’s like having our own, muted stretch of coast for the quiet. (more…)
Variety show host “Ziwe” Fumudoh
2,418 words
Justin Tyran Roberts has short dreadlocks, a scowling face, and a dumb tattoo between his eyebrows. The convicted felon has reportedly confessed to a shooting spree in Columbus, Georgia and Phenix City, Alabama last weekend that either involved three incidents where five white men were injured or four incidents where six white men were injured. (more…)
2,756 words
Richard Lyman Bushman
The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century
New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2018
Most of us who are not farmers are tempted to take farming for granted. We certainly see the results of farming in the produce sections of our supermarkets. Beyond that, we have pleasant images of industrious country folk in denim overalls just doin’ their thing amid amber waves of grain. (more…)
3,334 words
Ron Chernow
Grant
New York: Penguin Press, 2017
Ulysses S. Grant is one of the archetypal Americans. A brilliant general who would only accept unconditional surrender. A modest president who eschewed pomp in favor of simple, democratic attire. (more…)
H. P. Lovecraft with Felis
3,233 words
A thought has been lurking in the back of my mind for some time.
In terms of fiction, and even outside it (with the notable exception of H. P. Lovecraft), were certain authors reflexively embraced as soul mates by white conservatives and racialists, in reality . . . anti-white — out of “principle,” opportunism, or just unconsciously? (more…)
1,807 words
Thomas Nelson Page
Bred in the Bone
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904
Bred in the Bone, a 1904 novella by Thomas Nelson Page, epitomizes race realism through the proxy of horses and horse racing. It also embodies the author’s characteristic nostalgia for the aristocratic white supremacy of the antebellum South. (more…)
Postcard by Edgar Orr, Dogwood Trees in Bloom, Atlanta, Georgia, ca. 1930-45.
1,912 words
Spring has finally come roaring into Georgia, blanketing vehicles with yellow pollen and causing a sudden eruption of three-foot dandelions all across my front and back yards. (more…)
Phil Eiger Newmann, Flannery O’Connor, 2021.
1,842 words
Like her near-contemporary Gore Vidal (both were born in 1925), the fiction writer Mary Flannery O’Connor had her first brush with fame via a Pathé movie newsreel. She had a pet chicken whom she’d taught to walk backward. Gore’s fame came a few years later when he piloted an airplane, age ten. (more…)
Edmund Dulac, “The Buried Moon” from The Red Cross Fairy Book, 1916.
4,430 words
He had me at: “It was still the South, he knew it for a certainty when they passed an aged negro in overalls hobbling down along the highway toward no conceivable destination. The land was cursed. God, he loved it.” [1] Tito Perdue, author of the two novels here reviewed, The Smut Book and Cynosura, is a proud Southerner who has enjoyed skewering the sacred cows of these, our cursed times since he became a writer in the early 1980s. (more…)
1,988 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.
1,335 words
So they want to ban Gone With the Wind? Pity, because a movie they would really like to strangle is Santa Fe Trail. Made in 1940, Santa Fe Trail is an Errol Flynn/Olivia de Havilland Western with lots of action and romance that discusses slavery and the Southern point of view in rational terms.
Errol Flynn plays Jeb Stuart, and Ronald Reagan plays George Custer. They are classmates at West Point in 1854 (more…)
8,232 words
As an American, I find European theories about this country and its character intriguing (or amusing) — particularly those formed from intimate experience. Of course, such theories presuppose that there is and has been such a thing as “the American people,” or “ethny” from which to draw an assessment. I submit two, not quite antithetical, but competing European judgments about the United States. (more…)
Yeah, right, lady.
2,529 words
For the purposes of learning about human nature and the kind of “diversity” that our globalist thought-leaders have in mind for us all, there’s nothing quite like working a public sector job. After following my passion and earning a less-than-useful degree in history and literature, (more…)
Auguste Raffet, Attack and take of the Crête-à-Pierrot, 1839.
2,671 words
As Saint-Domingue sank ever deeper beneath the churning waves of black filth, those whites fortunate enough to survive fled for the greater Caribbean, including the antebellum American South. The colonists were no longer welcome in their home of France, (more…)
Charles Henry Niehaus’ Nathan Bedford Forrest, when it was still in Health Sciences Park.
1,084 words
Here we go again.
Renowned Civil War General Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife’s remains are in the process of being removed from the Health Sciences Park in Memphis.
We can thank the activist Left for going the extra mile to defend us from such dangerous artifacts of American history. Nothing screams “the civil rights battle of our time” like knocking down monuments and exhuming corpses of evil, racist white men. (more…)
1,615 words 
Unless you’ve lived under a rock for the past five years, you’ve probably heard about the “dangerous” return of tribalism.
Before 2015 (or before Obama, depending on the source), Americans didn’t put themselves in tribes. They only saw red, white and blue. Everyone was judged as an individual. Civility and decency reigned supreme. Race relations and gender relations were all just fine. Americans were one nation, under God and indivisible. (more…)
2,365 words
After the Civil War, the American South was in ruins. Beyond the poverty, oppression, and the rapid demise of the old regime, however, the inheritors of the former Confederacy found themselves without defense in the national court of moral opinion. They were a defeated people who had drawn arms against a tolerant and progressive government in order to cling to outmoded ways of life, including (most offensively to some) the ancient practice of slavery.
Those who pined for the South’s days of greatness needed a champion. During the postbellum period, Thomas Nelson Page was one such champion. (more…)
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…)
3,754 words
John Huston’s Wise Blood (1979) is one of his lesser-known films, but it deserves a wider audience. Based on Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel of the same name, Wise Blood is the most faithful screen adaptation I have ever seen, largely because the screenwriter truly loved and understood the source material. The script was written by Benedict Fitzgerald, who knew Flannery O’Connor from childhood. (more…)
2,180 words
George Lewis
Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement
London: Hodder Education, 2006
There are very few books that cover the white response to the “civil rights” movement very seriously. Professor George Lewis of the University of Leicester (UK) has done such a work. However, the book maintains the flaws of all histories of “civil rights,” (more…)
1,779 words
Like her near-contemporary Gore Vidal (both were born in 1925), the fiction writer Mary Flannery O’Connor had her first brush with fame via a Pathé movie newsreel. She had a pet chicken whom she’d taught to walk backward. Gore’s fame came a few years later when he piloted an airplane, age ten. (more…)
1,582 words
Richard M. Weaver
Edited by George M. Curtis, III and James J. Thompson, Jr.
The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver
Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 1987
Richard Weaver is known for two notable ideas that need to be emphasized. First, he proposed that there is an objective truth, not many truths. Second, he said that things that were true or good in the past are still true and good today. (more…)
4,517 words
Richard Weaver
The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought
New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1968
Richard Weaver’s The Southern Tradition at Bay has grown in both poignancy and meaning since its posthumous publishing in 1968. Originally Weaver’s 1943 doctoral dissertation at Louisiana State University, this work offers a survey of the most important postbellum literature produced by Southern writers until 1910 and ties it together with a philosopher’s breadth of vision. (more…)
2,241 words
The Nation of Islam
The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, Volume 3: The Leo Frank Case
Chicago: Latimer Associates, 2016
One can read a review of the first two volumes of The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews here.
“Why should I hang? I have wealthy people in Brooklyn.” — Leo Frank, 1913 (more…)