Tag: the South

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…)