M.E. Bradford Ideas about property, language, and memory established the contours and parameters of M.E. Bradford’s Southern inheritance. In Bradford’s thought, property, language, and memory were linked in defense of what his mentor, Donald Davidson, characterized as “the great vital continuum of human experience to which we apply the inadequate term ‘tradition’….”[1] The [...]
Allen Tate Who Owns America? followed I’ll Take My Stand–which had appeared six years earlier–as a more diverse sequel and defense of decentralization. More importantly, Who Owns America? was explicitly a plea for a recovery of what had been lost: a humane social order. If the Agrarian and Distributist insights contained in Who [...]
A day after surrendering his army to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, Confederate General Robert E. Lee issued the following message to the soldiers of his beloved Army of Northern Virginia, which he had commanded since the spring of 1862, and at the head of which he had won battle after battle against superior Union [...]
I have called M.E. Bradford the Agrarian Aquinas. He did not write a Summa, but his work, as a whole, enriched and carried into new territory the message of I’ll Take My Stand on a broad front of literature, history, and political thought. He came at a crucial time when Richard Weaver had passed his [...]
Once a symbol of national unity and reconciliation, Robert E. Lee is under attack in modern America. In recent years, his name and that of other Confederate generals have been erased from schools across the South, and his statue and those of his Southern compatriots have been removed from countless town squares throughout the country. [...]
Russell Kirk gave southern conservatives a larger canvas by which to imagine the conservative tradition. One could be southern, conservative, and yet reject the ancient racial evils of the South. When Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind in 1953, he included among the pantheon of conservatives in the United States John C. Calhoun and John [...]
In graduate school, I was assigned by the resident “New South” historian I’ll Take My Stand by Twelve Southerners as my final paper. I eagerly accepted the project. This was in my back-yard, so to speak. I had read the book at least twice before and considered it one of the best tomes on Southern [...]
Art is the pulse of the soul. It expresses much of what is kept hidden and even what could not be expressed in any other form. Many people talk of a crisis in modern art—its abstractness, banality, and, could we even say, ugliness. If there is such a crisis, to me, it is nothing other [...]
John Dalberg-Acton, the English, Catholic historian, and Robert E. Lee, the American, Episcopal warrior, shared much in common in terms of their views on liberty. It is interesting to note that Lord Acton corresponded with General Robert E. Lee after the conclusion of the American Civil War. Sympathetic to the Confederate cause, Lord Acton considered [...]
As one who has published on William Gilmore Simms, the Old South’s greatest author, I am periodically asked where one should begin reading his works. This is a good question. Most readers today are not very familiar with Simms. Add to this the fact that he published over eighty books, and it is easy to [...]
Robert E. Lee once uttered one of history’s most searching observations: “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” What is the meaning of this statement, which is richer than a Delphic saying? “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of [...]
Wendell Berry addressed faith, agrarianism, and why he hates “environmentalism” in a ninety minute conversation with Centre College Professor Eric Mount. The two men sat in angled wingback chairs before a crowd of more than two hundred listeners in the sumptuous surroundings of Louisville’s Crescent Hill Baptist Church. In true professorial fashion, Mount made sure [...]
Susan Srigley brings to the fiction of Flannery O’Connor what others have not: a truly Catholic frame of reference informed by Thomas Aquinas. In her study of the South’s preeminent fictionist, Flannery O’Connor’s Sacramental Art, Susan Srigley reconsiders three of Flannery O’Connor’s most significant figures: Hazel Motes, Francis Tarwater, and Ruby Turpin. The former are, [...]
John Taylor of Caroline County, Virginia, was the chief pamphleteer of the Jeffersonian Republicans during the 1790s. With vigor, he attacked the Hamiltonian system with its national bank and privileges for the wealthy. Despite Taylor’s prominence in the Jeffersonian party and in forming its ideological expression, his significance has not always been understood. Historians have [...]