M. E. Bradford Archives ~ Page 3 of 4 ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Freedom & Tradition: M.E. Bradford’s Southern Patrimony

By Mark Malvasi|2017-09-05T23:05:49-05:00April 12th, 2015|Categories: Christendom, Culture, Featured, M. E. Bradford, Mark Malvasi, Southern Agrarians|Tags: 1MA|

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 and the Agrarian Mission

By Lee Cheek|2015-05-08T23:46:47-05:00April 12th, 2015|Categories: Agrarianism, John Randolph of Roanoke, M. E. Bradford|Tags: Allen Tate|

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 [...]

The Genius of M.E. Bradford

By Clyde Wilson|2016-10-17T11:05:26-05:00February 20th, 2015|Categories: Agrarianism, American Founding, Clyde Wilson, M. E. Bradford, South|

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 [...]

Mel Bradford, Religion, and Original Intentions

By Mark DeForrest|2015-12-19T11:36:46-06:00February 20th, 2014|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, M. E. Bradford, Religion|Tags: Mark DeForrest|

The late Mel Bradford (d. 1993) was one of the leading paleo-conservative scholars of the South, teaching at the University of Dallas until his unexpected death due to complications from surgery. Bradford’s scholarly work was primarily in the field of Southern literature (his writings on Faulkner received particular attention), although he branched out from literary [...]

Conservatives and the Problems of Language: Rhetoric and Respectability

By M.E. Bradford|2016-04-15T10:03:55-05:00November 22nd, 2013|Categories: Conservatism, Language, M. E. Bradford, Rhetoric|Tags: 1MA|

Conservatives have struggled with the problem of adjusting their public posture so as to reflect changes in their situation. Following electoral triumph and the dramatic shift in the temper of their countrymen which produced so many encouraging results at the polls, they have been obliged to represent themselves, through the spoken or the written word, [...]

M.E. Bradford and Southern Agrarianism

By Sean Busick|2023-05-07T16:05:00-05:00July 26th, 2013|Categories: Agrarianism, Lee Cheek, M. E. Bradford, Sean Busick, South, Southern Agrarians|

M.E. Bradford was was truly one of the giants of the postwar conservative intellectual movement. A Southerner first, he was naturally both an agrarian and a conservative. The late M.E. (“Mel”) Bradford (1934-1993) was truly one of the giants of the postwar conservative intellectual movement. A Texan (born in Fort Worth), Bradford earned his B.A. [...]

Founding Fathers-Lives of the Framers: Featured Book

By W. Winston Elliott III|2016-11-04T19:19:01-05:00February 20th, 2013|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Books, M. E. Bradford, Russell Kirk, TIC Featured Book, W. Winston Elliott III|Tags: TIC Featured Book|

Founding Fathers: Brief Lives of the Framers of the United States Constitution M.E. Bradford’s brief lives of the Founding Fathers, free of ideological prejudices, tell us the sort of delegates those fifty-five were: gentlemen, with few exceptions, attached to precedent and custom, prescription and “ancient constitutions.” Those colonial gentlemen, so very British, were not in [...]

Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the Constitution

By Kevin Gutzman|2020-06-22T16:20:45-05:00January 20th, 2013|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Books, Constitution, Kevin Gutzman, M. E. Bradford|Tags: 1MA|

Driven by an imperative to remind Americans of what they once knew, and to do so before the opportunity passed, M.E. Bradford possessed a reactionary vision; he yearned for a return to America’s birthright, the Constitution of 1787. Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution, by M. E. Bradford; foreword [...]

Artists at Home: Frost and Faulkner

By M.E. Bradford|2016-08-03T10:37:25-05:00September 4th, 2012|Categories: Christendom, Featured, Literature, M. E. Bradford, Robert Frost, South|Tags: 1MA|

M.E. Bradford It is a paradox of our times that close observers of the American literary scene residing beyond our borders receive, from the self-appointed guardians of “high” culture and the life of the mind within this country, so little really useful direction or assistance in identifying what American writing is worthwhile or [...]

A Proper Patrimony: Russell Kirk and America’s Moral Genealogy

By M.E. Bradford|2016-04-15T10:03:56-05:00August 6th, 2012|Categories: Books, M. E. Bradford, Roots of American Order, Russell Kirk|Tags: 1IR|

The Roots of American Order, by Russell Kirk It is nowadays the fashion to think of these United States as a wholly “invented” polity, as the pure and miraculous handiwork of those gifted political craftsmen who were our honored forefathers and whose high achievements we celebrate during this commemorative year. It is also the conventional [...]

The Household Gods of Freedom

By M.E. Bradford|2016-05-11T12:02:32-05:00May 31st, 2012|Categories: American Republic, Books, John Randolph of Roanoke, M. E. Bradford, Russell Kirk|Tags: 1UB|

John Randolph of Roanoke: A Study in American Politics, by Russell Kirk. For Southerners of my antique persuasion, Russell Kirk’s John Randolph of Roanoke is a locus classicus. And for most American conservatives, it is a work of decisive importance, a path leading into a neglected portion of our common patrimony, a portion now not well [...]

A Teaching for Republicans: Roman History and the Nation’s First Identity

By M.E. Bradford|2019-09-19T13:10:16-05:00May 7th, 2012|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, M. E. Bradford, Republicanism, Rome|Tags: 1IR|

The Federal District of Columbia, both in its formal character as a capital and also in its self-conscious attempt at a certain visual splendor, is, for every visitor from the somewhat sovereign states, a reminder that the analogy of ancient Rome had a formative effect upon those who conceived and designed it as their one [...]

M.E. Bradford’s Constitutional Theory: A Southern Conservative’s Affirmation of The Rule of Law

By Marshall DeRosa|2016-07-04T01:03:01-05:00May 4th, 2012|Categories: American Founding, Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Featured, M. E. Bradford, Political Science Reviewer, Republicanism, Southern Agrarians|

A Better Guide Than Reason: Studies in the American Revolution. (La Salle, IL: Sherwood Sugden & Company Publishers, 1979). Cited in the text as Guide. Remembering Who We Are: Observations of a Southern Conservative. (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1985). Cited in the text as Remembering. A Worthy Company: The Dramatic Story of [...]

Poetry: Donald Davidson’s “Aunt Maria and the Gourds”

By John E. Rocha Sr.|2014-01-23T12:55:33-06:00April 8th, 2012|Categories: Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Literature, M. E. Bradford, Moral Imagination|Tags: John Rocha|

While studying at the University of Dallas in the early ’90’s, I was taught and influenced by a few notable professors, such as Janet Smith, Frederick Wilhelmsen, Wayne Ambler, Leo Paul de Alvarez, along with a few others. Following Prof. Wilhelmsen after many class lectures back to his office or at least to the university mall, I [...]