2678 search results for: Southern%2525252525252525252525252525252BHeritage

The centennial of that enormous calamity later known as World War I saw the release of about a dozen books on the subject.  Catastrophe 1914, by Sir Max Hastings, one of the foremost British military historians writing today, is an exhaustive, one-volume history of that annus horribilis and the events leading up to the fatal...

The life of Lee having been “done,” redone, and perhaps even undone by revisionist treatment, the present weighty phenomenon requires some contextual examination.  We might first and simply ask the question, What is the purpose of this book?  I mean to say that the revisionist treatment of the so-called Civil War has been gathering force...

The life of country people, the Kentucky poet-farmer Wendell Berry has observed, is marked by a surprising complexity. To be successful it requires deep knowledge of the land, of the seasons in their time, of plants and animals—to say nothing of markets, freight costs, and federal regulations. Plant early, and risk late frost; plant late,...

Poetry, short story, novel, drama, screenplay, criticism, the teaching of writing: George Garrett has excelled across the entire spectrum of literary art. I can call to mind no other contemporary American writer who approaches this feat, though perhaps Garrett’s friend Fred Chappell comes closest. But, what is even rarer for a first-rank artist, Garrett also...

Randall Jarrell was born in Nashville in 1914 and grew up in Tennessee and Southern California.  He studied under poet and critic John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt University and followed him to Kenyon College, where he lived in Ransom’s attic with the young Robert Lowell and wrote his thesis on A.E. Housman.  Encouraged by Allen...

There is no conflict, M.E. Bradford insists, “between preserving the language and securing a civil polity,” a credo which, embedded in “What We Can Know For Certain: Frank Owsley and the Recovery of Southern History,” provides the subtext for the work as a whole. Not only does a relationship between language and polity exist, it...

Following the publication of Wise Blood in 1952, whispered speculation commenced among the novelist’s relatives, who wondered how an innocent Catholic girl from a genteel Southern background could have acquired the worldly experience to write the early scene in which Hazel Motes enters a stall in the men’s room at the local train station, reads...

Since the 1960’s, American politics at the national level has primarily consisted of an endless search for a new majority. The Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil-rights movement kicked off the quest by undermining the New Deal coalition that combined white Southerners with white, ethnic, Northern union members, allowing the Republican Party to invade the...

A minority on the left is possibly willing to admit that a few “good Southerners” during the War Between the States opposed slavery, secession, and the Confederacy.  Probably a much smaller minority would concede that a considerable number of Northerners opposed the war either to preserve the Union or to free the slaves.  That, in...