2673 search results for: Southern%25252525252525252525252BHeritage

“Ideas rule the world and its events. A revolution is a passage of an idea from theory to practice. Whatever men say, material interests never have caused and never will cause a revolution.” —Mazzini My grandmother, the daughter of a Confederate “high private,” always said that if someone had done something particularly good, you could...

Imagine America invaded by a foreign power, one that has quadruple the population and industrial base. Imagine that this enemy has free access to the world’s goods as well as an inexhaustible supply of cannon fodder from the proletariat of other countries, while America itself is tightly blockaded from the outside world. New York and...

In November 1972 I voted for the re-election of President Nixon.  Granted, it was only an elementary-school straw poll, but I was still thrilled when he carried the student body by a three-to-one margin.  On election night, the electoral map was covered in a sea of blue (in those days each party retained its appropriate...

Despite all that has passed since, the war of 1861-65 arguably remains the central event of American history.  In proportion to population no other event equals it in mobilization, death, destruction, and revolutionary change.  We are into the Sesquicentennial, and one would like to think that Americans will take the opportunity to contemplate where we...

John Lukacs has observed that our century’s two most significant revolutionaries were Lenin and Wilson. Of the two, according to Lukacs, the internationalist Lenin had less destructive influence in the long run than the democratic moralist but fervent nationalist Wilson; today it may be said that the Wilsonians have outlasted the Commies. Democracy and national...

“In my honest and unbiased judgment, the Good Lord will place the Garden of Eden in North Carolina, when He restores it to earth. He will do this because He will have so few changes to make in order to achieve perfection.” —Sam J. Ervin Jr. William S. Powell’s magnificent portrayal of an American state...

Black migration from the rural South to the cities of the North is an important chapter in 20th-century American history. What began as a steady trickle developed into a flood as blacks left the land in response to the promises of the factory. The decade of the I920’s alone saw nearly 250,000 blacks make the...

Thinking Clearly About War by Gary Jason   James Turner Johnson: Can Modern War Be Just?; Yale University Press; New Haven.   There is nothing quite so fatuous as the nuclear pacifism currently fashionable among leftist theologians and their ilk. Visions of mushroom clouds (brought on by repeated viewings of On the Beach and Dr. Strangelove)...

The opportunity for a reconsideration, indeed a reconstruction, of literary history is, in the case of William Gilmore Simms’ poetry, both enticing and rewarding.  In Matthew Brennan’s analytical volume, we find the basis, fully elaborated, for reengaging with a body of work, the worth of which has only recently been reevaluated. William Gilmore Simms (1806-70)...

“The Anglo-Saxon carries self-government and self-development with him wherever he goes.” —Henry Ward Beecher For almost exactly 30 years, Kevin P. Phillips has been cranking out some of the most interesting and provocative works of political analysis written since World War II. In 1969, The Emerging Republican Majority argued that American politics runs through periodic...

The publication of the last volume of William Marvel’s four-volume history of “Mr. Lincoln’s War” completes one of the more remarkable historical works of our time.  Marvel is an “amateur,” nonacademic, historian.  That is not a remarkable, but rather an old and honorable, thing.  This is what is remarkable: I can think of no active...

Rivers exercise a strange pull on the human imagination; they work their way into every art form, from Bernini’s Renaissance sculptures of the great flows of Europe to Mikhail Sholokhov’s social-realist novels of Cossack life along the Don to Basho’s haiku celebrating the waterways of northern Japan. In this country no region has taken to...