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“The fiction of Mr. Simms gave indication, we repeat, of genius, and that of no common order. Had he been even a Yankee, this genius would have been rendered immediately manifest to his countrymen, but unhappily (perhaps) he was a Southerner. . . . His book, therefore, depended entirely upon its own intrinsic value and...

That a tale should live, While temples perish!  That a poet’s song Should keep its echoes fresh for all the hills That could not keep their cities! . . . So wrote William Gilmore Simms in his poem “The Lions of Mycenae” (1870).  He was alluding to Aeschylus, Horace, and Homer, but was no doubt...

“If the general government should persist in the measures now threatened, there must be war. It is painful to discover with what unconcern they speak of war, and threaten it. They seem not to know what its horrors are.” —Stonewall Jackson On balance, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel has written a provocative and much-needed book on what...

Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy is divided into three parts held together, at times, only by the most tenuous of rhetorical threads.  The first deals with the perilous politics of Big Oil and American imperial overreach; the third, with the looming threat to American prosperity represented by out-of-control national debt and what Phillips calls the “financialization...

The War for Southern Independence reminds us of many things, not least of which that there were once many men who were willing to take up arms to defend what they believed to be their birthright as Americans. It was not by chance that the Great Seal of the new nation featured George Washington, for...

“Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?” —Job 41:1 No idea is more central to the American political tradition than that of limited government. As a nation we began with our commitment to the liberty of commonwealths, of communities, and of citizens. When we collectively rejected the remote, arbitrary, and potentially hostile power that,...

Longtime readers of Chronicles are familiar with John Shelton Reed, who used to write a column for this magazine.  Those less familiar may recall the occasional news story based on the latest intelligence-gathering done by the University of North Carolina’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture, which Professor Reed founded.  Well-known among his fellow...

“The way to have power is to take it.” —W.M. Tweed When on January 3, 1949, Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas was sworn in as a United States senator, an era in the politics of his state had come to an end, a period that had begun when Reconstruction concluded. Similar events occurred in other...

“Poetry is the language of the state of crisis.” —Stéphane Mallarmé When Cleanth Brooks died at 87 in 1994, a great era of American literary criticism ended. Brooks had been one of John Crowe Ransom’s prize students at Vanderbilt, and when Ransom issued the call for a method of criticism of poetry that would not...