2702 search results for: Southern%252525252525252BHeritage

“A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman, of the next generation.” —James Freeman Clarke James Madison was not “The Father of the Constitution.” I know you were probably taught that in school. I myself am guilty of having foisted that old truism of the history classroom off on countless sullen but gullible undergraduates....

In his engaging biography of John C. Calhoun, Irving H. Bartlett reminds us that American political culture and the men who made it were not always as decadent and corrupt as they are today. Yet Bartlett’s book is not a partisan manifesto. He is respectful of Calhoun but not always sympathetic to his views, aspirations,...

This fine first collection of poems from William Bedford Clark, the renowned Robert Penn Warren scholar who, as the back cover announces, “abandoned poetry as an undergraduate” and returned to it “in late middle age,” is a triumph of elegant formalism.  This volume—which ranges widely in form and motif, from the sacred to the profane,...

The decline of the household economy is one of the most significant economic changes in post-World War II America.  Unfortunately, it has received relatively little attention.  Professional economists find it trivial compared to the workings of large-scale institutions and global economies, while the average American sees only a positive development that has meant greater mobility,...

Wendell Berry is a Democrat, pacifist, and critic of organized religion.  Add to this the fact that he is a writer whose work has proved compelling to many conservatives, and he becomes a bit mysterious.  At times Berry himself has seemed somewhat bemused by the cultural conservatives who frequently promote his work.  Once we consider...

How does he get away with it? Ever since Bonfire of the Vanities, I have wondered at Tom Wolfe’s success. The success itself is well deserved: Wolfe is a dazzling writer, without peer as an observer of contemporary American life. But can’t the brilliant social and literary critics of New York figure out what he...

“Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land? All fear, none aid you, and few understand.” —Alexander Pope Poet, critic, and teacher Marion Montgomery is known to have taken a fortnight’s break from a book project in order to write another book! Ever since coming out a few years ago with the Prophetic Poet...

A work of genuine scholarship tells us what we did not know before and does so felicitously—it is a contribution to the world’s body of knowledge.  Discouragingly, a majority of academic books that have bounced across my desk in recent years either regurgitate what was told better long ago, or are the distorted remnants of...

“The Celts fear neither earthquakes nor the waves.” —Aristotle Nearly six years ago, Chronicles published “Death Before Dishonor,” an article I wrote about the westward march of the American pioneer.  Much of the time, I was writing about the Scotch-Irish—or Scots-Irish, if you prefer.  These hard-edged folks were in the vanguard of the movement across...