2674 search results for: Southern%252525252BHeritage

Martin Fletcher worked seven years as a Washington, D.C., correspondent for the London Times. Before returning to Britain, he packed up a car and hit the road for a five-month journey that started in Virginia and ended in Seattle. After years of writing about politics in Washington, Fletcher “resolved to take time off to explore...

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...

“Breathitt County in east Kentucky is the only county in the United States not to have had selective service enforced during the Second World War.  That was because there were so many volunteers.” —Gordon McKinney Since I have long been convinced that the Appalachian South embodies a grounded yet radical alternative to the American mainstream,...

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 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,...

Tactical strengths and strategic weaknesses mark John D. McKenzie’s reassessment of Robert E. Lee’s generalship. The strengths of this book are many. The weaknesses, however, undercut the very point that the author attempts to make; namely, that Lee was at best an average military leader, and that Lee’s apologists have given us a biased view...

In the middle part of this century one of the main staples of the Anglo- American reading public was the historical novel, or romance. Such “swashbucklers” were not great literature, but they had their virtues. In the hands of skilled writers like C.S. Forester or Kenneth Roberts, they introduced a great many people to some...

In Tom Wolfe’s America the Northern WASP elite is shallow and cowardly, the most sacrosanct minority groups seethe with ingratitude toward the majority and snarl at one another, culture is dominated by the conspicuous vulgarity of new and ill-gotten wealth, and manners and morals are in a catastrophic nosedive in which the relation of man...

Southerners have a special feeling for the pathos of history. They know what it is like to have a lost cause, a history that might be gone with the wind but is still resonant and noble for all that. The Southern Confederacy’s almost-allies, the British, also have a sense of the pathos of history. But...

Why does the South adore Stonewall Jackson? He was not a particularly lovable man. And he was certainly not a romantic, dashing cavalier, like Jeb Stewart; a stainless aristocrat calmly daring all the odds, like Robert E. Lee; or even a wizard of the saddle, like Bedford Forrest. Yet at Stone Mountain, Georgia—the Confederacy’s Mount...