As a displaced Southerner sojourning in Kansas, I’ll never forget the time I wandered into the statehouse and encountered John Steuart Curry’s mural. One section features John Brown, girded with sword and pistol, mouth and eyes agape. Mosaic beard jutting off at a right angle, brandishing a rifle in one hand and the Good Book...
2702 search results for: Southern%2BHeritage
Post
The Supreme Court, Globalization, and the Teaching of Religion
Public figures talk about globalization as if it were the Rapture. We are told that, unlike Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus, we live in an era of international trade; so these days, we must worry more about what the world thinks and does. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor told the Southern Center for International Studies,...
Post
Putin’s Friends in Ukraine
The most important borders for Americans to worry about are our own. But the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 has certainly shifted media attention from the crisis on our southern border to the borders of Ukraine. Although we do not know with certainty, it appears likely that pro-Russian rebels were the ones who shot...
Post
Texas and Heterosexual Marriage
Barely eight years ago, 76 percent of Texas voters affirmed by constitutional amendment their commitment to heterosexual marriage as the proper relational norm. But, hey, so what, when a federal judge informs Texans that “[S]tate-imposed inequality can find no refuge in the United States Constitution”? Accordingly, Texas joins the melancholy parade of Southern states—Virginia, Kentucky,...
Post
Two Experiments
It is a commonplace among American conservatives that, at some point in the past, the way Americans understood their constitutional and cultural tradition diverged from the reality of the constitutional order established in 1787. For the Southern Agrarians and their intellectual descendants, the great change occurred with the Civil War, which elevated “union” over the...
Post
The New Gold Rush—The American Border
What U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents really think about what's happening at our southern border.
Post
What is History? Part 35
You can do anything you like in London as long as you don’t do it in the street and don’t frighten the horses. —Mrs. Patrick Campbell There is nothing so stupid as a gallant British officer. —Wellington I am one Southerner who is not obsessed with the Civil War. I am too busy planning for...
Post
Europe, A Nation of Old Men Up for Grabs
I have just completed a three-week tour of Europe starting from a home base in Switzerland to southern Germany, thence to the south of France, and finally to northern Italy. Each of these places is unique. Each is delightful in its own way, rich in culture and history, a pleasure to be in. The food...
Post
State’s Wrongs
Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s column “Pragmatic Destruction” (What’s Wrong With the World, December 2011) attacks American democracy with a vengeance. He seems to be bothered by the fact that Southern blacks were “freed” (his quotation marks) by civil-rights laws through the negation of “states’ rights” (my quotation marks). I don’t see how restricting a certain class...
Post
“Tech Totalitarians” vs. the Right
The “tech totalitarians” of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Google have been joined by financial services corporations like Paypal in not only “de-platforming” and censoring alternative voices on the Right but “de-financing” them by blocking access to their services. Paypal is teaming up with the leftist, anti-Christian Southern Poverty Law Center to determine who to ban...
Post
High Times: The Late 60’s in New York
As 1969 rolled around and the decade was ending, I was six years old and living in a temperate Southern city a thousand miles from New York. Conflict came from wanting to stretch my feet into my brother’s half of the backest-back of our fake wood-sided turquoise station wagon; Vietnam had no meaning for me....
Post
Genes & Jingo
Popular journalists have begun writing off the sociobiology revolution. “Can Sociobiology Be Saved? and quote the learned opinions of Stephen J. Gould and Ashley Montagu (would they lie?). They indulge in vaguely worded smears: Konrad Lorenz was a nazi, E. O. Wilson is a Southerner, and sociobiology is a code word for racism among members...
Post
Yes, America Is Being Invaded
Though most of the migrants crossing the U.S. southern border are in search of economic opportunity, some are used as tools by our enemies. The invasion is deliberate.
Post
Slouching Toward Empire
The tragic fate of the Cherokee tribe is well documented. What is less widely known, and probably less researched, is the fairly rapid destruction of the Creeks—a nation whose territory included most of what is today Alabama and southern Georgia—and the role played by Andrew Jackson in their demise. In a style more readable than...
Post
You Had One Job
Our southern border is being overwhelmed by waves of “migrants” and interior immigration enforcement has collapsed, as the president continues to threaten closing the border. Trump has made plenty of threats before, threats about halting the “caravans,” making Mexico pay for a border wall, forcing “migrants” to wait in Mexico, and refusing to sign any...
Post
Along for the Ride
I thoroughly enjoyed Roger D. McGrath’s account of the Southern California Norton Owners Club journey along Old Route 66 (Correspondence, September). He mentions that his home is near the Rock Store, which immediately brought up memories of my old stomping grounds. I grew up in the west end of the San Fernando Valley, in Woodland...
Post
An Unpeaceable Kingdom
It was one of those Saturday nights that spills over into Sunday morning. Invited into the home of a main-line Protestant couple in split-level northern New Jersey, the 40ish group was made up of Jews and Roman Catholics from the neighborhood and of visiting Southern Baptists from Texas. After enjoying much conversation and suffering the...
Post
Trump’s Unsteady Performance
President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency to fund the wall along the nation’s southern border. Speaking in the Rose Garden, Trump said there was an emergency at the border which could only be fixed by building a wall. House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer had said before Trump’s address...
Post
Death Wish of the West—May 2011
beyond the revolution The Unentitled by Thomas Fleming views Suicide by (Legal) Immigration by Roger D. McGrath The Death Wish of the West by Claude Polin news DOMA’s Fifth Column by William J. Watkins, Jr. reviews A Southern Foison by Ray Olson Chronicles of the South edited by Clyde N. Wilson Vol. 1: Garden of the Beaux Arts Vol. 2: In Justice to so Fine a ...
Post
Texas Is Correct to Defend Its Sovereignty from the Border Invasion
The mass invasion now transpiring at the U.S. southern border is illegal, immoral, and unsustainable. Texas is within its rights to resist it.
Post
Cannibal Statistics
In debate, it is always possible to be right for the wrong reason. For instance, in supporting the proposition that cannibalism is immoral, I might argue that, historically, cannibalism encouraged the killing of human beings who might otherwise have been kidnapped by Arabs or rival African tribesmen and sold into slavery in the southern United...
Post
SPLC
So the Southern Poverty Law Center finally lost one. And a big one at that. The FBI has dropped the SPLC from its list of “partners” on the agency’s hate crimes page, The Daily Caller revealed last week. The agency dropped SPLC, an FBI spokesman told TheDC, because,“the Civil Rights program only provides links to...
Post
You Can’t Get There From Here
The sun is shining on a typical warm day. I roll my sleeves up, let the window down, and watch the train go by. The battered Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, and Santa Fe boxcars roll past, clackity-clacking and swaying just a little on their way to “Cow Town.” Then they are gone, so I turn...
Post
Finally, A Black “Hater”
The Southern Poverty Law Center, or the $PLC, as they call it at VDare.com, has finally found a black murder suspect they dislike. Indeed, such was their distaste, the “hate-watchers” published his mugshot on their website. Normally, SPLC covers only white “haters” collared by the long arm of the law. They include crackpot supremacists, separatists...
Post
A Liberal Policy
In regard to the recent controversy over illegal immigration, allow me to offer a few liberal proposals. The problem could be easily and immediately solved by putting all illegal aliens to work constructing a wall across the entire southern border. (They make up 25 percent of the construction industry, anyway.) And, at below minimum wages,...
Post
Trump Should Close NATO Membership Rolls
When Donald Trump meets with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg today, the president should give him a direct message: The roster of NATO membership is closed. For good. The United States will not hand out any more war guarantees to fight Russia to secure borders deep in Eastern Europe, when our own southern border is...
Post
Bundy: Not Quite A Terrorist
The Southern Poverty Law Center has weighed in again on Cliven Bundy, the rancher in Nevada at odds with the federal government over grazing rights, fees and endangered turtles on federal land. Having restrained itself from calling Bundy a “terrorist lawbreaker,” as the Daily Kos did, SPLC may be reconsidering. Apparently upset that Daily Kos...
Post
Lord Ashdown’s Balkan Fiefdom
For 200 years, the Balkan states have been manipulated by the powers of “Old Europe” to slow and control the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. They were created, enlarged, and shrunk as the need arose. During the two world wars, the territories inhabited by southern Slavs were used as bargaining chips in constructing alliances, while...
Post
The Lunacy Spreads
The hatewatch business has grown in recent years from a large but solo operation known as the Southern Poverty Law Center into a major industry that includes an array of outlets that also retail gratuitous contumely, scurrilous innuendo and naked lies. Say something the left doesn’t like, and any number of disreputable websites will declare...
Post
Miller and Lennon
Sixty-six years ago, a small plane took off from southern England for Paris. It never made it. On board was a 40 year old Army Air Force major, who before the war had been the most popular musician in America. His music is still listened to and enjoyed today, even though popular music has since...
Post
A Conservative Case for Open Borders?
As I write this, the federal government remains “shut down” because congressional Democrats have committed themselves en masse to open borders. The Democrats know that they can secure congressional approval of President Obama’s unilateral DACA amnesty if they give President Trump funding for a wall on our southern border. But the Democrats are unwilling to...
Post
Economics and the Catholic Ethic
Amintore Fanfani (1908-99) was an economic historian whose scholarship focused on the origins of capitalism and questions of economic and social equity. In his early career, he was part of a broader Catholic and conservative intellectual movement that was active during the interwar years and included the English Distributists and the Southern Agrarians. Like these...
Post
Trying to Find “Hate”
A problem with having to find “hate” wherever you look, and then blog about it in breathless, apocalyptic prose, is publishing a major gaffe. Thus did the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog offer this gem on Aug. 20 about conservative activist Larry Klayman, the founder of Judicial Watch: Right Wing Watch: Larry Klayman wants...
Post
Tom Landess, R.I.P.
Chronicles is very sad to report that our friend and longtime contributor Tom Landess has passed away of a sudden illness. A true man of letters, Dr. Landess wrote (and ghostwrote) hundreds of books and articles, as well as poetry. He was a student and friend of many of the Twelve Southerners and a brilliant...
Post
Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?
A pathologist who recently moved from Vermont to North Carolina has written an article in the American Journal of Forensic Sciences about the old Southern custom of lying in the road. The good doctor was apparently unacquainted with this practice, and he was upset to discover that every couple of weeks, on the average, one...
Post
The Middle East Heats Up
The string of attacks on civilian and military targets in southern Israel by gunmen suspected to have crossed from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula was a complex, carefully coordinated operation. Israeli sources say that its intelligence services, army and police were taken by surprise by the scale and slick organization of the multiple assaults staged near Eilat. More serious than...
Post
What Makes Us Human
Myths are part of what makes us human; all peoples live by myths, some healthy, some destructive. Among the unhealthy beliefs that have been propagated amongst Americans are that the Constitution came from the gods; that the conquest and destruction of the Southern states was noble; that the Americans who fought and died in World...
Post
Media Matters: Another Inquisitor In Fighting ‘Hate’
The granddaddy of the “anti-hate” movement is, of course, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has made hundreds of millions of dollars and ruined the lives of conservatives by using innuendo, guilt by association and outright lies to smear anyone it doesn’t like. And that’s just about anyone to right of, say, Che Guevara. One...
Post
Tune In: Live This Afternoon!
Despite the slow news week, Chronicles Unbound, the best show on radio, will still air live today, 3-5 PM CDT. Tune in online by clicking here, or download the podcast on Monday at this page. If you are in Northern Illinois or Southern Wisconsin, tune in on your terrestrial radio device at 100.5 FM. Chronicles editors @Thomas Fleming...
Post
An Invasion Heads North
The people who voted for Trump weren’t motivated by the allure of tax cuts. They were motivated by a desire to, at long last, secure the southern border. The organized mob now being allowed to march through Mexico is an all too vivid reminder that the wall has not yet been built. These marchers aren’t...
Post
Rebranding the Gun Culture
During the five years of the 1990’s that I served on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, one other member and I would occasionally upset the others by asking why the ACLU did not defend the Second Amendment rights of individuals. My colleague asked because he was an 80-year-old Hollywood...
Post
Don’t Feed the War Machine
“His sympathies were for race—too lofty to descend to persons,” a wit once said of the abolitionist Senator Sumner. For how else could a man countenance the slaughter of his countrymen, not only rebel Southerners but noble Robert Gould Shaw and Berkshires boys, too? The most dangerous people—the ones who will kill you for your...
Post
A Tale of Two Borders
One clear winner of the recent European Parliament elections was Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, whose party won roughly a third of the votes, finishing well ahead of any other party. Salvini’s party, the Lega, began as a regional party in Lombardy, but won numerous votes in southern Italy, including carrying many municipalities and several...
Post
Our Constitutional Covenant With Death
“The compact which exists between the North and the South,” proclaimed William Lloyd Garrison in an abolitionist declaration of 1843, “is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” When the Southern states concluded that they were no longer bound by what their enemies regarded as a compact with the devil. Garrison and his...
Post
Anatomy of a Murder
The November murder of a missionary Orthodox priest in Moscow highlighted the threats to Russia’s stability from extremist groups, including Muslim terrorists and the far right. The priest, Daniil Sysoyev, and his aide, Vladimir Strelbitsky, were shot down in a church in Moscow’s Southern Administrative Okrug on November 19. The gunman, whom some sources described...
Post
Debating the “Gentile Vice”
At its annual “Ministers Week” lectures last year, the theological school of Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas provided a revealing window into the contemporary debate within mainline church circles over homosexuality. Taking a pro-homosexuality approach was Victor Furnish, a professor at SMU’s Perkins School of Theology. Defending the traditional Christian stance was Richard Hays...
Post
Witnessing at The Hague
All history is to some extent contemporary, but none more so than that analyzed, interpreted, and sometimes constructed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague. ...
Post
Impeachment: The Left’s Ultimate Weapon
In 1868, President Andrew Johnson was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act that had been enacted by Congress over his veto in 1867. Defying the law, Johnson fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, without getting Senate approval, as the act required him to do. In his 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, John F. Kennedy...
Post
Not Necessarily Muslim
A January 24 bombing at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport left 35 dead and scores injured, as the Russian capital’s transportation system was targeted by terrorists for the second time in less than a year. The most likely culprits are Muslim terrorists from the North Caucasus who had struck Moscow’s metro system in March 2010. In the...
Post
Conspiratorial Illusions
The Atlanta air is clear and sultry, yet there’s a different air in the Democratic Convention’s Women’s Caucus in the Hyatt Regency—an air of conspiratorial illusions which stifle zealotry with their cold, hard calculations, but promise victory and the triumph of total human rights. In the hallway adjacent to the meeting room I’m the recipient...