Abbeville Institute

Long before the world knew him as a conqueror, William Walker was a small, quiet, almost bookish boy on the streets of Nashville. He entered the world on May 8, 1824, the son of a Scottish immigrant merchant, and grew up inside a prosperous and politically connected Tennessee family. His mind raced far ahead of his years. According to The...

Harvard professor Annette Gordon-Reed—who has won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, for her book The Hemingses of Monticello (2009)—is widely acknowledged to be the world’s foremost authority on the nature of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his toothsome slave, Sally Hemings. In chapters 13 through 16 of that book and in several subsequent interviews and...

Patrick Henry, otherwise known as Mister Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death, was a pretty good musician, much like his contemporary, Thomas Jefferson. But Henry did not practice scales. He did not copy violin pieces by hand into notebooks, did not build a personal library of Italian Baroque composers, and did not submit himself to the long discipline of...

Originally published at Reckonin.com I recently turned 85. I really did not expect to last this long. When I turned 70, I wrote a contemplative essay that attracted some attention. For 85, I mostly have only an old man’s boring reflections on how much has changed. I was a teenager before I saw a television and a college student before...

I enjoy studying maps. I especially enjoy maps of the ‘what-if’ scenarios if certain courses in history played out differently, but also the constant debate regarding cultural borders within the US. I frequently analyze the border of the cultural South, as I have cause to believe the South is shrinking faster than most would want to accept. This turf war...