Abbeville Institute

A review of Time Will Tell: Collected Poems (The University Press of SHSU, 2025) by David Middleton The deaths of Fred Chappell in 2024 and of Wendell Berry this past summer have left a gaping hole not only in Southern letters but in American prosody as a whole. Their poems, seemingly confined to the hills and hollers and valleys of southwestern North...

“My wish is simply to live my life as fully as I can…And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.” —Wendell Berry, What Are People For? (1990) “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world...

Kentucky never voted to leave the Union, yet it produced an entire rival government, thousands of Confederate soldiers, and a star on the Confederate battle flag. That contradiction makes it one of the strangest states during the Civil War—a place where roughly 25,000 to 40,000 men fought for the Confederacy while somewhere between 74,000 and 125,000, including approximately 24,...

Thomas Jefferson today is often castigated by “manly” scholars for not being more like George Washington or his aide-de-camp Alexander Hamilton. Though an excellent horseman, those skills were never on display during the American Revolution—especially during the British assault on Virginia during Jefferson’s tenure as governor (1779–1781). Yet that is like criticizing a puffin f...

Even here in Charleston, the city celebrated so lovingly in its pages, Owen Wister’s Lady Baltimore (1906) seems to be the subject of a discreet silence. For some time I was puzzled by this, for the novel has lost little if any of its original charm. While DuBose Heyward’s sentimental Porgy is daily fodder for every horse-and-buggy tour guide on...