Abbeville Institute

“If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.” -Michael Crichton, Timeline The quote attributed to Karl Marx, “If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded,” also applies. As does Orwell’s “Who controls the past controls the future....

The number 250 is an arbitrary number for a Southerner.  The life of our people did not begin in 1776, but in 1607.  Dixie celebrated her 250th anniversary in 1857, though few probably paid it the attention it deserved due to the violence being threatened against Southrons by the Yankees at the time. We are now in our 419th year...

The colonial South was a stronghold of traditional Protestantism. Although religiously diverse and generally tolerant by the standards of the era, its culture was largely shaped by a distinctly Protestant worldview. Among these Protestant settlers were the French Huguenots, whose presence in the Southeast, though aggregately relatively small, left a notable imprint between 1660 ...

Robert Lewis Dabney stood before the graduating class of Hampden-Sydney College in June of 1882 and told them, with the measured certainty of a man who had already watched one civilization end, that another was ending around them. He was sixty-two years old, a Presbyterian theologian, Stonewall Jackson’s chief of staff and biographer, and one of the most unsparing critics...

Rawlins Lowndes was one of the most significant and yet least remembered figures of the American founding era, a South Carolina lawyer, planter, jurist, and governor who became his state’s most forceful opponent of the U.S. Constitution during the ratification debates of 1788. He is best remembered for his prophetic warning that if the Constitution were adopted, “the...