New biography examines Preston Brooks, the SC congressman behind an infamous Senate floor beating
Nearly 170 years after South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks raised his cane and beat abolitionist Charles Sumner bloody on the Senate floor, the pro-slavery lawmaker behind one of America’s most notorious acts of political violence is getting a full-length...
Let’s Fix Our Broken Health Care System
We just went through the longest government shutdown in history over contention regarding renewal of temporarily enacted government subsidies to Obamacare premiums. This battle is not over. Eight Democrats threw in the towel and agreed to postpone the issue and...
News From Around the South, 11/24 to 12/1
TENNESSEE: Battle of Franklin Trust to mark Civil War anniversaries Three Williamson County battlefields are set to mark the 161st anniversaries of two pivotal Civil War conflicts on Saturday and Sunday. The Battle of Franklin Trust will host abbreviated after-hours...
Thanksgiving
It cuts to the core, through the hot air and the blue smoke and mirrors of our politics, to what really matters. Tatianna Schlossberg's essay in The New Yorker is the one thing you must read this holiday season to touch base with what is real — including grief,but it...
Une fête française: Lowcountry’s connection to the ‘first’ Thanksgiving
BEAUFORT — The story of the first Thanksgiving in North America nearly perfectly embodies the truism that history is written by the victors. Representations of the “first” Thanksgiving are rife with English pilgrims and Native Americans celebrating a bountiful harvest...
How to Remain Grounded and Thankful Amid the Chaos
In a year marked by political vitriol in seemingly every conversation, a relentless scourge of political violence, and the highest-profile political assassination since 1968, Thanksgiving arrives just in time. Truthfully, it always does. And it always reminds us that...
News From Around the South, 11/17 to 11/24
TEXAS: Texas education board debates narrowing focus of history curriculum In September, the board adopted a plan that emphasizes Texas and U.S. history, while reducing focus on world history and cultures. AUSTIN, Texas — The Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) is...
How Low Can Deviancy Go?
The central scandal in the Epstein's sex abuse ring targeting children is not the sex. It's the children. What powerful men do with grown-up women — that is, females 18 or older — bothers me little. I never cared much about Donald Trump's assignation with porn star...
What Is The Seawee Shell Ring?
Visitors come from all over the globe to see Charleston’s beautiful, centuries-old historic buildings. Yet very few people — even locals — ever make the half-hour drive to Awendaw to see what may be the Lowcountry’s oldest, and most mysterious, man-made structure: the...
What the Founders Feared
"The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home." — James Madison (1751-1836) America today would terrify the Founding Fathers. Armed troops roam the streets of major cities, masked government agents arrest people...
Obiter Dicta
We just went through the longest government shutdown in history over contention regarding renewal of temporarily enacted government subsidies to Read More
Recent Posts
TENNESSEE: Battle of Franklin Trust to mark Civil War anniversaries Three Williamson County battlefields are set to mark the 161st anniversaries of two pivotal Civil War conflicts on Saturday and Read More