American Thanksgiving wasn't born in Massachusetts. We can thank Virginia for this important holiday.

Modern activist historians think "reconciliation" is a pejorative, but for most Americans in the early 20th century, it was a necessary part of healing. This included histories written by Southerners. We discuss one of those books on this episode of The Essential Southern Podcast.

Why did Southerners in the early twentieth century think they needed to write their own history?

How did Americans think about the Arlington Confederate or Reconciliation monument in 1914? They clearly told you, and it isn't what the woke cancel culture folks want you to believe.

Augusta Jane Evans's St. Elmo was one of the best selling novels of the 19th Century. You would not know that today, but for generations, women read it and handed it down to their daughters and female family members. Why is it blacklisted? You'll hear.

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E. Merton Coulter was one of the more prominent Southern historians of the 20th century. In 1935, he explained why the South lagged behind the North in the writing of history until the 1860s, and then why the South needed to write its own history.

Donald Davidson wrote an essay in 1932 arguing for the influence of the Southern poet in the Southern tradition while concurrently blasting the Northern Progressive for his destruction of post-War Southern culture.

Donald Davidson's essay "That This Nation May Endure--The Need for Political Regionalism" in the 1936 book, "Who Owns America" is a stark reminder that the issues Americans face today are not new. Centralization and "New England imperialism" have long been a problem for the majority of Americans.

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In 1895, "Stonewall" Jackson's widow, Mary Anna Jackson, penned her "Memoirs of Stonewall Jackson" as a tribute her her late husband. This selection is a portion of the concluding chapter, and it displays the humanity, love, compassion, heroism, devotion, and emotion of the Southern tradition.

Richard Weaver's "The Southern Tradition at Bay" is one of the