The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage

A review of The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage (Scuppernong Press, 2018) by Boyd Cathey

I must confess that I feel a bit awkward about reviewing Dr. Boyd Cathey’s outstanding anthology, The Land We Love: The South and its Heritage. I am, as the reader may notice, mentioned in the preface, along with Clyde Wilson, as one of the author’s two most significant guides in preparing these essays. And despite the fact that unlike Clyde I didn’t write the foreword, I do appear with this eminent Southern historian on the back cover, as one of several bloggers praising the many fine qualities of Dr. Cathey’s work.

Notwithstanding my obvious conflict of interests, I did volunteer to review the book because it illustrates an observation that I’ve been making for the last forty years, namely, the most provocative writers for the onetime American conservative movement have been generally Southerners. Moreover, what’s rendered them worth reading is that their perspective is unlike the one that has prevailed elsewhere in the US. Southern conservatives wrote and still do, if this book is any indication, with a tragic sense born of defeat, an ingrained sense of place, and an appreciation for older, European conservative traditions.