I finally had the pleasure to read The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought, written by our USIH colleague Paul Murphy. It was the topic of discussion during my graduate seminar last night. My students found the history of the Agrarians fascinating, in no small part due to Paul’s masterful telling of it, but also because, being from Illinois—the “Land of Lincoln”—it was a shock to their system to learn that serious intellectuals found complex ways to defend the antebellum South. The thing I found most compelling about The Rebuke of History is Paul’s notion of Read more