Chronicles of the South: In Justice to So Fine a Country

The South won’t go away. Not yet. For one reason, there are those of us who love her still. For another, those old Southern constitutionalists and Agrarian critics of ‘progress’ are for many people beyond Mason-Dixon’s Line starting to look less like disagreeable relics and more like gifted prophets. Thus ends Clyde Wilson’s Introduction to In Justice to so Fine a Country, the second volume of Chronicles of the South, a collection of articles from Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Published in Rockford, Illinois, Chronicles has nevertheless been home to some of the best writing on the South published over the last quarter of a century. Volume Two features contributions by scholars and politicians, men of letters and political analysts, not to mention the only real live sociologist in captivity who can write well and has a sense of humor. Some names are familiar-Patrick J. Buchanan, George Garrett, William Murchison, Thomas Fleming, Clyde Wilson, John Shelton Reed-and others less so, but all of the contributions in this remarkable volume are worth savoring.