Böcker av Clyde N. Wilson

An admiring biography of John C. Calhoun by Margaret Coit won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. A little later John F. Kennedy chaired a committee that declared Calhoun to be one of the five greatest U.S. Senators of all time. The times have changed and recent writers have once more relegated Calhoun to a dark corner of American history. In the first half of the 19th century Calhoun was for 40 years one of the half dozen most important public men of America. Seldom victorious, he was always important and always listened to on many more national questions than slavery. Clyde Wilson, who is more familiar with Calhoun than anyone in our time, by exploring neglected aspects of his thought, demonstrates that Calhoun was a statesman-one who had a farseeing vision of the public good and told the people what he thought, even if unpopular. And that much of what he had to say is prophetic wisdom for the present.

In this second installment of The Wilson Files, we collect some of Dr. Wilson's most sagacious writings on the topic of nullification and the unenumerated rights reserved to the several sovereign States that comprise the confederation known as the United States of America.>Reclaiming the Consent of the Governed: "The cause of states' rights is the cause of liberty; they rise or fall together. . . . We know the problems. Where should we look for solutions? . . . . Thomas Jefferson gives us the answer: our most ancient and best tradition, states' rights: 'the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies' . . . . Some of the Founders hoped that the division of legislative, executive, and judicial power in the general government would help. . . . these checks and balances do not work. They ceased to work a long time ago. There is no serious conflict of power among the federal branches. The acts of all of them are directed toward checking the people of the States. . . . States' rights are historically sound, constitutionally sound, ethically sound, and sound from the point of view of democracy. Where they fall short is simply in the realm of political will and agenda. . . . if we are to speak of curbing the central power, the States are what we have got. They exist. They are historical, political, cultural realities, the indestructible bottom line of the American system. It would be a shame if, in this world-historical time of devolution, Americans did not look back to an ancient and honourable tradition that lies readily at hand."

This collection of Southern Poets and Poems, 1606-1860 is made not from the viewpoint of a>We are guided by the advice of William Gilmore Simms, the father of Southern literature: "The emotional literature of a people is as necessary to the philosophical historian as the mere details of events in the progress of a nation. This is essential to the reputation of the Southern people, as illustrating their feelings, sentiments, ideas and opinions - the motives which influenced their actions, and the objects which they had in contemplation, and which seemed to them to justify the struggle in which they were engaged." This is the first in a planned five-volume series that will trace with verse the four hundred year history of the people of the South and The Land They Loved. Clyde Wilson is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina where he was the editor of the multivolume The Papers of John C. Calhoun. He is the M.E. Bradford Distinguished Chair at the Abbeville Institute. He is the author or editor of over thirty books and published over 600 articles, essays and reviews and is the co-owner and president of Shotwell Publishing,

John C. Calhoun was a major character in 19th-century American politics. This work presents a selection of speeches and writings taken from a wide variety of occasions, both public and private, throughout his 40-year political career.