Dr. Wilson adds his recommendations

on what to read:

I agree with Dr. Fleming that it is important to know something of primary documents===the letters, diaries, and even speeches and newspapers of our forebears. (I have found in recent years that students are unable to do this. Set to read the Declaration or the Constitution they come back with the standard misconstructions they have been taught rather than the text in front of them.) Mel Bradford’s BETTER GUIDE THAN REASON, ORIGINAL INTENTIONS, and FOUNDING FATHERS are good places to start. I recently put together a bibliography on Southern history and literature that should be on the Abbeville Institute website one of these days. I agree also with Dr. Fleming that the creative literature of a period, having more insight than historians, should be resorted to. Even that not written within the period. Faulkner’s THE UNVANQUISHED contains a truer picture of the WBTS than any history written. This is also true of American history in general at the hands of such Southern writers as Andrew Lytle, Caroline Gordon, Mary Johnston, Mary Lee Settle. Generally, older histories, those written in the early 20th century before Marxist ideological labelling took hold, are better than most recent ones. I would suggest Shelby Foote’s CIVIL WAR and NORTH AGAINST SOUTH by Ludwell Johnson. Besides Simms’s novels of the colonial period, Revolutionary war, and Southwestern frontier, get hold of Simms’s LIFE OF FRANCIS MARION and his article “Daniel Boon.”