 | |
 July 2007 cover | |
| Editor | Paul Gottfried |
|---|---|
| Frequency | Monthly |
| Founded | 1977; 48 years ago (1977) |
| Country | United States |
| Website | chroniclesmagazine |
| ISSN | 0887-5731 |
| OCLC | 659216853 |
Chronicles is a U.S. monthly magazine published by theCharlemagne Institute and associated withpaleoconservative movement.[1][2][3][4] Its full current name isChronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. It was founded in 1977 by theRockford Institute, which later merged into a successor organization, the Charlemagne Institute.Paul Gottfried has been the editor-in-chief since 2021.[5]
In the first years since inception in 1977, the magazine was ananticommunist bi-monthly calledChronicles of Culture, edited byLeopold Tyrmand (1920–85), pen name of Jan Andrzej Stanislaw Kowalski, a Polish novelist and co-founder of theRockford Institute who had previously written forThe New Yorker.[6]
In its first decade, the magazine grew to some 5,000 subscribers, according toE. Christian Kopff.[7] The magazine became a monthly publication in 1982. In 1984,Thomas Fleming joined as managing editor.[8]
The magazine’s political influence reached its zenith in 1992 when prominent conservative journalist and politicianPatrick J. Buchanan ran for president. His failed candidacies in 1996 and 2000 paralleledChronicles’ drop in subscribers in the 1990s from nearly 15,000 to about 6,000.[citation needed]
In the 2000s, the magazine ran into severe financial difficulties. According to its own account, it received a large donation of “several million dollars” by Hannelore Schwindt, a native German who had married a Texan, in her will in 2008.[9] The executive editor at the time was Aaron D. Wolf, who died in 2019.[9]
Srđa Trifković is a longstanding editor for foreign affairs.[10] In 2021, Gottfried was appointed as Interim-Editor and he has stayed in this position until today.[citation needed]
Originally published bimonthly,[11] it was reduced to a monthly publication in 1982.[8]
Contributors toChronicles have includedPaul Gottfried,Taki Theodoracopulos,Srđa Trifković,Robert Weissberg, andCatharine Savage Brosman, among others.[13]
Beyond politics,Chronicles also gained recognition in the national press as a forum for cultural and intellectual debate. In 1987, columnistAnthony Harrigan referred to it as "the brilliant scholarly journal published by the highly respected Rockford Institute of Illinois."[14]
According to Edward H. Sebesta Fleming, who had been a co-founder ofSouthern Partisan magazine, broughtneo-Confederate views toChronicles.[15] By 1989 the subscription list had grown to nearly 15,000. Fleming published right-wing authors likeSam Francis,Clyde N. Wilson,Paul Gottfried, andChilton Williamson Jr. As theSoviet Union broke up at the end of theCold War and nationalism rose there and inEastern Europe, some articles inChronicles argued that the United States too would need to disintegrate by ethnicity.[15] Political scientist Joseph Lowndes has written thatChronicles "churned out regular anti-immigrant pieces, attacking Latin American and Southeast Asian immigration on the basis of race, culture, national identity and populist defense of the white working class".[16]
Joseph Scotchie, who has written forChronicles, described it in 1999 as emphasizing anti-intervention in foreign policy, anti-globalism, and aversion to mass immigration.[17] In 2000,James Warren ofThe Chicago Tribune calledChronicles "right-leaning" and wrote, "There are few publications more cerebral". He described aChronicles article criticizing the finances ofDonald Trump, who was then considering aReform Party presidential campaign.[18] Historians in the 2000s described writers associated withChronicles as "Neo-Agrarian conservatives"[1] revering Southern beliefs.[19]
Chronicles has had close ties to theneo-Confederate movement.[15][20][21]The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describedChronicles in 2017 as "a publication with strong neo-Confederate ties that caters to the more intellectual wing of the white nationalist movement",[21] and in another article said it was "controversial even among conservatives for its racism and anti-Semitism".[22]
