Some books entertain you. Some books educate you. And some books grab you by the collar and refuse to let you look away. Demon Copperhead is that third kind. Barbara Kingsolver’s 2022 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel drops the reader into Lee County, Virginia — deep in southern Appalachia — and tells the story of Damon Fields,…
SBP Podcast Episode 14: Beale Treasure -America’s Most Persistent Cipher Mystery
The Beale Treasure is one of the most enduring unsolved mysteries in American history — a tale of buried gold, encrypted messages, and a fortune that may still lie hidden in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. First published in 1885, the Beale Papers describe a massive cache of gold and silver allegedly buried in…
Southern Reads: On Trails
For our January 2026 Book Club selection, we read On Trails, a book that quietly reshapes how you understand movement, land, and the invisible systems that guide both. Robert Moor’s On Trails is not a hiking memoir in the traditional sense, nor is it a straight work of natural history. Instead, it is a slow,…
SBP Podcast Episode 13 : High Tide, High Times (Part 2): The Gentleman Smugglers & Operation Jackpot
When most people think of drug smuggling busts in the United States, they picture high-speed chases in Miami or massive DEA raids in Los Angeles. Few realize that one of the most significant crackdowns in American history didn’t start in those big cities, but along the seemingly quiet coastlines of South Carolina. In Part 1…
Southern Reads: All Sinners Bleed
Some Southern novels announce themselves with gothic excess — creaking houses, Spanish moss, and ghosts that refuse to stay buried. All the Sinners Bleed by SA Cosby does something quieter and far more unsettling. It opens in the daylight, in a modern Southern town that looks familiar enough to pass without comment. That familiarity is…
SBP Podcast Episode 13 : High Tide, High Times (Part 1): The Gentleman Smugglers & Operation Jackpot
In Episode 13 of the Southern Blueprint Podcast, we begin a two-part series exploring the true story of the Gentleman Smugglers and the massive federal investigation known as Operation Jackpot. This is a deeply Southern story—rooted in the Lowcountry, stretching from South Carolina’s barrier islands to the Caribbean, and ending with one of the most…
The State of Franklin: America’s Lost Four-Year Experiment (1784–1788)
The “State of Franklin” (occasionally referred to as “Frankland” in period documents) was a brief, extra-legal republic created by frontier leaders in what is now East Tennessee. Their aim: to establish the 14th state of the United States. Between 1784 and 1788, Franklin operated a rival government. It held elections, enacted laws, organized courts, negotiated…
SBP Podcast Episode 12: Coming Back to NASCAR After 20 Years — At the Wildest Possible Time
There are times when you return to something familiar and realize it never really left you — it just changed while you were gone. That’s what happened to me with NASCAR. I haven’t truly followed the sport since around 2007–2008. Life moved on. Interests changed. NASCAR, at least to me, stopped feeling like home. But…
LEWIS REDMOND: THE PRINCE OF DARK CORNER — THE OUTLAW WHO MADE THE SOUTH HIS LEGEND
In the years after the Civil War, as the Carolinas nursed wounds still raw from defeat and Reconstruction, federal law felt like a distant threat in the mountain country along the state line. The steep ridges and tight hollers held families who clung fiercely to their land, to their own labor, and—often—the hidden lifeblood of…
Southern Reads: Southern Stock
There’s a certain kind of book that doesn’t just land in your hands — it lands in your life at precisely the right moment. That’s what happened when I picked up Southern Stock by Gena Elliott this month for our Hidden Pine Lodge Book Club. What I thought would be a good Southern racing novel…