Free Republic

As America debates whether to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan, in the ninth year of a war for ends we cannot discern, a riveting new history recalls times when Americans fought for vital national interests. "A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent" is Robert Merry's brilliant biography and history of that time. Merry goes far toward righting the injustice done by historians who have denied this great man his place in the pantheon of presidents, because they believe "Jimmy Polk's War" to have been a war...

ELIZABETH -- Many of the headstones marking the graves in New Jersey’s oldest cemetery are no longer readable, not only because they’re worn, but because they’re partially underground. While excavating around the headstones in the Old First Presbyterian Church cemetery in Elizabeth last week, archaeologist Seth Gartland found stones had sunk several feet, leaving only the top half exposed. When workers elevated the decaying stones, Gartland discovered inscriptions that had long been hidden. Tony Kurdzuk/The Star-LedgerRows and rows of markers in the cemetery of the First Presbyterian Church on Broad St. The cemetery is currently undergoing a project of preserving...

The 4th of July is the time when we celebrate our nation-- a time to reflect on the freedoms which we believe are not granted by our government, but are self-evident rights for all humankind. Time for the Independence Day Quiz which asks, "How much do you really know?" Every day thousands leave their homelands to settle here in the land of the free. Before they become citizens they are required to take a citizenship test and score 80%. Could you pass this test if you took it today? Our quiz is made up of 20 questions found on the...

At a White House dinner with a group of historians at the beginning of the summer, Robert Dallek, a shrewd student of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, offered a chilling comment to President Obama. "In my judgment," he recalls saying, "war kills off great reform movements." The American record is pretty clear: World War I brought the Progressive Era to a close. When Franklin D. Roosevelt was waging World War II, he was candid in saying that "Dr. New Deal" had given way to "Dr. Win the War." Korea ended Harry Truman's Fair Deal, and Vietnam brought Lyndon Johnson's...

.....But what began to radicalize American anti-slavery activists? First, it was Evangelical Christianity. Some of the radicalism they took from their faith. They took from the so-called Second Great Awakening. They took from this idea that somehow, it was their duty, it was their place in the world--many of them were the sons and daughters of ministers--to save souls. And if you'd been inspired by Charles Grandison Finney out in Oberlin, Ohio, or--as Theodore Weld had--or a number of other ministers across the North, that it was your duty to go save souls, it was only one step further--and Finney...

Yellow Springs company embraces niche and club publications YELLOW SPRINGS — In the summer of 2008, Benjamin Smith and Vicki McClellan spotted a small magazine out of Fort Myers, Fla., calling itself Patriots of the American Revolution. After seeing it, they knew two things. First, they liked the magazine, its exploration of a certain corner of history, its direction and feel. Second, they knew their company, Yellow Springs custom publisher Ertel Publishing, could make it better. The magazine’s owner, Three Patriots LLC, has hired Ertel Publishing to design and produce the magazine. But Three Patriots and Ertel Publishing aren’t exactly...

A Declaration by the Representatives of the United Colonies of North-America, Now Met in Congress at Philadelphia, Setting Forth the Causes and Necessity of Their Taking Up Arms.(1) If it was possible for men, who exercise their reason to believe, that the divine Author of our existence intended a part of the human race to hold an absolute property in, and an unbounded power over others, marked out by his infinite goodness and wisdom, as the objects of a legal domination never rightfully resistible, however severe and oppressive, the inhabitants of these colonies might at least require from the...

The 1820s American Farm at the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, Virginia, features a log house which incorporates an original log cabin built in 1773. The two wings of the house, joined by an enclosed dogtrot, demonstrate the progression in log-structure building techniques from colonial to early American times. This log farm house is a Shenandoah Valley original, moved from northern Rockingham County to the Museum and reconstructed on a hillside site.

Even as the Left still flirts with socialism (and I'm being nice with the word, "flirts"), the first Pilgrims who arrived here in 1620 learned their lesson early: socialism, even on the scale of the Pilgrims colony at Plymouth Rock, doesn't work. William Bradford wrote about his "experiment" with socialism then in his journal, "Of Plymouth Plantation". Check it out sometime in a library or get it on Amazon. It is an early primary history of the Pilgrims' spirit of adventure, free enterprise, and devotion to religious freedom. We could use a little taste of their spirit today. I pulled...

The Virginia Frontier Culture Museum's 1740s log cabin is displayed as a work in progress. The cabin is a typical peeled-log, saddle-notched settler's cabin of the kind favored by Scotch-Irish moving into the wilds of the Backcountry. The construction was simple and required few tools. The museum's replica is built with one door and no windows -- a common practice which led to laws requiring homesteader's cabins have at least one window.

SAN ANTONIO -- There's a new battle under way for control of the Alamo -- and just like the Texas legend, neither side shows any sign of surrender. For more than a century, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas -- nearly 7,000 women who trace their pedigrees back to the origins of the Texas Republic -- have had total control of the Alamo, the state's most revered historic site. They maintain what's left of the old mission, manage its historic exhibits and run the gift shop. They don't charge admission, and the site doesn't cost the state government a...

(CNSNews.com) – Less than a week after the Environmental Protection Agency restarted a controversial dredging project on the Hudson River, dredgers operated by the General Electric Company dislodged wooden beams that are the last remnants of one of the largest British forts in the American colonies. The EPA now says that the beams are contaminated with potential carcinogens known as PCBs and therefore must be buried in a landfill. The dredging operation is being conducted to remove sediments containing PCBs from the river about 40 miles north of Albany, N.Y. Fort Edward, where the dredging damage occurred, was one of...

(CNSNews.com) – Less than a week after the Environmental Protection Agency restarted a controversial dredging project on the Hudson River, dredgers operated by the General Electric Company dislodged wooden beams that are the last remnants of one of the largest British forts in the American colonies. The EPA now says that the beams are contaminated with potential carcinogens known as PCBs and therefore must be buried in a landfill

Crews dredging PCBs from the Hudson River on Friday ripped away remnants of what was once Britain's largest fort in Colonial America, a mistake that incensed local officials who had feared the cleanup project would damage such relics in the area. Neal Orsini said he was awoken around 4 a.m. by the sound of dredging along his riverside property in Fort Edward, 45 miles north of Albany. Orsini said he later discovered that the dredgers had torn out the riverbank, along with two wooden beams that had been part of the original fort's waterfront bastion. A third beam was later...

The original targets of the Ku Klux Klan were Republicans, both black and white, according to a new television program and book, which describe how the Democrats started the KKK and for decades harassed the GOP with lynchings and threats. An estimated 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites died at the end of KKK ropes from 1882 to 1964. The documentation has been assembled by David Barton of Wallbu More..ilders and published in his book "Setting the Record Straight: American History in Black & White," which reveals that not only did the Democrats work hand-in-glove with the Ku Klux Klan for...

This country’s Founding Fathers were racist, sexist white men whose opinions don’t matter in today’s world -- unless they can be used to bolster liberal talking points. The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers by Brion McClanahan smashes those misguided notions by re-examining the men who helped forge this country’s government without falling back on postmodern spin. Founding Fathers is a painstaking look at how the country began, where the Founders stood on key issues like freedom of religion, as well as how they came to their political philosophies. It also details the spirited debates behind some of the...

The battle at Stony Point, which took place in July of 1779, was (according to the National Park Service) "the last military action of importance in the northern theater of war." In addition, the National Park Service provides this description of the general battle scene: Stony Point is a steep promontory jutting half a mile into the Hudson River and rising 150 feet above the water, which all but surrounds it. A marsh, under water at high tide, protected the inland side of the post. The British, under General Clinton, had secured, and fortified, that location. About six hundred Redcoats...

American History Exhumed by: Alana Goodman, July 10, 2009 On October 11, 1809, celebrated explorer Meriwether Lewis—of Lewis and Clarke fame—was found shot to death on the floor of an old tavern at the edge of Indian country in Tennessee. Witnesses and friends traveling with the explorer maintained that Lewis shot himself in the head and chest after a long bought of mental illness and depression. However, some of Lewis’ family members argued that he was murdered in cold blood. Two-hundred years later his descendents are still dead-set on solving the mystery, even if it means digging up and studying...

Is America a Christian Nation? Many people don't think so today. The truth is, however, that our great nation was founded on principles that are all throughout the Bible. Author and historian David Barton highlights our christian heritage in this eye opening message.

It has been 400 years since English explorer Henry Hudson mapped the northeast coast of North America, leaving a wake of rivers and towns named in his honor, yet what happened to the famed explorer remains a mystery. Hudson was never heard from again after a mutiny by his crew during a later voyage through northern Canada. That he died in the area in 1611 is a certainty, and he may have even been killed in cold blood, according to new research.

A nephew of mine is doing some project/study work on the Great Depression. I have tons of history books, but very little on economical history and the Great Depression. I'd like him to avoid Roosevelt adulating propaganda. What do you consider the authorative and most relevant books on the Great Depression and the (etatist) measures certain States (particularily US and Europeans) have taken against it? Thanks for your help.

Richard Perry/The New York TimesKalustyan's, a market at 123 Lexington Avenue, is the only building still standing where a president was sworn in: Chester A. Arthur. Forlornly unidentified and altogether forgotten, these sites have been literally lost to history. ...on West 125th Street...nothing marks the place where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was stabbed in 1958. Then there is the spot on Fifth Avenue where Winston Churchill, crossing against the light, was struck by a car in 1931 and nearly killed. snip Andrew Carroll, 39, an amateur historian, is embarking this week on a 50-state journey to...

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In this year of John Calvin's 500th birthday, I don't know of a better place to read about his impact on America than Abraham Kuyper's Lectures on Calvinism given at Princeton Seminary in October 1898. Kuyper was a pastor, a journalist, the founder of the Free University of Amsterdam, and prime minister of the Netherlands. John Calvin and Martin Luther were the twin pillars of the Protestant Reformation. Why do fewer people speak of Luther's culture-shaping impact on America, but for centuries Calvin has been seen in this light? Kuyper argues, Luther's starting-point was the . . . principle of...

The resolution passed Thursday includes a disclaimer saying that nothing in it supports or authorizes reparations by the United States.

I've commented before on celebratory history and how elites in academia like to focus on the "sins of the fathers" in their perspective. This approach, contrary to their claims, is agenda driven and is part of the broader culture war against American exceptionalism and the re-writing of American history. I recently came across an anecdotal comment that, in a small but profound way, points this out. . .

Charleston was in ruins. The peninsula was nearly deserted, the fine houses empty, the streets littered with the debris of fighting and the ash of fires that had burned out weeks before. The Southern gentility was long gone, their cause lost. In the weeks after the Civil War ended, it was, some said, "a city of the dead." On a Monday morning that spring, nearly 10,000 former slaves marched onto the grounds of the old Washington Race Course, where wealthy Charleston planters and socialites had gathered in old times. During the final year of the war, the track had been...

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon said Monday it no longer includes a Bible quote on the cover page of daily intelligence briefings it sends to the White House as was practice during the Bush administration. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said he did not know how long the Worldwide Intelligence Update cover sheets quoted from the Bible. Air Force Maj. Gen. Glen Shaffer, who was responsible for including them, retired in August 2003, according to his biography. For a period in 2003, at least, the daily reports prepared for President George W. Bush carried quotes from the books of Psalms and Ephesians...

When the Pilgrims landed in 1620, they established a system of communal property. Within three years they had scrapped it, instituting private property instead. Hoover media fellow Tom Bethell tells the story. There are three configurations of property rights: state, communal, and private property. Within a family, many goods are in effect communally owned. But when the number of communal members exceeds normal family size, as happens in tribes and communes, serious and intractable problems arise. It becomes costly to police the activities of the members, all of whom are entitled to their share of the total product of the...

Are children still taught American History in the public and private schools?

April 10, 2009 U.S. has been fighting Islamic fundamentalism since colonial eraBy Bryan Fischer As we watch the Somali pirate incident unfold in the Middle East, it serves as a reminder that, besides 9/11, Islam has had one other shaping influence on the history of the United States: we have a navy, thanks to the sea-going Islamic thugs of Thomas Jefferson's day, the Barbary Pirates. Even prior to our Declaration of Independence in 1776, Islamists under the control of an Ottoman warlord in Algiers were pirating American ships and enslaving their Christian crews. Thus our forefathers had early experience with...

New York Public LibraryAn illustration thought to be that of the English explorer Henry Hudson. National Maritime Museum Amsterdam/Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum A 17th-century navigation journal at the Museum of the City of New York. Looking for something to celebrate? How about the commemoration of New York’s 400th birthday beginning next Saturday? On April 4, 1609, the English navigator Henry Hudson left Amsterdam harbor to search for a shortcut to Asia. Hudson’s instructions from the Dutch East India Company were to sail east, as he had on two earlier voyages that were thwarted by Arctic ice. Instead, inspired by insights gleaned from...

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Connecticut legislators are considering making their state the first in New England to apologize for slavery and other racist policies of old. A legislative committee is hearing testimony on the resolution Monday.

“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”—Marcus Garvey

A series of reenactments, dramatic productions, family activities and special tours are scheduled this year as Civil War sites in West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania commemorate the 150th anniversary of abolitionist John Brown’s October 1859 raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Although the raid itself failed, it succeeded in exacerbating the divide between North and South, pushing the nation closer to civil war. “Before the raid, negotiations and a compromise between North and South might have been possible; however, after the attack—and Brown’s trial and hanging—emotions ran so high that armed conflict became inevitable,” says Tom Riford of...

As a boy, Harrison Tyler (chemical engineering '51) never gave much thought to his grandfather, John Tyler, the 10th president of the United States. "I grew up during World War II," he told Subaru Drive Magazine in 2002, "and surviving the war and the shortages was what was on everybody's mind. Being related to a president was never a thought."

God’s children, of African, Asian, European, Hispanic, American Indian, and Jewish ancestry, were once told stories about the men and women who helped make America great.

Happy Birthday Abe by: Heather Latham, February 20, 2009 On the 200th Anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, Shelby Steele, Ph.D., a Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, recalls, “As a native son of Illinois, I grew up steeped in Lincoln lore. I remember boarding a bus on a dark winter morning with my sixth grade classmates for a day-long fieldtrip that would take us from our school…all the way downstate to Springfield and New Salem, the small, Southern Illinois towns in which the great man had come of age. It was a day-long excursion…with...

The year 2008 will not go down as a banner year in American history. It has been, as Queen Elizabeth described 1992, the year of the Diana-Charles divorce, an “annus horribilis.” Financial implosions at home, upheavals abroad, and the specter of unemployment stalk too many families this holiday season. But no matter how bad we think we have it — no matter how awful we think it can get — our problems are but a pittance compared to the horrors that were staring George Washington in the face during the Christmas season 202 years ago....

Christmas Night, 1776 By Newt Gingrich On Christmas Day, 1776, nearly all thought the Revolution was lost, except for a valiant few who still believed in "The Cause." We owe our liberty today to those valiant few. Led by George Washington, most of his army, dressed in rags and barefoot, faced a winter gale of rain, sleet, ice and snow. This band of patriots braved a midnight river crossing and a nine mile march over frozen roads to win a spectacular victory at Trenton, New Jersey, the following morning. Those were indeed times, as Thomas Paine would write, that "try...

I see that the Curator of African-American & Community History for the North Carolina Museum of History, Mr. Earl Ijames, is back in the news. Mr. Ijames was recently the keynote speaker at a new Confederate monument dedication in North Carolina. A news story quotes Mr. Ijames as saying: "We need to present a more balanced history," he said, adding that the black Confederate soldier has been lost to history. "They never got recognized, but we are starting to change that," Ijames said.

This video of the National Portrait Gallery U.S. Civil War exhibit features: Lincoln, Seward, Stanton, Beauregard, Butler, McClellan, Lee, Davis, Sherman, Jackson, Pickett, Mosby, Grant, Frederick Douglas, Hariet Beecher Stowe and the Fugitive's story. After watching, please name your favorite Civil War era person and explain why. Thanks. Watch video.

The evil is called Islamism or Islamofascism A Date that will live in Infamy By Alan Caruba Sunday, December 7, 2008 December 7, 1941, “A date that will live infamy” is a fading memory for those alive at the time and most certainly for those born since that day. For most Americans I suspect it is just a date they may have read about in a high school history book or seen dramatized in documentaries or films. It was, if you are still trying to recall its significance, the day the Empire of Japan attacked the U.S. fleet in Pearl...

Later on Tuesday, U.S. Senator Jim DeMint (R – S.C.) criticized the CVC design in a press release, charging “it fails to appropriately honor our religious heritage that has been critical to America’s success.”

Matthew Spalding, Director of the Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation, says the visitor center selectively cuts passages from the Constitution, weighing in on a long-running debate about the scope and limits of federal power by taking the liberal side of that debate, envisioning broad congressional powers that the founding fathers never intended. "I started looking at this stuff and it's just patently absurd," he said. "The dominant message when you walk though the doors in this exhibit you're hit with is the role of Congress is to fulfill our greatest aspirations. So the message you're teaching these...

PATRIOT PERSPECTIVE Pilgrims Regress By Mark Alexander In the aftermath of a momentous election, an election sure to change the course of our nation, it is tempting to despair. On this Thanksgiving, though, let us resist that powerful temptation and instead take stock of the blessings of liberty. President Ronald Reagan often cited the Pilgrims who celebrated the first Thanksgiving as our forebears who charted the path of American freedom. He made frequent reference to John Winthrop's "shining city upon a hill." As Reagan explained, "The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined....

...The big lies about America all work to undermine the sense of honor and gratitude that ought to inspire every citizen, particularly in this Thanksgiving season...

[NOTE - This politically-correct article is posted here so you can see the garbage coming from Madison, Wisconsin this Thanksgiving. Pay attention to the dates referenced. Rush also referenced it today, so i thought I'd post it here for your perusal. Not to be read too soon after eating cookies, or you'll lose them.] ******************************************************* Everything you know about the "first" Thanksgiving is wrong. Plymouth Rock. Pilgrims. Perseverance. Big feast. Happy Indians sharing in the bounty. According to "award-winning" filmmaker Patty Loew, it's all bunk, except maybe the part about eating turkey. Early settlers were so hungry they ate about...

BookTV/C-Span2 HEADSUP!!! Tune in at 11:15 PM EASTERN or set your TIVO/DVD Recorder. FR's own "LS" and his latest work-product (book) will be the topic of a segment on BookTV (45 min. in duration). IF you miss this first broadcast, please go to the BookTV/C-Span2 page linked for future date/time of rebroadcasts.

How the New Capitol Visitor Center Distorts American History by Gina L. DiorioWhile the media trains its cameras on the bailout proceedings on Capitol Hill, another fierce battle is being waged just a few feet away. A battle over our nation’s past, it has profound ramifications for our future. Yet, thanks to the mainstream media’s overwhelming lack of interest in telling the story – or perhaps overwhelming interest that the story not be told – most Americans will never hear it. The clash is over the glaring historical omissions of the soon-to-be-opened Capitol Visitor Center (CVC). The largest undertaking in...