Free Republic

"The founding of the United States was among the most dramatic and glorious events in history. For the first time, a nation was founded on the principle of individual rights. Those interested in learning about America’s founding and its cause may turn to history texts. But history texts, even when their content is accurate, tend to be dry accounts of events. They lack the excitement of an adventure novel. Yet most novels set in the Revolutionary period are not good sources of information: Being works of fiction, they may take liberties with historical fact; and they often employ the American...

Having already dominated the worlds of reality TV, fashion, modeling, social media, and internet gossip, Kendall and Kylie Jenner are giving their literary careers another go. The celebrity sisters, who previously dipped their toes into writing in 2014 with their debut novel, Rebels: City of Indra, are set to release a follow-up, titled Time of the Twins, to the science fiction story.

By 1967, Vladimir Nabokov had published 15 novels and novellas and six short story collections. But as he told the Paris Review that year, “It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology”—the study and classification of butterflies—“and never written any novels at all.” As most Nabokov readers know, the great Russian-American writer had a passion for butterflies. He published 18 science papers in the field of lepidoptery, and from 1942 to 1948 was de facto curator of lepidoptery at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. As a lepidopterist, Nabokov’s...

Downton Abbey just finished its six-season run two months ago, but if you have been fiending for British accents, period costumes, poorly managed hereditary estates, class tensions, love stories revolving around a young woman named Mary, and the nostalgic eye of Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, here comes Julian Fellowes Presents Doctor Thorne. The miniseries, adapted from an Anthony Trollope novel, arrives on Amazon on Friday, having aired earlier this year in the U.K. under the simple title Doctor Thorne. For its move to America, the show has put on airs. These airs reflect Amazon’s ambitions, ones that will perhaps...

🌞 🏡 🍺 🍿 🚶🐕. 🐿 🏃 🌲 🐕 😱. 🐕 🛫 🐿. 👁 🕳 🏃 🐕 🚑 🏥. 🌅 🔪 🐿 ☠. ☎️ 🚔 👁 🚽. 💸 😭🐕 😛. 💩. P.S. 👺 🙀 👑 🐙 ☃ 🌊.

David Peterson has so far created 4,000 Dothraki words When the misogynistic, male Dothraki characters launch into curse-laden tirades on "Game of Thrones," viewers have a 35-year-old Southern California father and a University of California Berkeley graduate to thank for what they hear. David J. Peterson invented Dothraki, the language spoken by the crass race of nomadic horse warriors first described in George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Fire and Ice," on which the HBO series is based. "It's a lot of fun," he said Tuesday, in his first, interactive Facetime Live interview. Especially coming up with the curse...

A progressive organization published a list of the “ten worst things” in education. You can learn a lot about why public schools are mediocre by looking at this list. The ten items provide a distillation of what progressive/liberal educators value, and conversely what they consider not worth mentioning. Progressive/liberal thinking dominates our schools, so this is not idle chitchat. Some of the ten items may be problems but they are hardly “the worst.” As you’ll see, there is almost no mention of academic failings, namely, that kids don’t master basic skills nor learn much essential knowledge. (You’ll also notice a...

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Darwyn Cooke, the comic book artist best known for his vibrantly imaginative work on DC superheroes and noir crime stories, has died. He was 53. Cooke’s wife, Marsha Cooke, said he died Saturday morning at his home in Florida following a battle with lung cancer. Cooke famously reimagined the Justice League members in 2004 with a signature retro style in “DC: The New Frontier.” His other work included gritty adaptations of Richard Stark’s “Parker” novels, a modern interpretation of Catwoman and the “Solo” graphic novel series, which earned Cooke an Eisner Award, considered to be...

Standard anti-cop ideology, whether emanating from the ACLU or the academy, holds that law enforcement actions are racist if they don’t mirror population data. New York City illustrates why that expectation is so misguided. Blacks make up 23 percent of New York City’s population, but they commit 75 percent of all shootings, 70 percent of all robberies, and 66 percent of all violent crime, according to victims and witnesses. Add Hispanic shootings and you account for 98 percent of all illegal gunfire in the city. Whites are 33 percent of the city’s population, but they commit fewer than two percent...

The Female of the Species WHEN the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride, He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside. But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail. For the female of the species is more deadly than the male. When Nag the basking cobra hears the careless foot of man, He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can. But his mate makes no such motion where she camps beside the trail. For the female of the species is more deadly than the male. When the early Jesuit...

For the first time in two generations the American people are faced with the primary issue of humanity and all government - the issue of human liberty. Not only in the United States but throughout the world, the whole philosophy of individual liberty is under attack. In haste to bring under control the sweeping social forces unleashed by the political and economic dislocations of the World War, by the tremendous advances in productive technology during the last quarter-century, by the failure to march with a growing sense of justice, peoples and governments are blindly wounding, even destroying, those fundamental human...

Hello, Freepers, I haven't visited Free Republic in a while, but I know this is the best place if one wants unrevised history book recommendations. I know some things about the bloody origins of Islam, but I would like to further my knowledge.

Wednesday is the 100th birthday of Jane Jacobs, the journalist and urban theorist whose 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, changed the trajectory of New York and cities everywhere. In the book, Jacobs argued that the preceding century of urban planning had essentially “arisen on a foundation of nonsense”—that the old, white men who advocated for highways and high-rises, wide streets and buildings set back from sidewalks by acres of grass, were not only clueless but were actively destroying American cities. Instead, Jacobs wrote, cities should be built with communities and street-level interaction in mind. […]...

An Arizona high school student is facing a felony charge after police say he exposed himself in a football team picture that ended up in the school yearbook. Mesa police say 19-year-old Hunter Osborn was arrested after they were alerted to the picture over the weekend. A police document says the Red Mountain High School team photo shows Osborn exposing his penis through the top of his waistband.

The disease of theory:“Crime & Punishment” at 150 by Gary Saul Morson On theory’s deleterious effects in Crime and Punishment. One hundred and fifty years ago, when Dostoevsky published Crime and Punishment, Russia was seething with reform, idealism, and hatred. Four years earlier, the “tsar-liberator” Alexander II (reigned 1855–1881) had at last abolished serfdom, a form of bondage making 90 percent of the population saleable property. New charters granted considerable autonomy to the universities as press censorship was relaxed. The court system, which even a famous Slavophile said made his hair stand on end and his skin frost over, was...

Dinesh D'Souza has received a lot of attention for his documentaries like "America: Imagine The World Without Her" and "Obama's America", both looking at what factors shaped Obama and the US' influence on the world. This older book is a good look at the influence Christianity as a whole has had on the world and the United States.

Something My Father-in-law reminded me of the other day.... One of my most precious memories of the time with my wife who passed in September 2016, was several years ago. We were taking a road trip. I believe that it was one to see my family in Alabama, with a side trip to Memphis to see Elvis' mansion and take in some blues. So, we're like gonna be on the road for hours and hours. We had plenty of music, via an mp3 player and an FM transmitter that it plugged into so we could listen through the car speakers....