Free Republic

In a new biography by Keith Koffler, Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon shares his reminiscences about Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, calling the tome one of his six most formative influences, and comparing America’s challenges to those to which our forebearers succumbed. “I’m not a multiculturalist,” Bannon relates in Bannon: Always the Rebel, explaining: America has “an underlying culture, that has been passed down from Jerusalem, to Athens, to Rome, to London. It’s the belief in self-reliance, it’s the belief in the self-determination of the individual. It’s freedom to be...

Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" is one of the great works of written history. It comes in six volumes and was published over 12 years starting in 1776. It covers how the Roman Empire fell from its glory over centuries, eventually crumbling to nothing. Over the weekend prominent historian Niall Ferguson, the presenter of the TV series "Civilization," has drawn an analogy between the bloodshed in Paris last Friday and what was the beginning of the end for the Roman Empire. Ferguson declares he is here "to tell you that this is exactly how civilizations...

Gibbon on global warming Yale University Professor Charles Hill is one of the Yale faculty's notable polymaths. Before joining the Yale faculty as diplomat in residence and lecturer in international politics, he seems to have been everywhere and done everything. His former student Molly Worthen titled her biography of Professor Hill The Man On Whom Nothing Was Lost (a book we wrote about here, here and here). Yesterday's Wall Street Journal carried a letter to the editor by Professor Hill responding to a Journal editorial on global warming hokum: "The fact that the earth's climate changes in cycles from warm...

Since Romulus, with a small band of shepherds and outlaws, fortified himself on the hills near the Tyber, ten centuries had already elapsed. During the four first ages, the Romans, in the laborious school of poverty, had acquired the virtues of war and government: by the vigorous exertion of those virtues, and by the assistance of fortune, they had obtained, in the course of the three succeeding centuries, an absolute empire over many countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The last three hundred years had been consumed in apparent prosperity and internal decline. The nation of soldiers, magistrates, and legislators,...

When will Jesus return? Posted: December 23, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com "For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; And the government will rest on His shoulders; And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace, On the throne of David and over his kingdom, To establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness. From then on and forevermore. ..." Isaiah 9:6-7 (NASB) As we celebrate the birth...