Free Republic

Downtown Baraboo is about to party like it’s 1915. A century ago today, people paused at 2 p.m. to gather on the courthouse square and hear speeches lauding Al. Ringling and the palatial theater he was building across the street. On Thursday before this week’s installment of Concerts on the Square, those assembled at that very spot will witness a re-enactment of Al. Ringling Day. Four dignitaries – Mayor Mike Palm, Al. Ringling Theatre Friends President Charlene Flygt, Sauk County Historical Society President Paul Wolter and Wisconsin Historical Society Executive Director Ellsworth Brown – will repeat parts of the speeches...

If Governor Nikki Haley thinks that removing a flag from a capitol building will do anything to alleviate the racial hatred fomented by Barack Obama over the past several years, and the Left throughout the country's history, she is sadly mistaken. Not only Governor Haley, but every conservative thinker who follows her lead have fallen into the web of deceit that the Left always uses to entrap the gullible. I recall over the years having seen white supremacists with American flags flying. Their position is that America is being taken away from them by foreigners and people who had no...

Now is the time to talk about replacing the statue of Robert E. Lee, as iconic as it is controversial, from its perch at the center of Lee Circle, Mayor Mitch Landrieu announced Wednesday (June 24) during a gathering held to highlight his racial reconciliation initiative. "Symbols really do matter," he said. "Symbols should reflect who we really are as a people. "We have never been a culture, in essence, that revered war rather than peace, division rather than unity." The slaying last week of nine black people in a historic Charleston, S.C., church at the hands of Dylann Roof,...

The planet hadn’t seen a major war between all the Great Powers since the downfall of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. But 99 years later the dam breaks and a Pandora’s Box of violence engulfs the planet.

Was it created by man, or by Mother Nature? That's what many are wondering about a giant face that appears to be carved into a cliff on a remote island near Vancouver Island. Hank Gus of the Tseshaht First Nation had heard about the "face in the rocks" years ago. A Washington State kayaker stumbled upon the face back in 2008 while paddling past Reeks Island in the Broken Group Islands. Gus had been searching for the carving for two years. Then, just a few weeks ago, he finally found the hidden treasure and took a cellphone video of the...

Causality is the relationship between cause and effect. This thing (cause) made this happen (effect). Now, I am not a Southerner. I have no vested history with the ConfederateFlag/Battle Flag of The Northern Virginia Army. What I find galling about this issue is the deliberate ignorance of Causality by too many. Did Dylan dispshirt kill nine Americans of African descent (effect) as a reaction to the flag (cause)? Or, did Dylan dispshirt kill nine Americans of African descent (effect) so he could be famous (cause)? It is disingenuous in the extreme, and intellectually lazy, to assert that a flag caused...

A new phenomenon is sweeping across Sparta as more and more students come forward claiming to have encountered the flightless Dodo bird. Caught somewhere between a pigeon and a dove with its gray feathers and unmistakable yellow scowl, the Dodo bird stood at an intimidating one meter tall back in the 17th century when it became extinct--barely a century after its discovery. The Dodo bird was not known for its impact on this planet while it lived, but, rather, remains a point of contention and activism because of its death. The extinction of this bird has been overwhelmingly attributed to...

As a young U.S. Army soldier during World War II, Rollins Edwards knew better than to refuse an assignment. When officers led him and a dozen others into a wooden gas chamber and locked the door, he didn't complain. None of them did. Then, a mixture of mustard gas and a similar agent called lewisite was piped inside. "It felt like you were on fire," recalls Edwards, now 93 years old. "Guys started screaming and hollering and trying to break out. And then some of the guys fainted. And finally they opened the door and let us out, and the...

This town hall meeting took place Sep 10, 2001 in Amherst Mass 12 hours before the first plane struck the towers in New York City, before the Pentagon was hit, and before Flight 93 was taken down in a suicide dive by the terrorists who were being overrun by brave Americans. This video is significant because of the statements made at the 40 minute to 50 minute mark and again at the 1 hour 10 minute mark which were in response to comments made at the 45 minute mark. Keep in mind this was made 12 hours before the World...

A New York City police officer’s car has prompted cries of racism. When the unidentified officer drove to work in a replica of “The General Lee” from the 1980s hit CBS show “The Dukes of Hazzard,” a resident called the local CBS affiliate to complain. The problem? The car’s roof is adorned with a Confederate flag.

Allen Weinstein, a historian of Cold War espionage whose 1978 book, “Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case,” marshaled a mountain of new evidence to argue that Alger Hiss was guilty as charged in one of the most famous spy trials of the postwar era, and who served as the ninth national archivist of the United States, died on Thursday at a nursing home in Gaithersburg, Md. He was 77. The cause was pneumonia, his son Andrew said. He had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for several years. Making use of newly available F.B.I. documents totaling tens of thousands of pages, Mr. Weinstein...

...for the archaeologist of 20 years ago, might have been the stuff of science fiction. Who would have known then that scientists would resurrect in startling detail an entire ancient Roman town after only fractional excavation? And who would have known that thousands of people from nearly every corner of the world would be able to 'walk' through that town without ever physically setting foot within?  This, however, is exactly what has happened for an obscure archaeological site located in Portugal -- a relatively small ancient Roman town whose few visible remains have attracted comparatively few visitors -- at least...

Evidence of what could be the oldest footprints in North America has been discovered below the shoreline of a remote British Columbia island. Fossilized human footprints believed to be of a man, woman and child and estimated to be more than 13,000 years old were discovered at Calvert Island, which is located on B.C.'s central coast and is accessible only by boat or float plane. Remnants of an ancient campfire were found nearby. Archeologist Duncan McLaren said radiocarbon dating indicates the charcoal materials are 13,200 years old, and he is preparing to duplicate those tests to confirm the results... Fossilized...

New work on the skeletal remains of scarlet macaws found in an ancient Pueblo settlement indicates that social and political hierarchies may have emerged in the American Southwest earlier than previously thought. Researchers determined that the macaws, whose brilliant red and blue feathers are highly prized in Pueblo culture, were persistently traded hundreds of miles north from Mesoamerica starting in the early 10th century, at least 150 years before the origin of hierarchy is usually attributed. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that the acquisition and control of macaws, along with other valued...

Rare Bronze Age gold artifact found in burial mound in Wiltshire, U.K. For the first time, an early Bronze Age sun-disc from Monkton Farleigh in Wiltshire, U.K., is being exhibited for public view at the Wiltshire Museum, in time for this year's summer solstice. It is one of only 6 sun-disc finds and is one of the earliest metal objects found in Britain. Made in about 2,400 BC, soon after the sarsen stones were erected at Stonehenge, it is thought to represent the sun. The sun-disc was initially found in 1947 in a burial mound at Monkton Farleigh, just over...

DNA analysis of a 40,000-year-old human jawbone from Romania suggests that an early modern group of humans interbred with Neanderthals soon after their first arrival in Europe. Researchers have concluded that an early modern human who lived in present-day Romania about 40,000 years ago had a Neanderthal ancestor who lived just 4 to 6 generations back in the individual's family tree. Co-led by Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator David Reich at Harvard Medical School, along with researchers at the Key Laboratory of Vertebrate Evolution and...

The current attempt to direct the symbols of South Carolina leads me to believe that there may an ultimate goal -the repeal of 2ndA-. Maybe "we" as patriots can discuss and provide discussion as to why the separate states should be able to present symbols as appropriate to our location. As an example; The State of Illinois, in legislation, has designated the Cardinal as their State bird. Is this not a tacit acceptance of religion and the Roman Catholic church as the preferred religion of Illinois? I wonder, how many of the 13-colony states have firearms in their flag? I...

On June 18th, 1815, 400 Hanoverian soldiers were the only thing standing between defeat and victory for the alliance against Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo.In 1811, Napoleon's empire and its allies had over 44 million subjects and covered most of Europe. But after being defeated in 1813 and 1814 by the Sixth Coalition, which included Austria, Prussia, Russia, Britain, Portugal, Sweden, Spain and other German states, Napoleon was forced to abdicate and exiled to the island of Elba. The First French Empire was dissolved, and the Bourbon monarchy restored, but in February 1815 Napoleon escaped from his exile and...

Major retailers are halting sales of the Confederate flag after the shooting deaths of nine black church members in South Carolina. Sears Holding Corp. says it is removing Confederate flag merchandise from its website, and a spokesman says that no Confederate flag merchandise is sold inside Sears or Kmart stores. On Monday, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said it would remove all items from its store shelves and website that feature the flag after the shooting suspect, Dylann Storm Roof, appeared in photos holding the flag. However, the companies that make Confederate flags and confederate-themed products, as well as smaller operators that...

This afternoon, in announcing her support for removing the Confederate flag from the capitol grounds, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley asserted that killer Dylann Roof had a “a sick and twisted view of the flag” which did not reflect “the people in our state who respect and in many ways revere it.” If the governor meant that very few of the flag’s supporters believe in mass murder, she is surely right. But on the question of whose view of the Confederate Flag is more twisted, she is almost certainly wrong. Roof’s belief that black life had no purpose beyond subjugation...