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As a student of history I was interested in the new Beck book Miracles and Massacres and was wondering if anyone had read it yet and if it was good history.

'The Myth of the Robber Barons' Explained (Part 1) video 13:30 Bill Whittle interviews the author Bill Folsom about his book The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in AmericaPart 2 is available by subscription to PJTV

For millennia the Catholic Church has consistently opposed unnatural vice. Here is a brief sampling of useful quotes from Saints, Doctors of the Church, Church Fathers and Ecclesiastical Writers who condemn homosexual vice in their writings. 1. Athenagoras of Athens (2nd Century) Athenagoras of Athens was a philosopher who converted to Christianity in the second century. He shows that the pagans, who were totally immoral, did not even refrain from sins against nature: "But though such is our character (Oh. why should I speak of things unfit to be uttered?), the things said of us are an example of the...

A great diva could sing the names in the phone book and it would come out like Puccini. A talented writer like Bill Bryson could take any year in American history and make it fascinating. Doing the usual round of interviews after his latest book came out, "One Summer: America, 1927," he was asked why he would choose to write about so ordinary a year, one without a great war or depression or discovery or… Ordinary? 1927? It was anything but. If any year was grand and glorious in modern American history, and yet a portent of the tragedies and...

The Origin of Nativity Scenes “... Mary gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the place where travelers lodged.” According to St Luke the Evangelist (2,7) Jesus was born in a stable or at least in a place where animals were kept. In fact the word presepio (Nativity Scene) comes from the Latin verb praesepire (to enclose, to hedge, to fence) and today it means manger or crib. The term is thought to have been used for the first time with...

In the early 1980's, I found myself working on a graduate degree at the University of Wisconsin.   The University had a Nobel laureate among the faculty, Dr. Howard Temin.   I had already made the decision to fight for the second amendment.  Although I thought the cause was lost, I could not in good conscience  give up.    I could not live with myself if I did not do what I could to preserve the Constitution and the rule of law.  I had just finished a tour of duty,   I had taken an oath, and I had...

Almost one hundred years after a group of explorers set out across the frozen landscape of Antarctica to set up supply depots for famed explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, a box of 22 never-before-seen exposed but unprocessed negatives taken by the group’s photographer has been unearthed in one of those shacks, preserved in a block of ice.

In a recent “Talking Points” broadcast on Phil Robertson, Bill O’Reilly made a number of assertions about Christian theology, which came as a complete surprise to me, a practicing Christian and a teacher of adult Bible studies. O’Reilly cited as his authority the fact that he had written a book about Jesus. Curious, I reviewed the Kindle edition of “Killing Jesus” by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard. Far from establishing O’Reilly’s credentials as an authority on Christianity, I found this popular book contains no fewer than 133 historical errors. The book also contains multiple internal contradictions. For example, with stimulating...

There are two things that never change on their own, and that is history and the human heart. It is due to the nature of the human heart that history is comprised of bad and destructive decisions. But Jesus Christ came to change all of this, and still does to this day, especially with those who are willing to seek him. Are you one of them?

The first thing I noticed when arriving at Birmingham’s Bethel Baptist Church of Collegeville today for the “homegoing” service of the Rev. Lamar Weaver, 85, was the hearse from Poole’s Funeral Chapels, Inc. How fitting since it was the Poole brothers, Ernest and John, who helped save Weaver’s life 56 years ago. On March 6, 1957, a day after the Alabama Public Commission ruled that waiting rooms designated for interstate travel must remain segregated, Weaver met the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Birmingham’s formidable civil rights leader and Bethel’s pastor, and his wife, Ruby, at Terminal Station. The Shuttlesworths had bought tickets...

We have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain.The images themselves cover a startling mix of subjects: There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of. Which brings me to the point of this release. We are looking...

A high-quality genome sequence obtained from a female Neanderthal toe bone reveals that the individual’s parents were close relatives and that such inbreeding was prevalent among her recent ancestors, according to a paper published today (December 18) in Nature. But the sequence also reveals that interbreeding occurred between Neanderthals and other hominin groups, including early modern humans. “Did humans evolve like a constantly branching tree? A lot of people think so,” said Milford Wolpoff, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the study. “But there’s also been this thread of thought, by some...

Several months ago someone sent me a copy of a book: 2008 God’s Final Witness, by Ronald Weinland. It was suggested to me that perhaps I should challenge Mr. Weinland to debate me. As I scanned the book, I decided that the best response overall was to allow time to respond to Mr. Weinland, and my thinking has been vindicated. You see, Mr. Weinland claims that, “When this book is published at the end of summer of 2006, there will be a maximum of two years remaining before the world will be plunged into the worst time in human history”...

Flag of Serbia 1882-1918 On a summer day after the end of World War Two, dark forces took the life of a warrior who had fought valiantly for his beloved homeland and the human and democratic rights of his people. A military man to his core, he had also been a humane commander and a visionary, a true hero whose moral standards and ethical principles exemplified virtues known to humanity since the birth of Jesus Christ. He was General Dragoljub-Draza Mihailovich – a Serb, born in Serbia, the homeland for whom he would give everything, including his life. Since his...

The city of Caesarea has been in the news recently, for the lavish lifestyle of certain contemporary residents. Yet the people of the seaside city also seem to have lived high on the hog in ancient history. Archaeologists have found surprisingly detailed records of sumptuous eating, drinking, dressing and housing customs of the wealthy – though it seems women only got to partake of the luxury within the home. Rich then was like rich now – a matter of means. In a discussion on “who is rich” in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Shabbat (25b), Rabbi Meir simply said a truly...

Freepers, as an adjunct professor of humanities, I am most interested in your opinions on American historiography and education.

 The Jesse Tree  The Jesse Tree helps us connect the custom of decorating Christmas trees to the events leading to Jesus' birth. The Jesse Tree is named from Isaiah 11:1: “A shoot shall come out of the stock of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” Jesse was the father of King David. We adorn a Jesse Tree with illustrated ornaments that represent the people, prophesies, and events leading up to the birth of Jesus. The ornaments of the Jesse Tree tell the story of God in the Old Testament, connecting the Advent season with the...

 The University of Oxford and the Vatican have jointly created a digital project that will put online over 1.5 million pages of medieval and biblical texts. The four-year project will digitize the collections of the Bodleian Libraries and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV) related to their Hebrew manuscripts, Greek manuscripts and fifteenth-century printed books. They include a Gutenberg Bible from 1455, an autographed and annotated manuscript of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, and the oldest surviving Hebrew codex.The project is funded by a $3.2 million grant from the Polonsky Foundation. Dr Leonard Polonsky said, “In today’s fast-paced, digital-driven world of scholarship, easy...

A small boat rescues a USS West Virginia crew member from the water after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Two men can be seen on the superstructure of the USS West Virginia, upper center, with the mast of the USS Tennessee in the background. Dec 7 1941.

The city of Heracleion was engulfed underwater 1500 years ago. This grand city had been mentioned by the Greek writer Herodotus, the 5th-century BC historian. He had told a wonderful tale of Helen of Troy, who traveled to Heracleion, then a port of 'great wealth', with her Trojan lover, Paris. When French marine archaeologist Franck Goddio stumbled upon some relics, it led them to one of the greatest finds of the 21st century; a city underwater. The discovery took place when Goddio had been in search of Napoleon’s warships from the 1798 Battle of the Nile, when he had been...