Free Republic

They came as slaves: human cargo transported on British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children. Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. Some were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives. We don’t really need to go through all of...

The president of the NAACP Greater Grand Rapids Branch said that students who brought a Donald Trump for president banner and a ‘Betsy Ross’ 13-star flag to a local high school football game were involved in “intentional actions of intimidation and rooted in no agenda other than to insult, to injure, and to incite.” Cle J. Jackson, the president of the NAACP Greater Grand Rapids Branch, said the Betsy Ross 13-star flag has been appropriated by “the so-called ‘Patriot Movement’ and other militia groups who are responding to America’s increasing diversity with opposition and racial supremacy.” At a Sept. 9...

Full title: Human skeleton discovered at Antikythera shipwreck after more than 2,000 years at the bottom of the sea Buried beneath sand and the fragments of ancient pottery, researchers have discovered the 2,000-year-old remains of a sailor who died upon the ill-fated 'Antikythera ship.' Archaeologists have investigated the famous shipwreck off a tiny Greek island for which it's named for over a century, revealing a trove of remarkable artefacts – including the mysterious 'Antikythera Mechanism,' thought to be a 'guide to the galaxy.'

The long-lost ship of British polar explorer Sir John Franklin, HMS Terror, has been found in pristine condition at the bottom of an Arctic bay, researchers have said, in a discovery that challenges the accepted history behind one of polar exploration’s deepest mysteries. HMS Terror and Franklin’s flagship, HMS Erebus, were abandoned in heavy sea ice far to the north of the eventual wreck site in 1848, during the Royal Navy explorer’s doomed attempt to complete the Northwest Passage.

O n the surface, Oppenheim looks like your typical German town resting along the banks of the Rhine River. But there's more to Oppenheim than beer halls and a Gothic-style cathedral from the Middle Ages. Beneath its narrow cobblestone streets lies something deeper—an entire labyrinth of tunnels and cellars. “The town is practically honeycombed with cavities,” Wilfried Hilpke, a tour guide with Oppenheim’s tourism office, tells Smithsonian.com. Hilpke should know. For the past ten years, he’s spent much of his time leading hour-long hardhat tours of Oppenheim’s elaborate tunnel system, taking visitors through a journey that covers just a fraction...

Greta Friedman, the woman in white kissed by a sailor in New York’s Times Square in a photograph symbolising the end of the second world war, has died aged 92. Her son, Joshua Friedman, said she died on Thursday in Virginia after suffering a series of ailments, including pneumonia, NBC News reported. CBS News said she would be laid to rest with her late husband, Mischa Elliot Friedman, at Arlington national cemetery in Virginia. Friedman, then a dental assistant on a break, was the woman in one of the most famous pictures of the 20th century, the moment Americans learned...

This is the story of a city on knife's edge, riven by religious and political tensions, made vulnerable to disaster by its own neglect and avarice. It is a story of official blunders which turned a minor, commonplace accident into an all-consuming conflagration. It's a story of chaos, mass hysteria, profiteering and racist violence – but it is also a story of some heroism and charity, from royal and commoner alike. It unfolds over 72 hours, beginning at midnight on September 2, 1666, and ending at the climax of the fire's worse day. Of course, in an era without reliable...

Today is V-J Day, the anniversary of the date in 1945 of the formal Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. For practical purposes, it ended on August 14 (August 15 in Japan, on the other side of the International Date Line), when President Truman announced the capitulation of Japan and the end of World War II in the Pacific, unleashing a paroxysm of jubilation throughout the victorious nations. The war in Europe had ended with the German surrender on May 8th, but Japan fought on in the Pacific and had only lost Okinawa, the last stepping stone...

In today's technically sophisticated and globally connected world, we assume life has been completely reinvented. In truth, it has not changed all that much. Facebook and Google may have recalibrated our lifestyles, but human nature, geography and culture are nearly timeless. Even as ideologies and governments come and go, the same old, same old problems and challenges remain. Compare what dominated the news in 1966, 50 years ago. Abroad, Israel was constantly fighting on the West Bank against Palestinian guerrilla groups and in the air over Syria. It is likely that in another 50 years the story will remain about...

President Obama enjoys quoting or paraphrasing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s remark that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Like his oft-repeated phrase that his political opponents are “on the wrong side of history,” the statement suggests Obama’s view that real-world events will ultimately shift to what he thinks they ought to be, regardless of his own actions. As chaos both domestic and abroad has shown, there is more to be done to influence the course of events than to dispense platitudes.

Greetings Readers, Friends, and Other Visitors: The Time Traveler appeared suddenly in my study on New Year’s Eve, 2004. He was a stolid, grizzled man in a gray tunic and looked to be in his late-sixties or older. He also appeared to be the veteran of wars or of some terrible accident since he had livid scars on his face and neck and hands, some even visible in his scalp beneath a fuzz of gray hair cropped short in a military cut. One eye was covered by a black eyepatch. Before I could finish dialing 911 he announced in a...

A hundred years ago, Muslims were furious over an immigration bill whose origins lay with advocacy by a headstrong and loudmouthed Republican in the White House. The anti-immigration bill offended the Ottoman Empire, the rotting Caliphate of Islam soon to be defeated at the hands of America and the West, by banning the entry of “all polygamists, or persons who admit their belief in the practice of polygamy.”

An 18th Century European lord puzzling over the accelerating decline of the aristocracy only had to look in the mirror to find his answer. Chronic inbreeding ensured the degeneration of the gentry, and yet even though the nobility well knew this, they were powerless. The entire European system of class and governance rested upon the idea of hereditary rule, even as it sowed the seeds of its own demise. Elites always need more than just raw power. They need a justification for rule to establish legitimacy, at a very minimum in their own eyes, if not those of the lower...

While we shouldn't live in the past, we can certainly learn from it. We are not the first humans to walk the Earth and yet too many, especially the young, suffer from the conceit that history is just a boring subject in school. PBS is rerunning episodes on its award-winning series "American Experience" on modern presidents and the challenges they faced. Each episode retraces what presidents believed to be good ideas at the time -- from Lyndon Johnson's program to wipe out poverty and defeat the communists in Vietnam, to George W. Bush's toppling of Saddam Hussein. In each episode,...

"Madison was discouraged! He strongly felt that a new form of government needed to be devised, but he worried that it would not happen. The Annapolis Convention was intended to tackle only one of the two problematic areas—“the trade of the United States”—and he didn’t know if even THAT would happen!"

A legendary battle of western history: Today is the anniversary of the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. Thermopylae is a pass in east central Greece between the cliffs of Mount Oeta and the Malic Gulf, and in ancient times, it was a principal entrance into southern Greece from the north. It was there that the Greeks confronted the third Persian expedition of the Persian Wars - an army of as many as a half-million men under Xerxes. When they found that their position had been turned, however, the Greeks retreated precipitously - all except for a 300-strong Spartan contingent...

Ever since the failed coup in Turkey, there has been a rapid alignment towards an Ezekiel 38 scenario and several of these developments need to be addressed. First, some background: Ezekiel 38 describes a war between Israel and certain surrounding nations with the enemies of Israel having the motive of taking a certain spoil.  This war has clearly not yet taken place and it appears to occur shortly before the millennial reign of the Messiah (Jesus) per the text, likely around the time of the rapture and the beginning of Daniel's 70th Week.  While there is some debate regarding Russia's...

The reason so many in America are rooting for Donald Trump is that he single handedly disrobed the Republican Party, and bared the dirty, corrupt underbelly Hillary Clinton may shatter the proverbial glass ceiling by being the first women nominated as the Democrat Party’s Presidential nominee, but Donald Trump is also significantly historical. People say Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for U.S. President is historical only because she is a woman. Blah blah blah. Feminist author Camille Paglia called Hillary Clinton an “ethically challenged incompetent,” and has repeatedly challenged Hillary’s feminist credentials. Special: Alzheimer's Quick Test: Is Your Bedroom Organized Why is...

Ask yourself this: In all of the gazillions of lectures and tirades (there have, as to date, been no genuine conversations) on slavery, have you ever heard of the names of John Currantee and Ephraim Robin John? Such names—and there are many, many more—belong to a racially incorrect history of slavery, an historical account that threatens to rip asunder the ideological foundations of the Racism-Industrial-Complex (RIC), or Big Racism. For centuries and centuries, courtesy of both Arabs and its indigenous peoples, slavery was endemic throughout the continent of Africa. Contrary to what contemporary mythical portraits like Roots would have us...

If you have seen Dinesh O'Souza's movie, "Hillary's America" (highly recommended), this will refresh your memory. If you haven't seen the movie, this is some of the history of the Democratic party that either will astonish you, or if you already know it, will be a good refresher course.