Free Republic

On this day in 1890, the writer Boris Pasternak was born into an affluent and cultured Russian-Jewish family. His father, Leonid, was a renowned artist and professor at the Moscow School of Painting; his mother Rosa, nee Kaufman, was a concert pianist. His parents’ social circle included notable figures of the day such as Sergei Rachmaninoff and Leo Tolstoy. The influence of this creative community led the young Pasternak to study first music and then philosophy, both in Russia and abroad. In 1912 he abandoned academia to pursue his true calling: poetry and prose. The outbreak of World War I...

"What I knew was what they were doing was wrong then, and it's wrong today," said [Rick] Monday. "I had a lot of friends who lost their lives protecting the rights and freedoms that flag represented. I'm not sure what I was thinking, except I was angry and I started to run after them. It is the way I was raised growing up in Santa Monica, [Calif.], and it was reinforced by my six years in the Marine Reserves," he said. Monday said the crowd suddenly began to sing "God Bless America."...(with video)

Of all Belisarius’s victories, the defeat of the great Gothic host under King Vittiges which had besieged Rome from February of AD 537 through March of AD 538 must rank as his greatest feat. In this, he was able to defend successfully a gigantic city that had been considered indefensible against a siege while outnumbered at least 20 to 1 – and maybe more. March 12 is the date commonly given for the break-up of the siege, when the remnants of the great Gothic army pulled up stakes and retreated for Ravenna. For the previous few months, they had...

On March 7, AD 203, during the reign of the emperor Septimius Severus, five Christians were martyred in the amphitheater of Carthage under the procurator Hilarian. The three men were named Revocatus, Saturus, and Saturninus. The two women, however, are more famous, having their names entered into the Roman Canon of the Mass: Felicitas, a slave eight months pregnant, and Perpetua, a young Roman matron of noble birth who had recently given birth to a child. Unlike many of the Acts of these early martyrs, the antiquity and authenticity of the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas is not seriously challenged...