Free Republic

n 2022, Jon Lauck published The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800-1900. His book describes a wonderful range of things to love about the 19th-century Midwest: its democratic civic ethos, the enduring Midwestern commitment to antislavery that resulted from the Northwest Ordinance’s original prohibition of the practice, and the wildfire-spread of co-educational colleges in the region. Lauck also adorns his book with wonderful quotations, which illustrate points such as the Midwestern love of literature that made it the talk of every table. “When William Dean Howells was visiting Representative James A. Garfield in Hiram, Ohio, in the...

Mosaic of the three times Our Lady of Prompt Succor saved New Orleans. General Jackson and his men may be seen in the bottom right. I took this photo of the mosaic at the Ursuline Convent in New Orleans in 2019. Andrew Jackson was a study in contrasts. By most accounts, he was hot tempered and had a tendency to violence. In his youth, he engaged in most of the vices common to young men of that time: drinking, carousing, and engaging in every form of gambling known to man. He apparently had a passion for cock-fighting. He got...

Something seemed to snap after President Joe Biden asked, “Where’s Jackie?” The snap wasn’t in the president himself, but rather from much of the media, as what had been whispered about in Washington and bandied about on talk radio had become a mainstream topic. (Although a Morning Consult survey in August found that a plurality of 48% believed that Biden was not mentally fit to be president.)

Seems to be true to history so far-but given it's PBS, I am skeptical.

The Pilgrims didn’t bring ‘genocide’ to America. They barely brought themselves, with half of their company dying that first winter, in 1620-21.Americans have a great and exuberant tradition that touches our sense of belonging and our pride in coming together. No, I am not referring to Thanksgiving, that festival of gratitude, generosity, and welcome. I am referring to the equally great and exuberant tradition of trash-talking other people. Supposedly we have reformed. Ethnic slurs that were once common have retreated to the dark corners of dive bars and the even darker corners of anti-social media. We live in a time...

It was billed as a land of promise — a place where free Black Americans could obtain more political rights and a better quality of life. Liberia did not receive its name until 1824, but the territory that became its capital city was purchased on Dec. 15, 1821. Almost exactly 200 years later, a Liberian historian has discovered that original purchase agreement — a document missing since 1835 that sheds light on the acquisition of the only U.S. colony in Africa.

On this day in 1814, a 35-year-old lawyer named Francis Scott Key watches a British fleet shell Baltimore's Ft McHenry. The poem he writes about the bombardment will later be set to music and become America's national anthem. pic.twitter.com/FtPoEVYeUO— Military History Now (@MilHistNow) September 13, 2021

In the 1990s, when I was in graduate school and reading required postmodern/Marxist theory, including Critical Race Theory, I little imagined that twenty-some years later, irate parents at school board meetings would be denouncing its use in elementary school classrooms and organizing recall elections. This is for the good. CRT is dividing Americans and actually harming blacks—and whites. What I as an adult graduate student found tedious and abstractly wrong-headed is now boiled down for K-12. It tells students that what their eyes and ears tell them is wrong: all white people are privileged oppressors. To accomplish this, it reaches...

What teachers choose to cover (or not cover) during their limited classroom time will reveal what biases and agendas that educator has on American history.“Ladies and gentlemen: The story you are about to see is true,” declared the introduction to the classic television program “Dragnet.” “All we want are the facts, ma’am,” asserted police officer “Joe Friday” during his investigations. True stories; just the facts: it seems so straightforward, doesn’t it? Not when American social studies curricula are concerned.“I teach my students that [Thomas] Jefferson sat there and wrote ‘all men are created equal,’ but he made his money off...

Any mother who has had to bury her child — one of the most devastating and enduring tragedies of motherhood — can take heart on Mother’s Day. You are not alone. The mother who was the very inspiration for the holiday, Ann Marie Reeves Jarvis, lost seven of her 11 children during the mid-1800s in rural Virginia. The dedication to honoring and supporting mothers displayed by Ann Marie Reeves Jarvis inspired her daughter Anna Jarvis, who never married or had children, to lobby for a holiday to honor “the best mother who ever lived — your mother.” After a few...

We have just the perfect solution for American kids' deep ignorance about their nation's founding principles, system of government, and history. It's making them into political activists!It’s deja vu all over again. A coalition of government- and billionaire-funded nonprofits has a “bipartisan” plan for national curriculum goals, this time concerning U.S. history and government. Today this “state-led” coalition is releasing a major report they hope will get the attention of the Biden administration and state governors to “collaboratively” enact their vision nationwide. Remember, these sorts of national plans are supported by people on the right and left, so there can...

Our neighbor to the north doesn’t have a “Second Amendment,” so there is little that gun owners can do if Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau passes his sweeping gun reform legislation. Not only would it ban the ownership of so-called “assault-style” firearms such as AR-15s, but it could allow municipalities to even ban handguns – all handguns regardless of age. In a press conference earlier this month, the Liberal Party PM said he would move forward with a buyback program in the coming months, but also said that the legislation would empower municipalities to restrict storage and transportation of handguns...

Identity politics will drive us straight back into the tyranny and subjugation our Founders and subsequent generations fought so hard to escape.For something as seemingly mundane as a government report on civics, the “1776 Commission Report” has been a surprisingly hot topic.The report was posted to the White House website on a Monday around 5:30 p.m. ET. It was one of the last actions of the Trump administration. Less than 48 hours later, in one of the very first acts of the Biden administration, it was taken down. Fortunately, a handful of organizations posted it on their own websites so...

The New Yorker interview with San Francisco's school board president reveals how political ideology has replaced knowledge among especially younger American leftists.Last week, The New Yorker ran an interview with San Francisco school board President Gabriela López, a 30-year-old former teacher leading the district’s charge to bury American history. It’s eye-opening, to say the least.López was elected on a campaign to cancel history. Under her leadership, the nation’s seventh-largest school district has spent its time not teaching its 57,000 students — who have been “learning” online for nearly a full year — but plotting to take the names of historic...

One of former President Trump's longtime allies in the Senate said Sunday that Trump would be remembered for his role in the events leading up to the deadly riot that overtook the Capitol on Jan. 6. Speaking on CBS's "Face the Nation," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) indicated that he thought history would judge Trump's responsibility for the siege that resulted in the deaths of several people, including one Capitol Police officer, but added that he did not think it was the Senate's role to convict the former president for inciting the riot. "Well, I mean, he’s going to have a...

The aftermath of the 2020 election finds the nation unsettled, with legitimate concerns about election fraud overshadowed by the capitol riot and kooky conspiracy theories.The presidential election was close. Only 84 Electoral College votes separated the contenders. Widespread allegations of ballot fraud were claimed by national party chairmen in 11 states, with court challenges lasting into the middle of the year following the election. Changing the results in just two states would flip the election.The fraud allegations were serious, including dead people voting and votes far in excess of registered voters in some counties. Yet partisan election boards quickly certified...

The '1776 principles have led to a tremendously successful country and overcome great national trials,' Rollins noted. They 'helped make us more peaceful, more just and more prosperousIf you’ve read any leftist coverage of President Trump’s 1776 Commission, you’d have been surprised to listen in on its first meeting Tuesday. It was brief, orderly, included a wide range of voices and life experiences united by a commitment to American ideals, and commission members repeatedly emphasized their interest in avoiding partisanship and reaching out to Americans of all backgrounds and walks of life. Their goal is to unite Americans, as Trump’s...

Abraham Lincoln didn’t do enough for black lives, according to militant proponents of the woke revolution. In October, the San Francisco Unified School District School Names Advisory Committee suggested a list of school names to be replaced in the city. On that list was a school named after Lincoln, the Great Emancipator. In just a few years, the discussion about history and monuments has gone from whether we should keep Confederate monuments to erasing the president who orchestrated the Confederacy’s destruction. Regarding Lincoln, it seems the woke and John Wilkes Booth are now in alignment.

President Trump and his allies are launching a counterstrike in the war on our nation’s founding. Since The American Mind began nearly two years ago, we have consistently warned of the regime-level crisis caused by the corruption of the content of American education. The recent riots and the ongoing cultural revolution fomented by identity politics has helped prove our point. It is now clearer to Americans that if we do not change course, decades of anti-American propaganda and identitarian teaching in our schools will result in a fundamental overthrow of our system of government. Just two weeks ago the Trump...

On August 6, 1945, 30-year-old U.S. Air Force pilot Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr. took to the sky in the Enola Gay, his Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bomber. His destination, the Japanese city of Hiroshima, was not an especially notable target. His payload, however, a single bomb nicknamed “Little Boy,” would change the course of history. True watershed moments in history are rare — the agricultural revolution is one such example, as was the Battle of Salamis, the advent of Jesus Christ, and the fall of Western Rome. Yet in the last 1,500 years, no two distinct epochs of time...