Free Republic

In the recent Supreme Court decision of NYSR&PA v. Bruen, the court ruled the proper way to determine restraints on the exercise of Second Amendment rights was to review history and see if restraints on those rights had been widely accepted across the American polities, especially at the time of the ratification of the Second Amendment in 1791 and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, as the Second Amendment has been applied to the States by the Fourteenth Amendment. The right to bear (carry) arms for the protection of self and others has long been a part of...

Cancel culture has now reached President Abraham Lincoln, the man who wrote the Emancipation Proclamation declaring enslaved people “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Democrat Rep. Jamie Becker-Finn (DFL-Roseville) complained about Lincoln’s presence on the House floor this week during a debate on an education bill. “We are asked to serve, we serve in this body, we have to look at President Lincoln every day we are in this space.”

The removal of the Jews from the Arab world has been all but ignored, says Tom Gross It is not surprising, given the sheer scale of the Holocaust and its sadism, that it has dominated contemporary discourse among Jews and others. But, while the extermination of European Jews has rightfully (though belatedly) generated a great deal of study and research, the removal of the Jews from the Arab world has been all but ignored. This ignorance extends to policy-makers at the highest level. Some journalists and politicians I have spoken to have expressed surprise when I even mentioned that Jews...

Seeking to interdict Federal naval operations in Hampton Roads, the ironclad CSS Virginia (ex-Merrimack) left its berth at Norfolk and steamed out to attack the nearby Union ships. Under the command of Flag Officer Franklin Buchanan, the CSS Virginia headed straight for the USS Cumberland off Newport News. Around 2pm on March 8, 1862, the CSS Virginia struck the Cumberland with its 1,500lb iron ram, smashing a huge hole in its wooden hull. Despite the mortal blow delivered to the Cumberland, the CSS Virginia, which had become entangled within the shredded hull of its opponent, was also at risk of...

Californians are always talking about the coming Big One, but what if the big one is a flood, not an earthquake? With this recent cavalcade of rainstorms, there's been renewed interest in a 2011 USGS study on the so-called "ARkStorm." In it, the USGS lays out a case for a hypothetical "megastorm," one that could cause up to $725 billion in damage and impact a quarter of California's homes. The ARkStorm would bring with it catastrophic rains, hurricane-force winds and hundreds of landslides. Central Valley flooding alone is projected to span 300 miles. If that sounds far-fetched, there's historic precedent:...

Five dollars was all she was paid by the Atlantic Monthly Magazine for her poem, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," published FEBRUARY 1, 1862. It became Lincoln's favorite song and the Union's theme song. Her name was Julia Ward Howe, the daughter of a Wall Street banker and the wife of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, director of a school for the blind in Boston, which grew into the famous Perkins Institute. Julia and her husband entertained John Brown in their home and published the anti-slavery journal Commonwealth. In 1861, Julia traveled to Washington, D.C., and saw the city teeming...

As the sun went down after the 1862 Battle of Shiloh during the Civil War, some soldiers noticed that their wounds were glowing a faint blue. Many men waited on the rainy, muddy Tennessee battlefield for two days that April, until medics could treat them. Once they were taken to field hospitals, the troops with glowing wounds were more likely to survive their injuries — and to get better faster. Thus the mysterious blue light was dubbed “Angel’s Glow.” In 2001, 17-year-old Civil War buff Bill Martin visited the Shiloh battlefield with his family and heard the legend of Angel’s...

History, the Roman historian Livy said, is the best medicine for a troubled mind. And these indeed are troubling times. Abetted by their shills in the mainstream media, the liberal Democrats are trying to wring every ounce of partisan advantage from the war in Iraq, no matter how much such carping undermines our resolve and comforts the enemy. But as I’m reminded while re-reading the first volume of Shelby Foote’s masterpiece The Civil War, not much of our current crisis is really that new; but what is new is particularly dangerous.