Free Republic

One of the country’s most well-known tributes to the Revolutionary era is on the brink of financial ruin. Mitchell Reiss, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s president and CEO, released an open letter at the end of June revealing that Colonial Williamsburg, which markets itself as “the world’s largest living history museum,” is in dire financial straits.

During the Revolutionary War, our new nation faced a financial crisis. The colonies had no money to pay for the war and the prospects of raising funds were dismal, at best. Colonial troops had not been paid the money due them, so protests ensued. Some officers even surrounded the Continental Congress and held it for ransom, trying to get what was promised the troops for years of hardship, struggle and deprivation. Our young country was very near imploding after all the years of bloodshed, sacrifice and valiant commitment to the dream of liberty. Enter Robert Morris: the richest man in...

Oxford Union Admits It Is 'Institutionally Racist' After Cocktail Row The historic Oxford Union debating society has passed a motion declaring itself “institutionally racist” after it promoted a “Colonial Comeback” cocktail at an event last week. A meeting was held to address the issue of the offensive cocktail, which was advertised on a poster showing black hands in chains during a recent debate over Britain making reparations to former colonies. During the meeting society treasurer Zuleyka Shahin proposed the motion, arguing that the cocktail was “symptomatic of a wider problem” of racism at the union. Co-chair of the Campaign for...

What do you get when you combine water, American persimmons and hops and ferment it with yeast? A beer based on a 300-year-old recipe scribbled in a cookbook kept by Virginia's prominent Randolph family. Ardent Craft Ales in Richmond recently brewed "Jane's Percimon Beer" unearthed from the book in the Virginia Historical Society's collections from the 1700s that contains food, medicinal remedies and beer recipes. The formula for the Colonial-era concoction is one of thousands of alcoholic recipes in the society's collection that provide a glimpse into what Virginians and others were drinking in the 18th century and other points...

Colonial Crimes and Punishments Crime: assault in sudden anger, blasphemy, counterfeiting, idolatry, murder, rebellion, robbery of a church, witchcraft Punishment: death by hanging Crime: denying God, killing chickens, spying, stealing grapes, striking one’s mother or father Punishment: death (usually by hanging) Crime: forgery, manslaughter, theft Punishment: branding with an “F” for forgery, an “M” for manslaughter, or a “T” for theft Crime: hog theft Punishment: first offense: 25 lashes and a fine of 400 pounds of tobacco (39 lashes for a Native American or mulatto), second offense: time in the pillory, ear nailing third offense: death (usually by hanging)...

King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia of Sweden were greeted by hundreds of Delawareans as they celebrated the 375th anniversary of the New Sweden Colony, known today as the city of Wilmington. The Swedish royals, along with Finland's Speaker of the Parliament Eero Heinäluoma, began their day in Delaware with a luncheon at the Bunea Vista Mansion in New Castle with Governor Jack Markell.

Ridiculed.  Lampooned.  Denigrated.  That was the reaction that Dinesh D'Souza got upon launching his thesis about President Obama's mindset in his 2010 Forbes article, "How Obama Thinks." He argued in effect that president Obama's mindset was locked and loaded with the blame-colonialism doctrine that is still alive and well in post-colonial Asia and Africa.  The critical reaction came from political analysts from both sides of the political aisle.  For example, Daniel Larison of The American Conservative claimed that D'Souza "has authored what may possibly be the most ridiculous piece of Obama analysis yet." Andrew Ferguson of The Weekly Standard claimed...

Obama: Planet Will ‘Boil Over' If Africans Are Allowed Cars and Air-Conditioning July 1, 2013 - 4:22 PM By Ryan Kierman (CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama said at a town hall event in Johannesburg, South Africa, on Saturday that unless we find new way of producing energy "the planet will boil over" if people in Africa are allowed to attain air conditioning, automobiles and big houses. “Ultimately, if you think about all the youth that everybody has mentioned here in Africa, if everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got...

Imagine what would happen if America barged its way into a developing country, buttered up its homicidal dictator and agreed a back-of-the-envelope deal in which he signed over his nation’s mineral wealth in return for roads, railways and sports stadiums. Everyone would benefit, no? No. The problem is that the infrastructure turns out to be worth a hell of a lot less than the minerals. Fortunately, Washington has had the foresight to top up the dictator’s Swiss bank account. Problem solved! As for the mining operation, the Americans really don’t want to be bothered by minimum wages or trade unions....

Johnnie Stevens of Workers World Party gave the following talk at the July 30 meeting in New York’s Riverside Church protesting the war against Libya.Attacking Libya is attacking Africa! The war against Libya is a colonial war against all of Africa! I want to ask you all to come out on Sat., Aug. 13, to march in Harlem against the attacks on Libya and Zimbabwe and against the economic cuts of teachers and workers. Who’s all coming out for the march in Harlem, please stand up. (The audience stood up.) Our party’s first demonstration was in 1959 at Rockefeller Center...

... Mr. Gingrich, who is mulling a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, made the comments to National Review Online. He was quoted by the conservative Web site as saying: “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.” Commenting on a recent article in Forbes by Dinesh D’Souza, Mr. Gingrich told National Review Online that Mr. Obama “is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who...

A Sami (Lapp) family in Norway around 1900Photo: Library of CongressIn the freezing far northern reaches of Europe live an indigenous, semi-nomadic people of fishermen, fur trappers and reindeer herders. Like a thin but stubborn sheet of ice, these people have inhabited Sápmi, a large but sparsely populated area covering parts of northern Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia’s Kola Peninsula for thousands of years. They remained closely tied to nature throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, as their clothes, dwellings and other trappings of culture bear witness – here beautifully frozen in film. These people are the Sámi.Sami family in...

Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." Obama Sr. wasn't a doctrinaire socialist; rather, he saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa. For Obama Sr. this was an issue of national autonomy. "Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country?" As he put it,...

Citing a recent Forbes article by Dinesh D’Souza, former House speaker Newt Gingrich tells National Review Online that President Obama may follow a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview. Gingrich says that D’Souza has made a “stunning insight” into Obama’s behavior — the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama.” “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” Gingrich asks. “That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.” “This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch...

Had Americans been able to stop obsessing over the color of Barack Obama's skin and instead paid more attention to his cultural identity, maybe he would not be in the White House today. The key to understanding him lies with his identification with his father, and his adoption of a cultural and political mindset rooted in postcolonial Africa. Like many educated intellectuals in postcolonial Africa, Barack Hussein Obama , Sr. was enraged at the transformation of his native land by its colonial conqueror. But instead of embracing the traditional values of his own tribal cultural past, he embraced an imported...

So, what happened to all of those Scotch-Irish settlers and their descendants? It doesn't seem that large numbers of Americans identify themselves as Scotch-Irish (or Ulster Scots or Scots-Irish). If they do, the Bureau of the Census surveys don't reveal them. The answer is, the descendants of the Scotch-Irish settlers are legion -- but a great many of them call themselves simply "Americans."

Belle Grove is a fine old limestone manor house which comes with a good bit of history. The house was built near Middleton in Frederick County, Virginia, by Isaac Hite, Jr., a grandson of the pioneer Pennsylvania German settler Jost Hite. Its elegant design warranted mention in A History of the Valley of Virginia, by Samuel Kercheval, Charles James Faulkner, and John Jeremiah Jacob (1833). . . [vintage pictures]

When the Pennsylvania Germans crosses the Potomac into the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, they brought with them the skills and tools for erecting stone buildings. In the Cumberland Valley of Pennsylvania and Maryland, they had built numerous limestone-block houses, barns, and outbuildings. The Shenandoah Valley offered the same building materials. Jefferson County, now in West Virginia, has a collection of fine old stone houses built of limestone blocks. [Old pictures]

MILFORD, Conn. (AP) -- A Colonial-era skull believed to belong to a Revolutionary War soldier is set to be reburied in Connecticut with full military honors. The unidentified skull was discovered in the 1840s when railroad tracks were being laid near where 46 soldiers died of smallpox. British troops had captured the soldiers in 1776 and abandoned them by what is now Milford Cemetery. Experts have determined the skull belonged to a man of European descent who was between 25 and 35 years old....

AN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Colonial BancGroup Inc. became the largest bank failure this year after the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation seized the struggling Alabama-based lender Friday and sold it to BB&T Corp. Late Friday, the FDIC announced four other banks had been closed: Community Bank of Las Vegas and its Arizona subsidiary, Community Bank of Arizona; Union Bank, Gilbert, Ariz; and Dwelling House Savings and Loan, Pittsburgh. The Colonial BancGroup deal will knock roughly $2.8 billion off a pool of money, known as the Deposit Insurance Fund, which the FDIC maintains to guarantee bank customer deposits. BB&T /quotes/comstock/13*!bbt/quotes/nls/bbt (BBT 28.23,...