Free Republic

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Thursday ordered the removal of portraits in the Capitol of previous House speakers who served in the Confederacy as part of an effort to "appropriately observe Juneteenth" on Friday. Pelosi said she discovered the four portraits as she was taking inventory in the Capitol of Confederate statues, which she is also trying to remove but can't do unilaterally. "Tomorrow, Juneteenth, the clerk will oversee the removal of those Confederate speakers from the House," Pelosi announced at a press conference at the Capitol. "There's no room in the hallowed halls of this democracy, this temple of democracy,...

Leo McKinstry says the current craze for genealogy reflects an unhealthy combination of snobbery and inverse snobbery, and is a poor replacement for national history When I visited the National Archives at Kew last week the place was full of them, scurrying about with their plastic wallets in hand, a look of eager concentration on their faces. It was impossible to escape their busy presence as they whispered noisily to relatives or whooped over the discovery of some new piece of information. These were the followers of one of Britain’s fastest-growing craze, the mania for researching family history. Studying bloodlines...