Free Republic

Today, members of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) gutted the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). As of this afternoon, all staff members have been placed on administrative leave. They received a letter from the Director of Human Resources that the leave would be paid for 90 days and that no one will be allowed on IMLS property during that time... The union representing IMLS staff, AFGE Local 3403, indicated that the decision to fire staff came after a short meeting between DOGE and IMLS leadership. Everyone working at IMLS was required to return government property before exiting...

The Biden administration is vacating a decades-old decision to revoke the security clearance of World War II-era scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who is known today as the “father of the atomic bomb.” In a written statement first shared with The Hill, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the 1954 decision barring Oppenheimer’s clearance went through a “flawed process” and noted that there was evidence of bias. “In 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission revoked Dr. Oppenheimer’s security clearance through a flawed process that violated the Commission’s own regulations. As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and...

The study of history is vital to a student’s education. Fail to learn it, and you’re “condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana famously said. Neglect to study it, and you’re “a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree,” novelist Michael Crichton wrote. In his 1864 book La Cité Antique, French historian Fustel de Coulange powerfully summarized the value of the subject: “History studies not just facts and institutions, its real subject is the human spirit.” Clearly, studying the past is an indispensable component of understanding the world. But there is a big problem: When men write history,...

A BBC documentary depicting Winston Churchill as a drunken enemy of the working class has been branded as ‘graceless’ and ‘ill-informed’ by his grandson. Churchill: When Britain Said No, broadcast on BBC2 last week, was an account of how the wartime leader lost the 1945 General Election. It showed him as a deeply hated figure among the working class, in part because of the harsh economic policies he pursued as Chancellor in the 1920s. The most vocal critic of Churchill in the programme was a man presented as ‘activist and writer’, Dave Douglass. He said of Churchill: ‘His role during...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 (UPI) -- Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was investigating the man who allegedly planned the Sept. 11 airplane hijackings and attacks on New York and Washington when he was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan, according to two former Central Intelligence Agency officials. Bob Baer, a former case officer in the agency's Directorate of Operations, said he provided Pearl with unpublished information about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who has since been accused by American officials of being one of the masterminds of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and a top aide to Osama bin Laden. Mohammed is...

In July, the (NEH) sponsored a workshop on “History and Commemoration: The Legacies of the Pacific War in WWII” for college professors in Hawaii. Professor Penelope Blake, a veteran professor of Humanities at Rock Valley College in Rockford, Ill., was one of 25 American scholars chosen to attend the workshop, but was reportedly disheartened to find the conference “driven by an overt political bias and a blatant anti-American agenda.” Professor Blake is now reportedly calling on Congress to implement better oversight over the NEH. In a letter addressed directly to her Illinois congressman, Rep. Don Manzullo, Blake documents conference details...

Sunday, April 8, 2007 "Peace in our time." Neville Chamberlain's umbrella. The British prime minister's appeasement of evil at Munich in 1938. It all came rushing back this past week, but before Iran and Great Britain worked up the return British sailors and marines taken hostage and humiliated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government. No, the appeasement in the service of peaceful relations is happening on the home front in Great Britain. Last Monday brought word that a new government-backed study found British schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons for fear of riling up Muslim students. That's right, teachers...

<p>An Indian tribe has forced distributors of an Arab studies guide for U.S. teachers to remove an inaccurate passage that says Muslim explorers preceded Christopher Columbus to North America and became Algonquin chiefs.</p> <p>Peter DiGangi, director of Canada's Algonquin Nation Secretariat in Quebec, called claims in the book, the "Arab World Studies Notebook," "preposterous" and "outlandish," saying nothing in the tribe's written or oral history support them.</p>