Free Republic

In 1791, before Washington DC became the capital of the United States, surveyors placed a series of 40 boundary stones to mark the original 100-square-mile District of Columbia. Today, many of those historic markers still survive -- hidden in neighborhoods, parks, and along roads around the capital. Join me as I drive around Virginia, Maryland, and Washington DC searching for these forgotten pieces of American history and visit several of the original boundary markers placed between 1791 and 1792. These stones witnessed the birth of the nation's capital and are some of the oldest surviving monuments connected to the creation...

WASHINGTON — Former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema opened up about the sordid details of her dalliance with her then-married ex-bodyguard during a deposition in the $75,000 “homewrecker” suit brought by his angry ex-wife. Sinema (I-Ariz.), the first openly bisexual person elected to Congress, fessed up to having repeated sex with Matthew Ammel in cities across America in an affair that upended his 14-year marriage. She confessed that she first had sex with Ammel, her then-bodyguard, around Memorial Day of 2024, two years after he began working on her security team. “We were staying at an Airbnb in Napa, California. We were...

A clever swap has extended the historic Voyager 2’s mission in interstellar space. Engineers are hoping to do the same for Voyager 1. An ambitious effort to boost an aging probe on its journey through the uncharted territory of interstellar space seems to have found success. Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have spent the last few months implementing what they nicknamed the “Big Bang” fix to buy the historic Voyager 2 spacecraft more time to continue its science mission. Voyager 2 is roughly 21.35 billion kilometers (13 billion miles) away from Earth, while its twin, Voyager...

This artist’s concept shows the red supergiant star Betelgeuse and a companion star orbiting within the supergiant’s tenuous outer atmosphere. Artwork: NASA, ESA, Elizabeth Wheatley (STScI); Science: Andrea Dupree (CfA) Betelgeuse has always been something of a mystery. And by “mystery,” I mean a source of endless fun, fascination and frustration for astronomers. Betelgeuse is one of the brightest stars in the sky, marking the right shoulder of the constellation Orion. It’s a red supergiant, a massive star with more than a dozen times the sun’s heft, that’s blasting out many tens of thousands as much light as our own...

This video explores some of the Byzantine ruins hidden beneath the streets of modern Istanbul. I'd like to thank the management of the Ring Stone Hotel and Alp Watmough for making my filming possible. YT Summary: toldinstone explores the architectural palimpsest of Sultan Ahmed, tracing remnants of the Great Palace of the Byzantine emperors hidden within modern structures. From repurposed cisterns and sarcophagi to surviving ramp towers, the narrative uncovers how historical layers continue to shape the fabric of daily life in contemporary Istanbul. Istanbul's Hidden Byzantine Ruins | 9:34 toldinstone | 645K subscribers | 19,389 views | August 15,...

France is in the middle of the month of its deepest summer slumber. The juilletistes are back from their summer vacations but the aoûtiens are still enjoying theirs, and with them many of the businesses outside major cities and those who don't rely on tourists. Much of the country – and certainly everywhere near the water or the scenic hot spots – will appear to be running at half speed if at all, until La Rentrée kicks in at the beginning of September. It's a tradition going all the way back to the Middle Ages, when Pope Gregory IX gave...

One person’s trash dramatically turned into another’s treasure as workers in Belgium happened upon a gold hoard worth more than $10 million while installing a sewer line in a building they were renovating. “Our first reaction was actually disbelief,” Kobe, an 18-year-old student worker, told Belgium outlet VRT. “Of course, we hadn’t expected to find gold.” At the time, the construction crew was renovating a building in the city center of the Flemish community of Sint-Gillis-Dendermonde, located about 40 miles from Brussels. During the building rehab, workers were removing the foundation to make way for a sewer pipe when they...

A Tennessee teacher who was named Teacher of the Year has quit after accusing the school district of directing her to change a failing student’s grade. Samira Hardcastle, named the 2025-2026 Teacher of the Year at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Antioch, Tenn., submitted her letter of resignation in May after eight years teaching art in Metro Nashville Public Schools. “District leaders asked me to fabricate grades for a parent who sat in the office for hours until her daughter’s failing grades were changed,” Hardcastle said in an impassioned speech at Tuesday’s school board meeting. “It creates false entitlement....

I asked Grok how the red states and blue states performed economically between 2000 and 2026. It only gave me up until 2024, but if trends continued, the red states have continued to close the gap and may actually be higher income economies than blue states. Approx. Real GDP CAGR 2000–2024 Yearly Red-leaning group ████████████████ ≈ 2.3–2.6% Blue-leaning group ██████████████ ≈ 1.9–2.2% U.S. overall ███████████████ ≈ 2.1% Approximate cumulative real GDP growth (total multiplicative increase) These are simple compounds of representative average annual rates over 24 years: Red-leaning group (~2.4% average annual): Growth factor ≈ 1.77 → ~77% total cumulative...

Americans should not fear the past. I remember the first time I came across a “trigger warning.” I was on a university campus in the ‘90s, attending the first lecture of a new history professor. As I perused her course syllabus, I was impressed with the reading list and organization. Then I spotted an incongruous “warning” to women and African Americans suggesting that they might find some of the material offensive. At first, I thought it was an inappropriate joke. I asked someone about it, and I was informed that “trigger warnings” had become increasingly common in the classrooms of...

Scorching summer heat and prolonged drought have dramatically lowered the Tiber River in central Rome, revealing the long-submerged stone remains of a nearly 2,000-year-old bridge once known as Nero’s Bridge. According to a report from CNN, the rare sight has drawn locals and tourists to the riverbanks for a fleeting glimpse of the ancient structure that normally lies completely underwater. The Tiber’s flow, fed by tributaries from the northern Apennine Mountains, has dropped below 80 cubic meters per second—roughly half the seasonal average—according to Rome’s civil protection coordinator Giovanni Giganti.

The feds are probing a shadowy nonprofit’s $100 million anti-Israel “war chest” allegedly amassed by a glamorous ally of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a racecar-driving billionaire and a Texas private equity mogul, The Post has learned. The Department of Homeland Security is investigating a UK-based outfit known only as PFF, scrutinizing whether it illegally funneled donor funds to Al-Haq, a Palestinian group sanctioned by the US in September, sources said. Two sources with direct knowledge said federal agents are investigating more broadly whether the fund’s organizers employ opaque UK corporate entities to obscure cross-border financial flows. One insider said the “linchpin”...

Alaska Democratic Senate hopeful Mary Peltola rejected support this week from former Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost the state by double-digits in her failed 2024 presidential campaign. “Alaska is a must-win Senate seat for Democrats to retake control of the Senate,” Harris wrote in a fundraising email, urging the public to “help Mary Peltola get the support she needs” by splitting a donation between Peltola’s campaign and the ex-veep’s Fight for the People PAC. Harris continued, “So if there’s anyone who can flip Alaska and secure the Senate majority for Democrats – it’s Mary. But she cannot do it...

A Georgia financial advising CEO was sentenced Friday to 20 years behind bars for masterminding a $380 million Ponzi scheme to fund his lavish lifestyle of yachts, private jets and luxury shopping. Todd Burkhalter, the founder of Atlanta-area Drive Planning LLC, orchestrated one of Georgia’s largest schemes and stole millions from over 2,000 investors in the years-long con. Burkhalter, 59, was ordered to serve two decades in federal prison by US District Court Judge Tiffany R. Johnson, while two of his executives were sentenced to less than five years for their roles this week. Burkhalter’s attorneys had asked for a...

...at the Carrarzu Iddia archaeological site in Bortigali, a short distance from the town of Macomer. The monument still preserves its burial chamber and exedra and provides new insights into Nuragic civilization...The monument, which had long been completely hidden by vegetation, was rediscovered thanks to survey activities...The tomb is located on the southern slope of Crastu Littu, at an elevation of approximately 740 meters...The funerary monument is constructed of trachyte blocks... the burial chamber and the monumental semicircular exedra preceding the entrance...are still clearly visible......the space is divided into two levels near the entrance -- a construction solution that has...

A young man who once wondered if he would live past 1941 will be turning 105 years old Saturday. James (Pat) Bollich grew up in Louisiana. He trained at Fort Polk and arrived in the Philippines in November, 1941, less than a month before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Jamie Bollich wrote, “U.S. and Filipino forces retreated to the Bataan Peninsula when the Japanese invaded the Philippines, but after four months their food and ammunition ran out and the 70,000 troops were forced to surrender.”

A Pablo Picasso painting stolen while on loan from the Guggenheim Museum more than six decades ago has resurfaced, and the museum has gone to court to get it back. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation filed suit in New York State Supreme Court this week, according to Hyperallergic, against Massachusetts residents Lawrence Jay Handler and Wendy Cohen Handler, who the museum says currently possess Femme dans un fauteuil (Woman in an Armchair), a small 1918 painting that disappeared from the University of Pittsburgh in 1961. The story begins on February 5 of that year, when a graduate student and dormitory...

You said:H.Res.414 calculates slavery reparations for the years of 1619 up to 1865. What is the argument for why the United States should pay on behalf of the British Empire?ChatGPT said:There is an important distinction here: H.Res. 414 does not actually argue that the United States should compensate people for slavery because Britain committed it. Its argument is that the United States, after independence, inherited and continued the institution and therefore assumed responsibility for its own conduct and its continuing consequences.The key passage is unusually explicit. It says that, beginning with the nation's founding in 1776, federal policies "produced and...

Fighting in the Second World War went on until the very end. WWII: The Last Day | 20:41 The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered | 1.64M subscribers | 14,619 views | August 14, 2026

Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin defended his organization’s fundraising record despite a massive Republican advantage and implored allies to help raise more funds in the final few months before the November midterm elections. “While we’ve raised a record amount of money, and it is a record in the 198-year history of the DNC, there’s no chair or no team of officers that’s raised more money without the White House in [its] team, but the reality is we need more,” Martin said during an executive committee meeting on Friday. “I don’t want folks to think, well, we’re OK. We need...