Free Republic

Old Map Islands The study was inspired by the Gough map, which depicts two “lost” islands in Cardigan Bay offshore west Wales, United Kingdom. A new study of coastal geography finds that the lost islands mentioned in Welsh folklore and poetry are plausible. New evidence on the evolution of west Wales’ coastline has shown a Welsh tradition going back to the medieval era of a landscape lost to the sea is plausible. The researchers from Swansea University and the University of Oxford suggest how two islands came into being and subsequently vanished using geological data and a medieval map....

A Trump Indictment Could Change Everything: The question of whether the FBI raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home means he will either be indicted or reelected might be the wrong question. The answer in this topsy-turvy political climate should be: Why choose? An indictment wouldn’t legally preclude Trump from running and most certainly wouldn’t discourage him. It has likely strengthened him politically, at least in the short term.

How can one write history so that it seems like a thriller? How does one write a biography without making the subject the centerpiece of the narrative? I have no idea if David Pietrusza asked himself these questions — or this one: How can history be written as a newspaper headline? Call this a biography by indirection. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is defined by competing individuals and movements: Huey Long, Father Coughlan, Al Smith, the Liberty League, Earl Browder and the Communist Party, Dr. Francis Townsend and the Townsend Plan, Norman Thomas and the Socialist Party. They threatened FDR’s majority in...

The 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones does not accept correction. Instead, she attacks every critic as a racist or race traitor. In August, history professor James H. Sweet wrote that the 1619 Project illustrated the problem of “presentism” in history. In an American Historical Association essay, “Is History History?” he argued The New York Times’s 1619 Project looks at “the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism.”Sweet almost immediately found himself attacked by a mob of historians for not adhering to the standards of “presentism.” He quickly groveled with a public apology and a...

Here’s a paradox. Over the past two-and-a-half years, a cadre of senior politicians and their “expert” advisors across the world have successfully promoted a series of controversial public policies by claiming they’re based on “the science” rather than a particular moral or ideological vision. I’m thinking of lockdowns and net zero in particular. Yet at the same time, this group has engaged in behavior that has undermined public confidence in science. Why appeal to the authority of science to win support for a series of politically contentious policies — and then diminish its authority?

This was a watershed moment in the understanding and study of "violent" tornadoes....proving the Multi-Vortex theory of Dr Ted Fujita...16 year old Bruce Boyd captures the very rare instance of an F-5 tornado forming...being less than a mile away...yes, im a weather geek...

We need DAILY reminders (just like they indoctrinate our kids in government indoctrination centers), that REAL LIFE events once happened and perhaps should happen again

WEST HOLLYWOOD—What if Adolf Hitler had just been an actor? In another rendition of history, he had all the makings for it. David Bowie, in his oft-forgotten national socialist phase, called Der Fuhrer “one of the first rock stars.” Bowie later said he was on a lot of cocaine. Pop historians would say as much of the high command. But it’s there: Hitler had “the look.” Not starting quarterback stuff (or whatever the non-Amerikaner equivalent), but a true aesthete’s presentation that was straight out of Hollywood. Was he even good-looking? It doesn’t matter, because we could not—still cannot—look away.

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Spain, working with a colleague from South Africa, has found that for some people living in the Roman Empire, funerary meals were much like everyday meals...During the time of the Roman Empire, rules were made for conquered lands that tended to coincide with rules that the Romans themselves followed. One set of rules governed funeral arrangements. And one of those rules mandated that an animal (or part of one) must be sacrificed and placed into the grave with the person who had died—regardless of age, gender or social status. In this...

“Fifteen centuries after its foundation, the magnificent Byzantine Church of Hagia Sophia still hides secrets whose discovery causes surprise and admiration.” Now, the oldest structure of the entire Hagia Sophia complex in Istanbul has been opened. The existence of the structure, a three-room catacomb dating to the 4th century, has been known since 1946, but only recently was the work of removing the tons of mud and sediment that engulfed the site completed, reports CNN Greece.

BEL AIR, Calif. (FOX 11) - There is a history in the Santa Monica Mountains of seasonal wildfire threats. The Skirball Fire is nowhere near as devastating as the one that tore through the neighborhood back when John F. Kennedy was president. A little more than half a century ago - on November 5th, 1961, a brush fire triggered when a construction crew's equipment threw off a spark and quickly grew into a massive blaze fueled by Santa Ana winds. Tragically, 484 homes were destroyed and a little more than 16,000 acres burned

Cache of ancient gold rings discovered in Romania. (Ţării Crişurilor Museum, Oradea, Romania) Archaeologists in Romania have discovered an extraordinary cache of ancient gold rings that a 6,500-year-old woman wore in her hair. The trove in a Copper Age grave includes 169 gold rings, 800 bone beads, and an ornate spiraled copper bracelet discovered by a team from the Ţării Crişurilor museum in Oradea, Romania. The jewelry was laid to rest alongside a burial of an "extremely rich" woman, museum director Gabriel Moisa said, Romanian outlet Agerpres reports. Archaeologists identified the remains as belonging to a woman based on the...

Arguing for keeping “presentism” out of history seems like a straightforward argument from an acknowledged history scholar, right? Wrong. Not these days. The president of the American Historical Association, James H. Sweet, published an essay last week arguing that scholars should bar “presentism” from history. Sweet’s column in the American Historical Association magazine, Perspectives on History, argued that “doing history with integrity requires us to interpret elements of the past not through the optics of the present but within the worlds of our historical actors.” Pretty basic stuff. Shortly thereafter, Sweet was mobbed by those who clearly didn’t like his...

Tirana, Albania — It is the stuff of wild nightmares. Despite the passage of three decades, for Iranian dissidents residing in a sprawling Albanian compound — far from their homeland — the torture and trauma of life inside an Iranian regime prison is still raw. “I was a university student, almost seven months pregnant, when the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) came,” Kobra Jowkar, now 59, says softly. “They raided our home at midnight and were very ruthless.” That ruthlessness, she claims, included kicking her around like a soccer ball — and walking on her bulging belly. The worst would...

Dr. Anthony Fauci announced his retirement Monday. He told Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times he will “pursue the next chapter” of his career in December. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is 81, and has been in his post for 38 years. Fauci is a tragic figure, for his career represents in an individual the final collapse of American republicanism and the basic idea of common sense upon which it was built.

As a relatively young country, America has a tendency to ignore history, if not outright disdain it. This ahistorical impulse is manifested in the citizenry’s incessant craving for the novel in every realm of daily life, be it economic, cultural, social, spiritual, medical, or political. What’s new is improved; and what’s old is discarded (unless and until it becomes “retro” within a passing fad). Within the public this engenders a short attention span and a desire for “progress” – which the Left deliberately conflates with “desirable” to attain its political aims. (After all, one can progress into a better person;...

The university announced on Tuesday that the so-called “Galileo manuscript” – a one-page document that includes a letter accompanying the astronomer’s presentation of his telescope and his supposed notes observing Jupiter’s moons through his telescope in 1610 – was crafted by Tobia Nicotra, a well-known forger from Italy who was fined and sentenced to two years in jail for crafting fake Galileo documents in 1934. He also infamously produced fake autographs of Christopher Columbus and Mozart. The possibility came to light in May when the Georgia State University professor Nick Wilding expressed “serious doubts about its authenticity”. Wilding found while...

Questioning leftist propaganda is now a cardinal sin. Leftism is a discipline of doublethink, and nowhere is that more apparent than its approach towards morality. Moral relativism is the name of the game, until the ethic in question imperils the fragile architecture of the left’s inconsistent and collective mind. For many of the academicians at the American Historical Association, intellectual honesty and discourse makes you the chief among sinners. Six days ago, James H. Sweet, president of the AHA, published a written piece in the association’s editorial titled, “Is History History?” — and the ensuing fallout was described by one...

Description: Letter to Anthony Fauci condemning the way he has dealt with the AIDS epidemic and its sufferers"You are responsible for all government funded AIDS treatment research. In the name of right, you make decisions that cost the lives of others. I call the decisions you are making acts of murder." Larry Kramer "An Open Letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci" San Francisco Examiner, June 26, 1988Anthony Fauci, you are a murderer and should not be the guest of honor at any event that reflects on the past decade of the AIDS crisis. Your refusal to hear the screams of AIDS...

U2 surveillance aircraft criss-crossed the globe photographing everything from 70,000 feet. The pictures, now on display at the Penn Museum, reveal a wealth of archaeological information...Images taken from on high to observe what may be buried underground have been used by archaeologists for more than a century, and researchers at the Penn Museum have embraced the technology since at least the 1920s.But no one has ever utilized the most famous trove of aerial images from the Cold War, those produced by high-flying U-2 spy planes, first deployed by the CIA to photograph all over the world beginning in 1956, a...