Free Republic

On this date in 1946, market day in the southeastern Polish town of Debica, three captured fighters* from the anti-communist Freedom and Independence (WiN) movement were publicly hanged. This salutary, and surprise, hanging was a nasty public message during the dirty post-war war to consolidate communist authority in Poland. The message, however, was not exactly meant for a world wider than Poland itself, so the fact that it was captured in a grainy photograph snapped by WiN agent Józef Stec and subsequently smuggled out to the West was not at all to the liking of Polish authorities....

On this date in 1835, five professional gamblers were strung up in Vicksburg. It was an event more adjacent to than constituent of the slave rebellion panic shaking Mississippi, for the men were neither slaves nor their confederates and they were not struck down for threatening the Slave Power; at best, the uneasiness of possible insurrectionary stirrings abroad informed the tense background, or offered the post hoc justification — but these lynchings were a different thing that inhabited by chance the same time and place. A Mississippi River boomtown “created by the easy credit of the Jacksonian ‘flush times’ and...

On this anniversary date of King Charles I’s beheading, the two-years-dead corpse of the late Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell was hung in chains at Tyburn and then beheaded, along with the bodies of John Bradshaw and Henry Ireton. The great-great-grandnephew of ruthless Tudor pol Thomas Cromwell rose higher than any English commoner, high enough to be offered the very crown he had struck off at Whitehall. Oliver Cromwell declined it in sweeping Puritan rhetoric just as if he hadn’t spent weeks agonizing over whether to take it. “I would not seek to set up that which Providence hath destroyed and...

On December 1921 at 22 Hans Place in Knightsbridge, a treaty was signed between a provisional Irish Government and the British to create what was called the Irish Free State. However only six months later, a few hundred yards away in Eaton Place, an assassination occurred, the reverberations of which could be said to have helped start the Irish Civil War in 1922. At around midday of 22 June 1922, Field-Marshall Sir Henry Wilson unveiled a war memorial at Liverpool Street Station. He made a speech, quoted some relevant Kipling poetry and soon after returned by taxi to his home...