Free Republic

Did I return from vacation to an alternate 2019? Did Biff actually succeed with the DeLorean after all? Of all the strange outcomes to pop up in this version of the universe, “RNC endorses World Socialist Website’s credibility” was somewhere around the millionth rank of possibilities. “And they’d be correct” ranked around the billionth mark. Earlier today, RNC spokesperson Liz Harrington issued the strange-yet-true endorsement of World Socialist Website’s deep dive into the integrity of the New York Times — and especially its “1619 Project” fantasy that might get projected into schools around the country: Elizabeth Harrington ✔ @LizRNC The...

Q. What was your initial reaction to the 1619 Project? A. Well, I didn’t know anything about it until I got my Sunday paper, with the magazine section entirely devoted to the 1619 Project. Because this is a subject I’ve long been interested in I sat down and started to read some of the essays. I’d say that, almost from the outset, I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery, which was clearly, obviously, not an exclusively American institution, but existed throughout history. And slavery in...

President Obama has declined an invitation to speak at next month’s ceremony marking the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. The event, slated for Nov. 19 at the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, instead will feature Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and renowned historian James McPherson as the keynote speakers, the Gettysburg National Military Park said in a press release. “President Obama will not attend and the Secretary of Interior will represent the administration,” the park pointed out in the first paragraph of its press release. It’s unclear why Mr. Obama, a noted admirer of President Lincoln, declined the...

The New York Review of BooksJune 13, 2002 Review Could the South Have Won? By James M. McPherson Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America by William C. Davis The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War by William W. Freehling Lee and His Army in Confederate History by Gary W. Gallagher The War Hits Home: The Civil War in Southeastern Virginia by Brian Steel Wills The field of Civil War history has produced more interpretative disputes than most historical events. Next to debates about the causes of the...

Some of the pro-north activists around here have been asking for a factual refutation of McPherson. Since I'm too cheap to purchase "Battle Cry" due to the fact that its revenues go into the pocket of an avowed Democrat with marxist political affiliations, I decided to examine his positions in one of those free articles on the web. Here goes... The following is intended as a refutation and analysis of the main arguments found in James McPherson's article "The Civil War: Causes and Results." I've broken it down by section to address his arguments in detail. His statements are selected...

As things seem to be going at present, it would seem that we are about to be bombarded with yet another round of blatant anti-Southern propaganda straight from the mouths and pens of Marxist/socialist "historians" who really know better but hope you don't. We were recently "treated" to yet another showing of Ken Burns' "The Civil War." I've heard comments by some that this series was somewhat redone and is, this time around, more objective than in the past. Having watched the miserable thing in its entirety twice over the years I felt no need to subject myself to it...

July will bring the 140th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg. Across Pennsylvania fields baking under the hot summer sun, reenactors will be out in force - most from the South, eager to replay, or imaginatively reverse, the whole encounter. Reenactments began in 1913, a time closer to the battle than to us. But Gettysburg is a place that history embalmed as a special shrine long ago. What new could there be to say about it?In the hands of two master historians, Stephen Sears and James McPherson, plenty, it turns out - though their books serve quite different purposes. McPherson's...

DILORENZO IS ESSENTIALLY CORRECT that the tariff supplied ninety percent of federal revenue before the Civil War. For the thirty years from 1831 to 1860 it was eighty-four percent, but for the 1850s as a decade it was indeed ninety percent. But the idea that the South paid about seventy-five percent of tariff revenues is totally absurd. DiLorenzo bases this on pages 26-27 of Charles Adams, When in the Course of Human Events, but Adams comes up with these figures out of thin air, and worse, appears to be measuring the South's share of exports, and then transposing that percentage...