Free Republic

A pocket watch that once belonged to one of the Titanic's most renowned passengers has sold at an auction for $2.3 million — a record price for memorabilia related to the historic shipwreck, according to the auction house. The 18-carat gold watch was gifted to its original owner, Isidor Straus, by his wife, Ida Straus, for his 43rd birthday, said Henry Aldridge and Son, the auction house that sold it on Saturday. It was recovered from his body after the Titanic sunk in the North Atlantic in April 1912. Isidor Straus was an American businessman and politician who owned the...

Columbia County, Ark. — There’s no sign of it here in Magnolia, Ark., but the boycott season is upon us, and graduates of Princeton and Bryn Mawr are demanding “justice” from Wal-Mart, which is not in the justice business but in the groceries, clothes, and car-batteries business. It is easy to scoff, but I am ready to start taking the social-justice warriors’ insipid rhetoric seriously — as soon as two things happen: First, I want to hear from the Wal-Mart-protesting riffraff a definition of “justice” that is something that does not boil down to “I Get What I Want, Irrespective...

There are few things that Connecticut can bring to the table when discussions of American exceptionalism come to the forefront. A notable exception could be insurance, but now there is also a connection to time and its boundless second hands, the very stroke that registers as the heartbeat of the American tradition. Connecticut however, does have a rich history of ties to American exceptionalism. During the American Revolution, firearms and ammunition were produced there. Even today, there is still a glimmer of that American manufacturing with Groton as a center of submarine building. As defense spending has declined, so has...