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Jul 1, 1863: The Battle of Gettysburg begins The largest military conflict in North American history begins this day when Union and Confederate forces collide at Gettysburg. The epic battle lasted three days and resulted in a retreat to Virginia by Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Two months prior to Gettysburg, Lee had dealt a stunning defeat to the Army of the Potomac at Chancellorsville. He then made plans for a Northern invasion in order to relieve pressure on war-weary Virginia and to seize the initiative from the Yankees. His army, numbering about 80,000, began moving on June...

Most of the heroes in the Revolutionary War, from Washington down to the humblest recruit shivering through the winter at Valley Forge, fought on the land. The tiny, hastily formed Continental Navy—consisting mainly of improvised small craft and converted merchantmen—had to content itself with pinprick raids on enemy commercial shipping or coastal targets and occasional small-scale actions against lesser British military craft, never ships of the line in battle array. Only two American naval officers, both foreign-born, emerged from the Revolutionary War with true hero status, and only one of them, John Paul Jones, is widely remembered today. A vain...

This is a great concert and a wonderful paean to Lincoln.But there were no Gray Dead.Is the South forgettable...is it only the forgotten losing side!

Is America a Christian nation? Sarah Palin said on Friday that it's "mind-boggling" to suggest otherwise. But two groups dedicated to the separation of church and state are now speaking out against her, arguing that she is misreading the founders' intent. "It's incredibly hypocritical that Sarah Palin, who disapproves of government involvement in just about anything, now suddenly wants the government to help people be religious," Barry Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told ABC News. "It is wildly inconsistent with her views on limited government to get the government involved in matters...

Emblem of a divisive and controversial political movement or historic symbol of American defiance? Those are two views of the Gadsden Flag, the bright yellow banner adorned with the image of a coiled rattlesnake and the words "Don't Tread on Me." The flag has been adopted by tea party activists, who have unfurled it at rallies across the nation, and some Republican members of Congress, who hung it from a balcony at the U.S. Capitol before a vote on the health care overhaul. On Friday, the flag will fly over the state Capitol — and that doesn't sit well with...

On Monday's O'Reilly Factor on Fox News, NPR news analyst Juan Williams furthered the left's talking point about the tea party's supposed connection to militias, and even went so far to claim that the Gadsden or "Don't Tread on Me" flags used by the conservative grassroots movement is "the same imagery that was on Timothy McVeigh" . . . [snip]

Legacy of Boston Tea Party Sullied by Sensationalist Politics By: Chloe Jenkins-Sleczkowski Posted: 2/3/10 The past year has brought on an inreased exposure of tea - not Earl Grey. I am speaking of the Tea Party Movement, the grassroots and conservative-minded (dis-)organization that has been making headlines with its latest shenanigans to reclaim the country for the intellectually lazy. Although some political diversity is a nice change, it does not need to be in the form of griping conservatives who are only making it harder on a president who has more than enough on his plate. The Tea Party...

President Reagan,, in his farewell address to the nation, warned America about the need to change. Reagan, even now, 22 years after his presidency, remains a beacon for freedom and his message has never been more relevant. The fact that Ronald Reagan saw fit to offer this advice at the end of his term showed that he believed there was still work to be done to keep the country centered. Where we have drifted since his time is away from awareness and toward a society more interested in idle pleasure than in history or civic duty....

Few could fathom why 55-year-old John Jay turned down President Adams’s nomination to rejoin the Supreme Court when his two terms as New York’s governor ended. What would lead him, in the hale prime of life, to retire instead to the plain yellow house he’d just built on a hilltop at the remote northern edge of Westchester County, two days’ ride from Manhattan, where visitors were few and the mail and newspapers came but once a week? After 27 years at the forge of the new nation’s founding, why would so lavishly talented a man give up his vital role...

Tuesday, January 19, 2010, is the 203rd birthday of Robert E. Lee, whose memory is still dear in the hearts of many Americans and people throughout God’s good earth.

Debate was heated at times as the guidelines will dictate what about 4.8 million K-12 students must learn in social studies, history and economics over the next decade. The standards also will be used by textbook publishers who develop material for the nation based on Texas, one of their largest markets. On Friday, the board declined to strike the "Red Scare" from high school history classes, and added a reference to the Venona Papers, research that "confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government." It also agreed to require students to differentiate between "legal and illegal immigration" in a section...

Trying to blame someone—anyone—other than his man Barack Obama for the security meltdown surrounding NWA 253, Ed Schultz ran head-first without a helmet into American history tonight. Seeking to shift the onus onto England for not having alerted us about having denied young Umar entry into its country, Ed entertainingly claimed that the UK has probably been "our best ally since the country started." Um, Ed: "since the country started"? You mean, like, when we started the country in 1776? When we declared our independence from, and fought a war against, uh, you know. That same country that—more than a...

NEW YORK — Members of one of America's oldest Protestant churches officially apologized Friday — for the first time — for massacring and displacing Native Americans 400 years ago. "We consumed your resources, dehumanized your people and disregarded your culture, along with your dreams, hopes and great love for this land," the Rev. Robert Chase told descendants from both sides. "With pain, we the Collegiate Church, remember our part in these events." The minister spoke on Native American Heritage Day at a reconciliation ceremony of the Lenape tribe with the Collegiate Church, started in 1628 in then-New Amsterdam as the...

As America debates whether to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan, in the ninth year of a war for ends we cannot discern, a riveting new history recalls times when Americans fought for vital national interests. "A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent" is Robert Merry's brilliant biography and history of that time. Merry goes far toward righting the injustice done by historians who have denied this great man his place in the pantheon of presidents, because they believe "Jimmy Polk's War" to have been a war...

ELIZABETH -- Many of the headstones marking the graves in New Jersey’s oldest cemetery are no longer readable, not only because they’re worn, but because they’re partially underground. While excavating around the headstones in the Old First Presbyterian Church cemetery in Elizabeth last week, archaeologist Seth Gartland found stones had sunk several feet, leaving only the top half exposed. When workers elevated the decaying stones, Gartland discovered inscriptions that had long been hidden. Tony Kurdzuk/The Star-LedgerRows and rows of markers in the cemetery of the First Presbyterian Church on Broad St. The cemetery is currently undergoing a project of preserving...

The 4th of July is the time when we celebrate our nation-- a time to reflect on the freedoms which we believe are not granted by our government, but are self-evident rights for all humankind. Time for the Independence Day Quiz which asks, "How much do you really know?" Every day thousands leave their homelands to settle here in the land of the free. Before they become citizens they are required to take a citizenship test and score 80%. Could you pass this test if you took it today? Our quiz is made up of 20 questions found on the...

At a White House dinner with a group of historians at the beginning of the summer, Robert Dallek, a shrewd student of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, offered a chilling comment to President Obama. "In my judgment," he recalls saying, "war kills off great reform movements." The American record is pretty clear: World War I brought the Progressive Era to a close. When Franklin D. Roosevelt was waging World War II, he was candid in saying that "Dr. New Deal" had given way to "Dr. Win the War." Korea ended Harry Truman's Fair Deal, and Vietnam brought Lyndon Johnson's...

.....But what began to radicalize American anti-slavery activists? First, it was Evangelical Christianity. Some of the radicalism they took from their faith. They took from the so-called Second Great Awakening. They took from this idea that somehow, it was their duty, it was their place in the world--many of them were the sons and daughters of ministers--to save souls. And if you'd been inspired by Charles Grandison Finney out in Oberlin, Ohio, or--as Theodore Weld had--or a number of other ministers across the North, that it was your duty to go save souls, it was only one step further--and Finney...

Yellow Springs company embraces niche and club publications YELLOW SPRINGS — In the summer of 2008, Benjamin Smith and Vicki McClellan spotted a small magazine out of Fort Myers, Fla., calling itself Patriots of the American Revolution. After seeing it, they knew two things. First, they liked the magazine, its exploration of a certain corner of history, its direction and feel. Second, they knew their company, Yellow Springs custom publisher Ertel Publishing, could make it better. The magazine’s owner, Three Patriots LLC, has hired Ertel Publishing to design and produce the magazine. But Three Patriots and Ertel Publishing aren’t exactly...

A Declaration by the Representatives of the United Colonies of North-America, Now Met in Congress at Philadelphia, Setting Forth the Causes and Necessity of Their Taking Up Arms.(1) If it was possible for men, who exercise their reason to believe, that the divine Author of our existence intended a part of the human race to hold an absolute property in, and an unbounded power over others, marked out by his infinite goodness and wisdom, as the objects of a legal domination never rightfully resistible, however severe and oppressive, the inhabitants of these colonies might at least require from the...