Free Republic

1 January. The first surprise was not their arrival. The radio messages had begun weeks before, announcing that one thousand ships from a star far out in space would land on 1 January 2000, in harbors along the Atlantic coast from Cape Cod to North Carolina. Well before dawn on that day, millions of people across North America had wakened early to witness the moment the ships entered Earth's atmosphere. However expected, to the watchers, children of the electronic age, the spaceships' approach was as awesome as had been that earlier one of three ships, one October over five hundred...

In the spring of 1991, Barack Obama, then the president of the Harvard Law Review, spoke at a rally in favor of Professor Derrick Bell and his push for greater diversity on the law school faculty, video footage that has been licensed by the website BuzzFeed from Boston television station WGBH: The context of the video: Bell was the first black professor to sit on the law school faculty. As David Remnick wrote in his Obama biography “The Bridge,” “Derrick Bell was, in Barack Obama’s time, the most vivid symbol of racial politics at Harvard Law School…In 1962, Bell helped...