Free Republic

The legend of fat, matronly Ma Barker and her four gangster sons. J. Edgar Hoover called Ma a "beast of prey", but many historians believe that Ma only cared for her sons and committed no crimes herself.

“Debunking military tactics used on the battlefield of Ukraine. To do so, I will also do a historical comparison by looking into the Korean War and the Iran-Iraq War.”

Here is my question. Was the North intending to end slavery to make growing cotton in the South untenable for the plantation owners in order to bankrupt them so that the Northern Textile barons could take over the land? I know the South seceded because the North was trying to end slavery, which would have raised the cost of growing cotton because the plantation would now have to pay wages, instead of trading labour for bodily needs. This likely was not an affordable option for the landowners, because the North was not going to pay a penny more for cotton...

At 6:30 p.m. on Thursday December 16, 1773, a group of between 100 and 150 Americans raided three East India Company merchantmen moored in Boston and threw 92,000 lb of tea (worth $1.7 million in today’s terms) into the harbor. A central part of the American founding story, the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party is being commemorated this month as a key moment when patriotic Americans fought back against the greedy British and their oppressive taxation policies that forced up prices on commodities such as tea, which in turn led to the American Revolution. But the truth is...

20,000 Boer Children Died in Concentration Camps, Boer War, 1899-1901. Very many victims of the February 1945 Dresden Firestorm were not German Citizens, They were Women and Children fleeing the Russians. These issues bear on the current conflicts. You can argue about "justification", but not about whether or not this happened. "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts", asserted the late NY Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.) The first modern instance of targeting civilians as pawns of war, came during the Boer War, when the families of the very tough guerilla fighters from among the Boer...

Pictures were colorized and enhanced using AI optimization software. For the audio, I remastered it using noise gate, compression, loudness normalization, EQ and a Limiter. Julius Franklin Howell (January 17, 1846 - June 19, 1948) joined the Confederate Army when he was 16. After surviving a few battles, he eventually found himself in a Union prison camp at Point Lookout, Maryland. In 1947, at the age of 101, Howell made this recording at the Library of Congress. Our new music channel - Life in the Music: Classic Collections 2-hour videos of music from the 1600s-1900s https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC24p... Audio has been restored...

SUFFOLK — Russell E. Darden’s great-great-uncle Julius first reached out to him about 20 years ago, when a sudden stiff breeze blew through an old house in Southampton County. Darden, a Civil War buff and a historian, was visiting an elderly friend, a man whose father had served in the war. He remembers looking up, startled, as a bedroom door blew open in the wind. On the back, framed in plastic, were photos of soldiers in Confederate uniforms. Darden didn’t know it then, but the breeze had pushed open a door to his family’s past. Several months later, with the...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky refused peace talks with Russia just days prior to the war, according to reports.Zelensky's adamant refusal to accept German-brokered peace talks with Russia, which ultimately resulted in large-scale killings and massive destruction in Ukraine, has earned him brickbats from people across the globe.As per the report published in the Wall Street Journal, it is evident that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had extended an offer for peace days before Russia launched the attack on Ukraine but the Ukrainian President did not pay any heed.

For some time I have wondered how to explain the cause of the Civil War in simple terms that are easy to understand. I now see that Ayn Rand did it years ago. Laws passed by a Northern controlled Congress routed all the money produced by the South into Northern "elite" pockets.

Julius Franklin Howell (January 17, 1846 - June 19, 1948) joined the Confederate Army when he was 16. After surviving a few battles, he eventually found himself in a Union prison camp at Point Lookout, Maryland. In 1947, at the age of 101, Howell made this recording at the Library of Congress. Audio has been restored for clarity.

Recording made in 1947 when he was 101 years old as an oral history of the American Civil War, (or the War Between the States, as it is known in South). This man joined the 24th Virginia Calvary in 1862 at the age of 16 and and half. He was eventually taken prisoner in the Spring of 1965 at what must have been the Battle of Hillsman's House since her refers to Gen. Ewell's surrender. He was held at Point Lookout, Maryland until the end of the war. He is quite emphatic that the South didn't fight for "the preservation...

Conventional wisdom of the moment tells us that the great war of 1861—1865 was “about” slavery or was “caused by” slavery. I submit that this is not a historical judgment but a political slogan. What a war is about has many answers according to the varied perspectives of different participants and of those who come after. To limit so vast an event as that war to one cause is to show contempt for the complexities of history as a quest for the understanding of human action. Two generations ago, most perceptive historians, much more learned than the current crop, said...

The Civil War is, as Shelby Foote noted, at the crossroads of our being. Looked at one way, it marked the end of a long struggle against slavery and the beginning of a long one for civil rights and racial equality. Looked at another, it marked the end of limited government and the beginning of the encroaching, ever-present Leviathan that exists today. These memories can be both in sync and in conflict. After all, it was the deployment of strong government in the form of a dominant army and the passage of federal amendments that played a large role in...

Science is the systematic application of a logico-empiricist method to look at and understand things, and was born in Christian Europe first with the Scholastic philosophy and then with Leonardo da Vinci, Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei. The necessary foundation for scientific research is the belief in one God that created a universe regulated by immutable laws which can be understood by man exactly because God's mind and man's are similar except in extent. The Christian God is a person. Galileo famously talked about the "book of nature", that scientists try to read, being written by God. This is possible...

The two most ardent boosters of the Normandy invasion were Stalin and Harry Hopkins ... Churchill famously urged that the advance on Germany continue from already-won bases in Italy and elsewhere in south-central Europe. Stalin’s demand for the big U.S.-British push in northern France, however, prevailed. According to the tally of one peeved letter to the editor in the New York Times, this would put the Allies on track to open their ninth front. Of course, in order to gather sufficient forces for the June 1944 D-Day invasion, men and equipment, particularly landing craft, had to be withdrawn from the...

A Conversation with Thomas Fleming, historian and author of A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War.Thomas Fleming is known for his provocative, politically incorrect, and very accessible histories that challenge many of the clichés of current American history books. Fleming is a revisionist in the best conservative sense of the word. His challenges to accepted wisdom are not with an agenda, but with a relentless hunger for the truth and a passion to present the past as it really was, along with capturing the attitudes and culture of the times. In...

"In dealing with Mr. Buchanan, one must accept at the beginning two caveats. First, as is his style, he will always resort to ad hominem attacks in lieu of an argument." "[I} was appalled by his absence of logic..."

So asks Newsweek's cover, which features a full-length photo of the prime minister his people voted the greatest Briton of them all. Quite a tribute, when one realizes Churchill's career coincides with the collapse of the British empire and the fall of his nation from world pre-eminence to third-rate power. That the Newsweek cover was sparked by my book "Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War" seems apparent, as one of the three essays, by Christopher Hitchens, was a scathing review. Though in places complimentary, Hitchens charmingly concludes: This book "stinks." Understandable. No Brit can easily concede my central thesis: The...

The South is rising again. Before I go any further, let me clarify. Sadly, too many in our country possess the superficial and ignorant perception that the only impetus behind southern secession was to perpetuate the abhorrent practice of slavery. Therefore, when they hear such a phrase, their kneejerk reaction tells them this must be about race. I assure you, it’s not. When the North invaded the South during the 1860s, it was to deny the southern states the ultimate expression of their sovereignty – the ability to withdraw from a union they had voluntarily joined.

What I think about secession basically is that it is a consummation devoutly to be wished, but a dangerous pursuit to advocate publicly. Janet Napolitano and the alphabet soup guys do not take kindly to the notion of freedom in any way, and for the precise reason that Abraham Lincoln did not. When asked why he didn’t just let the South go, Lincoln exploded in a rage, “Let the South go? LET THE SOUTH GO? How, then, should I fill my coffers?” Documented historical fact. Look it up for yourselves. Winners write history and the North/Leftists have had nearly 160...