Free Republic

WASHINGTON - Twice as many Civil War soldiers died from insect-related disease than direct combat - an obscure fact Gary Miller has discovered in his unique, decades-long hobby. Since the 1970s, Miller, 48, of Laurel, Md., has pored over books, soldiers' letters and regimental histories for insect references. He found that mosquitoes, body lice and flies were a constant nuisance to Union and Confederate soldiers. Roughly 60,000 soldiers died from malaria on the Union side alone, he said. "I think the beauty of looking at the insects is it's a topic that we all can relate to," he said. "Few...

Perhaps this duel is the most famous in history. Its results certainly meant the end of both Hamilton and Burr. They carried Hamilton from the field and the next day he died. Burr lived for years, but the shadow of his own doom was ever before him. It is reported that late in life he observed that, had he been wiser, he would have known that there was room enough in the world for both Hamilton and himself. Had Hamilton been equally wise, he would have known that calumnies and lies bring forth but bitter fruit. When the news of...

There's no physical evidence that the family who gave the Donner Party its name had anything to do with the cannibalism the ill-fated pioneers have been associated with for a century and a half, two scientists said Thursday. Cannibalism has been documented at the Sierra Nevada site where most of the Donner Party's 81 members were trapped during the brutal winter of 1846-47, but 21 people, including all the members of the George and Jacob Donner families, were stuck six miles away because a broken axle had delayed them. No cooked human bones were found among the thousands of fragments...

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IS TEACHING TRADITIONAL “HISTORY” HISTORY IN CARSON CITY’S HIGH SCHOOL? Meet Joe Enge. Joe is an award-winning, 15-year veteran history teacher in Carson City who has, among other things, written two history textbooks and served on the 1997 task force which drew up Nevada’s history standards. But according to school district administrators, he’s a “bad” teacher. You see, Joe has this crazy idea that American history should include our colonial period, as well as the Revolutionary War period. You know, where the Founding Fathers fought for independence from England and wrote the greatest governing document the world has ever...

•President Calvin Coolidge was born in Plymouth, Vt., on July 4, 1872. He is the only president born on July 4; however, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe all died on the Fourth of July. •One lucky Philadelphian purchased a $4 picture at a flea market. Behind the picture was an original 1776 printing of the Declaration of Independence. It was sold to TV producer Norman Lear for $8.1 million. •After the war, King George III rationalized that Washington would become a dictator and make the Americans yearn for royal rule. When he was told that Washington planned to...

Misquoting Our Founding Fathers    TO THE SOURCE How many times have your heard that "Our founding fathers were not Christians! They were deists!"? It is an absurd assertion. It conjures up images of clandestine gatherings in Philadelphia's Independence Hall where one by one Washington and Jefferson and Adams et al swear allegiance to some obscure deist creed and pledge to set America on the course of eradicating Biblical belief from all corners of the land. Sure some of our nation's founders were deists. Consider the grumpy pamphleteer Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason: "I do not believe in...

Jeff Head's Review of "A Patriot's History of the United States" Larry Schweikart (Freeper LS) and Michael Allen have written a history of the United States that is tremendously broad in scope, and monumental in its approach in our modern times. It begins with Christopher Columbus and proceeds through to current events, including 9-11 and its aftermath, the War on Terror and the fights in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the re-election of George W. Bush.. The work covers over 510 years of history in 825 pages. There are over 70 pages of footnotes at the end of the...

THE founding fathers were paranoid hypocrites and ungrateful malcontents. What was their cherished Declaration of Independence but empty political posturing? They groaned about the burden of taxation, but it was the English who were shouldering the real burden, paying taxes on everything from property to beer, from soap to candles, tobacco, paper, leather and beeswax. The notorious tea tax, which had so inflamed the people of Massachusetts, was only one-fourth of what the English paid at home; even Benjamin Franklin labeled the Boston Tea Party an act of piracy. Meanwhile, smugglers, with the full connivance of the colonists, were getting...

The New York Times recently ran a story about historian David Barton and his efforts to educate Americans on the religious beliefs of the Founders, titled Putting God Back into American History. The article correctly describes Mr. Barton as “a point man in a growing movement to call attention to the open Christianity of America’s great leaders and founding documents.” It appears that while the Times recognizes this movement, it does not yet understand it. Their lack of understanding results in: 1. Minimizing the movement by limiting it to “evangelical” Christians. 2.Equating the State with society and the Church with...

WASHINGTON — On a recent evening, David Barton, a leading conservative Christian advocate for emphasizing religion in American history, stood barefoot on a bench in the rotunda of the United States Capitol Building with a congressman by his side and about a hundred students from Oral Roberts University at his feet. "Isn't it interesting that we have all been trained to recognize the two least religious founding fathers?" Mr. Barton asked, pointing to Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin in a painting on the wall. "And compared to today's secularists these two guys look like a couple of Bible-thumping evangelicals!" Even...

JAMESTOWN, Va. (AP) - The Church of England has agreed to allow researchers using radar to look beneath two churches for remains that could determine whether a skeleton found at Jamestown is that of one of the colony's founders, scientists said Monday. Scientists who excavated the site of a 400-year-old fort at Jamestown want to know whether a skeleton discovered there in 2003 is that of Capt. Bartholomew Gosnold, captain of one of the three ships that carried settlers from England. To do so, they need to find the graves of Gosnold's sister and niece, who were buried in two...

BOOK REVIEW: A PATRIOT'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES By L. Schweikart and M. Allen; Publisher: Penguin, N.Y., 2004 It is refreshing to see a book like this published by a mainstream publisher. It seems that at least one mainstream publisher sees the advantage of having some balance in their list. Penguin is normally a reliable fountain of Left-wing books. Perhaps they even bored themselves in the end. The book is however on a special "Sentinel" list for specifically conservative books. Quarantining conservative books like a dangerous disease is a sort of a compliment to such books, though. It shows...

Florida Freepers: I will be appearing on WIOD, an AM radio station in Miami, Fla., on January 10, at 3:00 to discuss my new book, "A Patriot's History of the United States: From Coumubus' Great Discovery to the War on Terror." Tune in!!

The First Amendment to the Constitution forbids Congress to set up an official church; there was to be no “Church of the United States” as a branch of this country’s government. Such an alliance between Church and State is what “establishment” means. An established church is a politico-ecclesiastical structure that receives support from tax monies, advances its program by political means, and penalizes dissent. Our Constitution renounces such arrangements in toto; the Founders wrote the First Amendment into the Constitution to prevent them. The famed American jurist Joseph Story, who served on the Supreme Court from 1811 till 1845, and...

<p>This is it, Freepers! A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus' Great Discovery to the War on Terror goes on sale today!</p> <p>Freepers, if you love history, and, more important, if you think that there has been a void in the telling of America's REAL history, this book is for you.</p>

1960: WHO REALLY WON? Just shot an episode of Uncommon Knowledge, on the Electoral College, on which my guests were Tara Ross (whose new book, Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College is wonderfully cogent) and Jack Rakove, a professor of history here at Stanford. When I asked how many times the Electoral College had given chosen as president the candidate who had lost the popular vote, Tara and Jack mentioned the elections that usually get mentioned, namely those of 1876, 1888 and 2000, in which the winners of the popular vote (Tilden, Cleveland and Gore, respectively) lost the...

by Phyllis Schlafly November 3, 2004 The flap over the Department of Education consigning 300,000 copies of "Helping Your Child to Learn History" to the dumpster is evidence anew that the Federal Government should have no role in education. Illiteracy and low scores in public schools are a national scandal, but it's hard to see how federal spending improves anything. During the presidential campaign, both candidates vied with each other about how much federal money they would spend. John Kerry claimed that the Bush Administration failed to provide necessary funding for No Child Left Behind, and Bush spokesmen bragged that...

An overlooked truth about the war on terrorism, and the war in Iraq in particular, is that they both arrived too soon for the American military: before it had adequately transformed itself from a dinosaurian, Industrial Age beast to a light and lethal instrument skilled in guerrilla warfare, attuned to the local environment in the way of the 19th-century Apaches. My mention of the Apaches is deliberate. For in a world where mass infantry invasions are becoming politically and diplomatically prohibitive — even as dirty little struggles proliferate, featuring small clusters of combatants hiding out in Third World slums, deserts...