Free Republic

The [British] National Archives (BNA) is an executive agency of the government of the United Kingdom. Based in Kew in southwest London, the BNA is the UK government’s official archive, containing 1,000 years of history from Domesday Book to the present, with records from parchment and paper scrolls to digital files and archived websites, including Foreign Office and Colonial Office correspondence and files. The collections held by the BNA can be searched using their online catalogue. Entrance to the Archives is free. On April 18, 2012, the BNA released the first batch of thousands of “lost” colonial-era files believed to...

Back in the mid-1990s, I lived in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. My wife was a medical student at the University of Chicago and I worked as a newspaper reporter. I didn't know it, but also living in Hyde Park a few blocks away was a fellow just a couple years older than me named Barack Obama. At the time, he was a part-time lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, and I'm sure that at one time or another we crossed paths. I had no idea who he was, and unless he was a regular reader of the Chicago...