Free Republic

Germans are America’s big ethnic secret. No people and no culture has contributed more to what the United States is and is becoming. In the nation’s ethnic tangle, no root runs deeper than German America. As a scattered community only fitfully conscious of its own existence, none has more successfully pursued wealth, power and intellectual influence. And as a philosophical force in US politics — a whole political mindset — none has greater potency. Germany as a European state may have lost her way, the German language may struggle to keep its world grip, but the German spirit is alive...

The big chill freezing relations between the US and France has reached America's most Gallic city, New Orleans, otherwise known as the Big Easy. A statue of Joan of Arc gazes at the Mississippi and the French Quarter is still festooned with tricolours and fleur de lys flags but the malaise afflicting the two nations has even spread to the bicentennial celebration of their common past. A lavish exhibition marking one of the most important events in their joint history, the Louisiana Purchase, is drawing large crowds but its organisers at one stage feared that bad feeling over Iraq would...

Posted on Thu, Apr. 24, 2003 Nickel Makeover to Commemorate 2 Events REBECCA CARROLL Associated Press WASHINGTON -The nickel is getting a makeover. The back side of the new 5-cent coin will commemorate the bicentennial of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase and the 1804-06 Lewis and Clark expedition. The U.S. Mint hopes to issue the nickels late this year or in early 2004. In 2006, nickels will return to a depiction of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's Virginia home, although the image will not necessarily replicate the version on today's coin. Lawmakers from Virginia pushed for and received assurance that the coin design...