Free Republic

The American Ornithological Society says it will alter the names of North American birds named after humans, starting with up to 80 of them After two years of discussion and debate, the nation’s premier birding organization has decided that birds should not have human names. The American Ornithological Society announced Wednesday that it will remove names given to North American birds in honor of people and replace them with monikers that better describe their plumage and other characteristics. The group said it will prioritize birds whose names trace to enslavers, white supremacists and robbers of Indigenous graves. Among them is...

A task force surely composed of college graduates (aka Marxists) has attacked America’s Founders, ideas, and architecture. The National Archives and Records Administration (“NARA”), unofficially founded along with America but officially founded in 1934, exists to preserve historic American records and document government activities. Sadly, it’s currently staffed with hardcore Marxists who hate America, both its history and its current configuration. That is the only conclusion one can draw from an NARA task force report saying that NARA, is structurally racist, from the reverence shown for those who created this nation to the architecture of the classical NARA building. Here’s...

The San Francisco school board is accused of basing its decision to strip the historical names of 44 public schools off of "casual Google searches". ...The report links directly to the Zoom meetings of the renaming committee, and to its spreadsheet, where the Wikipedia entries justifying the committee’s actions are cited. ...James Lick, the wealthiest man in California when he died in 1876, got the boot because the committee disliked his funding of a sculpture depicting a prostrate Indian at the feet of white men. Nobody apparently read the article, however, because it clearly noted that Lick underwrote the sculpture...

Two German WWII tombstones at a Texas veterans cemetery — each bearing Nazi swastikas — have been removed and replaced with new ones that do not use the symbol. The 1943 gravestones belonging to German prisoners of war Alfred Kafka and Georg Forst at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery featured an Iron Cross with a swastika in the middle, and the phrase, “He died far from his home for the Leader (Führer), people and fatherland.” Cemetary workers removed the stones on Wednesday.

PITTSBURGH — The Pittsburgh Art Commission voted Wednesday to recommend the Stephen Foster statue in Oakland be removed. The recommendation is that the statue is removed from the public and placed in a place in private and "properly contextualized." The Pittsburgh Art Commission will recommend removal of the statue within six months. Foster, a Pittsburgh native who died in 1864, is famous for classic songs including “Oh! Susanna” and “Camptown Races.” Many of his songs were used in minstrel shows in which actors performed in blackface. The statue depicts Foster sitting above shoeless, banjo-playing “Uncle Ned,” a slave character from...

There's a massive amount of commentary today on the drive to remove monuments related to the Confederacy. Statues of generals, political leaders, and prominent citizens during that period in history are coming down all over the South following the violence in Charlottesville. Monuments that remind local citizens of their ancestors who died in the Civil War are also being removed. In truth, Charlottesville is an excuse to do what activists have wanted to do for decades; remove every last reminder that there was, at one time, an independent nation on the American continent based on the idea that humans could...

Nothing like a little crap on your comix page. See it at the source link above.

As Assyrian Christians were celebrating Easter Sunday, militants from the Islamic State blew up the 80-year-old church of the Virgin Mary in Tal Nasri village in the western countryside of Hasaka province, in northeastern Syria.

"Look at our history. We are Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea, pioneers who braved the unfamiliar, followed by a stampede of farmers and miners, and entrepreneurs and hucksters. That’s our spirit. That’s who we are.

The New York Times has been accused of bias by conservative US media after cropping George W Bush and his wife Laura out of its front-page image of the Selma anniversary march. The former Republican president took part in Saturday's march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama to mark 50 years since one of the bloodiest episodes in America's civil rights movement. But the photograph on the front page of Sunday's New York Times, which showed Barack and Michelle Obama leading the anniversary march, appeared to cut the Bushes from the right-hand side of the image.

The latest version of a top-selling study guide for the Advanced Placement European History exam explains the French Revolution with a chart which identifies Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as a fascist and pairs him with the Ku Klux Klan.“Barron’s AP European History” (7th edition) makes the claim, intended for consumption by American high school students, on page 168. The chart attempts to compare modern American political affiliations with the various factions involved in the French Revolution. The chart moves politically from left to right.The far right of the chart is labeled “fascist.” The authors demonstrate modern-day “fascists” by pairing “Clarence...

How reliable is academic research? Not very it seems, after noting that the Journal of Vibration and Control, a reputable academic publication, had to retract 60 different papers over the summer. The editors concluded that Chen-Yuan Chen, a researcher in Taiwan, had created a “peer-review and citation ring.” OK, it’s not exactly a “Sopranos” plot. But it’s pretty shady for the world of higher education. Chen went to great lengths to make up fake e-mail addresses and even assume the names of other scientists to write approvingly of his own research. In a sense, though, he was just exploiting the...

A number of center-right and New Media outlets have noted Politico Magazine's disingenuousness in the opening photograph in its "Race and the Modern GOP" article. At the item's top is the iconic "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door" photo showing onetime segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace "try(ing) to block the entry of two black students" into the University of Alabama. The aforementioned article title appears beneath the words "History Dept." The magazine is clearly trying to lead anyone not old enough to remember or anyone unfamiliar with U.S. history to believe that Wallace, who ran for president as a Democrat in...

School’s back — and so is the liberal agenda! Across the country, parents and lawmakers are up in arms about an honors curriculum that gives new meaning to the phrase “history in the making.” The 95-page outline is so agenda-driven, educators complain, that basic U.S. facts are either distorted — or worse, omitted altogether. The College Board’s proposal is a study in liberal indoctrination — so much so that the Republican National Committee (RNC) formally opposed the idea in August. In a vote, the RNC concluded that the Advanced Placement (AP) curriculum is a “radical revisionist view” of America’s greatest...

California history textbooks will now be asked to cover "the significance of President Barack Obama's election," under a law signed this week by Gov. Jerry Brown. requires California's Instructional Quality Commission "to consider including, and recommending for adoption by the state board, instruction on the election of President Barack Obama and the significance of the United States electing its first African American President, as appropriate." The author, Democratic Assemblyman Chris Holden, said in a statement: "We want to make sure that future generations understand that the election of our nation's first African American president was a historic step in the...

Saturday marks the 66th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima – devastating acts that helped bring World War Two to a close. (Three days after Hiroshima, Nagasaki was similarly battered). The attacks – the only time nuclear weapons have ever been used in world history to date – killed tens of thousands of people and shocked the planet with the scale of their destruction. There has been much controversy over the decision to bomb Japan and some speculation that it might have been racially motivated (given that the U.S. military did not drop such weapons on European civilian targets)....

...Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a stalwart believer that global warming is a “hoax,” dismissed the report as a publicity stunt. Perhaps the senator needs a history lesson, because climate change has been leading to global conflict — and even the collapse of civilizations — for more than 3,000 years. Drought and famine led to internal rebellions in some societies and the sacking of others, as people fleeing hardship at home became conquerors abroad. One of the most vivid examples comes from around 1200 B.C. A centuries-long drought in...

A faded fragment of papyrus known as the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” which caused an uproar when unveiled by a Harvard Divinity School historian in 2012, has been tested by scientists who conclude in a journal published on Thursday that the ink and papyrus are very likely ancient, and not a modern forgery. Skepticism about the tiny scrap of papyrus has been fierce because it contained a phrase never before seen in any piece of Scripture: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife...’ ” Too convenient for some, it also contained the words “she will be able to be my disciple,”...

Women make up only 9% of Wikipedia editors. Educators say raising that number is key to improving the online encyclopaedia, and have started campaigns to do just that. At the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Depression-era artist Natalie Smith Henry's vivid depiction of a farm family hangs high on the wall. But until recently, Henry didn't exist, at least not according to Wikipedia. Then Chelsea Tufarolo, a student at American University, decided to write her an article about her. It was Tufarolo's first post on the world's largest knowledge-sharing resource. Editors and activists are trying to address the root of what...

I don't normally care what a person believes when it comes to one's faith, well I do but I don't argue with them. Last night though .. I was outraged! Am I the only one to have heard the program?