Tag: History

Commentary: Contaminating Children’s Minds and Ruining Their Future

American Greatness
Students Learning

In parts one and two of this series, we’ve examined how Democrats and their poisoned ideology have declared war on America’s children. If anyone has any doubt as to the intention of the Progressive left to poison the minds of children and ruin their future, look no further than America’s teachers’ unions, especially Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers.

Historically working in tandem with the Democrat Party, teachers’ unions are intense advocates for curriculum that does not include basic knowledge to get ahead in life. Rather than actual education, its agenda includes social justice propaganda, racial division, climate change dogma, and promotion of sexual deviancy.

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College Students Lack ‘Rudimentary’ Knowledge of History, Civics: Survey

The College Fix

College students lack a “rudimentary grasp” of American history and government, as displayed in a civic literacy assessment recently conducted by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

The 35-question survey, “Losing America’s Memory 2.0,” asked more than 3,000 students from all 50 states questions about history and government, including Senate term lengths and a quote from the Gettysburg Address, according to ACTA. The survey was conducted in June by College Pulse.

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Commentary: Making a Culture of Creation, Not Consumption

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Painter

Throughout history, humankind has excelled in being creative. I’d argue that we still do! Unfortunately, in our modern times, this natural creativity is being pushed aside in favor of our need to consume. This need is just as instinctual, of course; how could we survive if we didn’t consume water, food, sleep, or shelter? We simply have to consume the basic necessities before we can be free to produce anything else. This dichotomy of creativity and consumption is designed as a balance, and generally, it works very well.

We have a modern problem, however. Our natural need to consume has turned into a full-on culture and lifestyle, and it is being systematically progressed by sellers of all sorts. Politics, media, industry, technology, agriculture, and business advertisers everywhere have capitalized on offering us more, more, and more if we only buy their “thing.”

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Commentary: The Resurrection of Jesus Is the Most Important Event in History

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Jesus Christ

Christians around the world will commemorate the most important event in our faith’s history this Sunday, but the Resurrection of Jesus isn’t just important to those who believe a Nazarene who walked the earth 2,000 years ago is the Son of God. The secular world’s history also turns on this pivotal event, which inspired so much progress that we take for granted today.

Christianity turned the values of the Pagan Roman world upside-down. The Romans considered the early Christians subversives—many called them “atheists” because they didn’t worship any pagan gods—and put them to death for refusing to worship the emperor. After some emperors adopted the faith, Emperor Julian attempted to revive paganism, but lamented that the Christian ethic had transformed the empire.

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Commentary: One-Size-Fits-All Education Doesn’t Work Well, but Diversity Advocates Are Hitting the Accelerator

RealClearWire

There’s a world of difference in the abilities of elementary school students in the Trotwood-Madison City School District, outside Dayton, Ohio. Some low-performing fifth graders are only capable of reading first-grade picture books with basic words like dog and cat, says Angie Fugate, a district specialist focusing on gifted education. In the same classrooms, the aces read at a sixth-grade level, devouring thick novels that adults also enjoy, including the Harry Potter series.  

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National Park Service Names Oak Ridge as American World War II Heritage City

Kaitlin Housler

The National Park Service (NPS)announced Monday the designation of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as an American World War II Heritage City.

NPS’ American World War II Heritage Cities Program ”honors the contributions of local towns, cities, counties and their citizens who stepped into the workforce to support America’s war effort during World War II.”

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Commentary: A Republic if You Can Teach It

RealClearWire

President Biden has a civics lesson that he is fond of and regularly repeats. It is about how the United States is unique in the world because of the founding ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

“Unlike every other nation on Earth, we were founded based on an idea,” he notes before adding that “while we’ve never fully lived up” to those principles, “we have never given up on them.”

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Woke University of Tennessee Professors Speak Out Against ‘Divisive Concepts’ Bill

Peter D'Abrosca

Several University of Tennessee – Knoxville (UTK) professors are speaking out about the so-called “divisive concepts” bill that has taken effect in Tennessee, which they oppose. 

“Professors and faculty at universities and colleges are specially qualified to teach the classes that they teach. They need to be in charge of what goes on in their classrooms and when the legislature comes in and starts dictating what can and cannot be discussed, that disrupts the entire purpose of higher education,” UTK professor Kristina Gehrman told 10NEWS.

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Commentary: Biden Administration’s Manipulated Energy Policy Demonstrates Ignorance of History

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Consumed, as they have been, with the work of pushing revisionist woke ideology in the schools, it seems the Left missed the lesson that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. They’ve learned nothing from the past, not even the recent past. 

Yet here we are, looking at the possibility we could repeat the same mistakes Europe made in the late 90s and early 2000s when they failed to realize the real motivations behind the green energy propaganda they were being spoon fed as truth.  

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Families Can Celebrate Tennessee’s Birthday This Saturday at the Tennessee State Museum and the State Library

Kaitlin Housler

The Tennessee State Museum and Tennessee State Library & Archives will host free events Saturday where families can celebrate Tennessee’s 226th birthday.

The Statehood Day Celebration hosted by the Tennessee State Library & Archives will have live music, a children’s scavenger hunt, games, crafts, a historic photography demonstration, historical reenactments, and an open house for the Early Literacy Center at the Library & Archives.

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Commentary: The Magnificent History of the Maligned and Misunderstood Fruitcake

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Traditional fruitcake

Nothing says Christmas quite like a fruitcake – or, at the very least, a fruitcake joke.

A quip attributed to former “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson has it that “There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other.”

It’s certainly earned its reputation for longevity.

Two friends from Iowa have been exchanging the same fruitcake since the late 1950s. Even older is the fruitcake left behind in Antarctica by the explorer Robert Falcon Scott in 1910. But the honor for the oldest known existing fruitcake goes to one that was baked in 1878 when Rutherford B. Hayes was president of the United States.

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Commentary: Individual Liberty and the Rule of Law

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silhouette of Statue of Liberty

I have been looking back over Alexis de Tocqueville’s unfinished masterpiece, The Old Regime and the French Revolution. It is full of piquant observations, for example this from the end of the preface: “a man’s admiration of absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.” How much contempt do you suppose emanates from the apparatchiks who inhabit the D.C. swamp and control our lives? How slavish is their devotion to the unfettered prerogatives of the idol they serve, the state?

That dialectic between adulation of the sources of power and contempt for those subject to it may in one sense be perennial, a sentiment captured by the old Latin tag: Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris: “it is part of human nature to hate those whom you have injured.” But Tocqueville translated that psychological characteristic into the realm of politics in which the question of liberty is paramount. Like Edmund Burke, Tocqueville was a supreme anatomist of the ways in which power co-opts the passion for liberty in order to counterfeit liberty’s essence. Describing the habit of “governmental paternalism,” Tocqueville notes that “Almost all the rulers who have tried to destroy freedom have at first attempted to preserve its forms.”

This has been seen from Augustus down to our own day. Rulers flatter themselves that they can combine the moral strength given by public consent with the advantages that only absolute power can give. Almost all have failed in the enterprise, and have soon discovered that it is impossible to make the appearance of freedom last where it is no longer a reality.

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Commentary: History Will Grind Out the Truth

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“History will figure that out on its own.” That is what Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) recently replied to Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  

In a heated congressional exchange, Fauci derided the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic was due to the leak of a dangerous virus, engineered in the Chinese Wuhan virology lab—and in part funded by U.S. health agencies, on the prompt of Fauci himself.  

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Newt Gingrich Commentary: General Lee and the Importance of Preserving American History

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Earlier this month, a 21-foot-tall bronze statue of Robert E. Lee — perhaps the most famous monument to the Confederate general — was removed from Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va. Supporters of the statue’s removal, including Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D), hailed the event as a triumph for racial justice.

The left has decided that Lee, the most recognized and celebrated figure of the Confederacy, is intolerable, a man who should be erased from American history. This maelstrom surrounding Lee has reached a fever pitch in recent years, as the woke movement has grown.

In short, anyone who dares mention Lee at all better demonize him as pure evil or else face the wrath of the progressive mob. This is retroactively imposing cancel culture on the past, while silencing free speech today.
In this context, Allen Guelzo’s newly released biography on the Confederate general, Robert E. Lee: A Life, is especially welcome and important.

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Students Think 9/11 Lessons Should Omit ‘Gruesome’ Details, ‘Avoid Placing Blame’

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The Virginia Department of Education recently posted a video on their YouTube Channel telling teachers to avoid talking about American exceptionalism while teaching about September 11, 2001.

Campus Reform reporter Ophelie Jacobson talked with University of Florida students about this video to see how students think 9/11 should be taught in the classroom.

Suggestions for lesson plans included keeping “gruesome” facts out of lesson plans  avoiding discussion of who was responsible for the attacks.

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Commentary: Politically Correct Ideology Is Masking and Contributing to the Widespread Failure of Our Institutions

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close up of green masks on a table

We know the nature of mass hysterias in history, and how they can overwhelm and paralyze what seem to be stable societies.  

We know the roots and origins of the cult of wokeness.  

And we know, too, how such insanity—from the Salem witch trials to Jacobinism to McCarthyism—can spread, despite alienating most of the population, through fear and the threat of personal ruin or worse. These are the dark sides of the tulip, hula-hoop, and pet-rock fads, the mass obsessions so suited to past affluent Western societies.  

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Commentary: Historians Selling Out for Leftist Star, Nikole Hannah-Jones

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Nikole Hannah-Jones

The University of North Carolina’s decision on June 30 to offer tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones came about through a torrent of threats (often tweeted), profanities, doxxings, and assaults—tactics that have become increasingly commonplace among professional activists and racial grievance-mongers.

Hannah-Jones, of course, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning opinion writer and architect of the New York Times’ notorious “1619 Project,” which claims that America’s true founding was not in 1776 but rather in 1619, when 20 or so African slaves arrived in Virginia. Hannah-Jones contends, moreover, that the American War of Independence was fought solely to preserve slavery. 

More than two-dozen credible historians, many of them political liberals and leftists, have debunked Hannah-Jones’ claims. Though, as we’ll see, some are less firm in their convictions than others. What’s clear, however, is that peer review is passé in the era of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Forget a stellar record of scholarly accomplishment—that’s a relic of “Eurocentrism.” Far more important these days is a candidate’s enthusiasm for social justice. It was Hannah-Jones’ celebrity activism and her “journalism,” not her scholarship, that formed the basis for the university’s initial offer of tenure earlier in the spring.

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Commentary: White Privilege and the Layers of False Ideology that Support Its Concept

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Group of kids playing with a rainbow parachute cloth in a field

White privilege is a myth. A relic of a time that no longer exists and that none of us living and raising kids today have ever really experienced. There was once a time when legal and cultural advantages were offered to whites, but those days are gone and pretending otherwise is causing great damage to children and our society.

White Privilege Talk Harms Children Psychologically

White privilege is a concept which hurts both white and non-white children, albeit in different ways. For white children, you steal from them the ability to feel pride in who they are, their ancestors, and in their cultural inheritance. Certainly every nation and people can find stains in its history. The past was a violent and merciless place in which all sides are implicated.

White privilege requires that children of European descent are never allowed to feel deserving of what they, their parents, or their ancestors have achieved. They are never allowed to believe that they have rightfully earned anything. Consequently, they are pressured to actively give up what is theirs in penitence. This is obviously damaging and abusive for a child to endure.

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75 Florida Teachers Sign Petition Vowing to Defy Critical Race Theory Ban

Peter D'Abrosca

As The Tennessee Star reported, the Zinn Education Project,  a nonprofit that pushes social justice curriculum in schools, released a petition signed by more than 5000 teachers nationwide who vow to continue to teach Critical Race Theory, even if it’s banned in their schools. 

“Lawmakers in at least 21 states are attempting to pass legislation that would require teachers to lie to students about the role of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and oppression throughout U.S. history,” the petition says.

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Commentary: The Massive Pushback Brewing Against the Progressive Left Could Dwarf the Tea Party Sea Change of 2010

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Joe Biden and Donald Trump

Victimizers quickly becoming victims is a recurrent theme of Thucydides’ history. In his commentary on the so-called stasis at Corcyra, he offers his most explicit warning about the long-term dangers of destroying legal institutions, customs, and traditions that serve the common good for short-term gain. 

The historian notes that in the inevitable yin and yang of politics, the destroyers inevitably will seek, but do so in vain, refuge in what they have destroyed. Between 2017 and 2021 the Left has done exactly that. 

What was common to the media’s deification of the criminally minded Michael Avenatti, and the promotion of a series of abject hoaxes? Do we remember the Steele “dossier,” the supposed authority of Fusion-GPS, the Schiff “report,” and the entire Russian “collusion” yarn? 

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Commentary: The U.S. Needs Measured Confrontation with China

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Policeman holding a rifle - in uniform

With the election of Joe Biden, there is increasing pressure for the United States to accommodate the global ambitions of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Such a policy will weaken the strategic position of the United States and embolden the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which seeks to transform the rules of international politics, and has demonstrated its willingness to employ coercive measures, including threats and open conflict, to achieve its aims. 

As it has done for decades, and does so now with the Biden Administration, the CCP makes appeals for accommodation while emphasizing the need to turn away from more confrontational policies, like those most recently advanced by the Trump Administration. And as always, China’s words must be seen as tactical measures it deploys in pursuit of its objectives. Thus, it is only a matter of time before attempts to cooperate with China fail. However tempting, accommodation will not succeed for the stark reason that China does not want it. 

Party Chairman Xi Jinping has made clear that what China seeks is world hegemony. And it is upon the pursuit of this hegemony that his power in the regime depends. 

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Newt Gingrich Commentary: Reclaiming the Spirit of Independence Day

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Planes in the sky letting off red, white and blue smoke

On Independence Day we reflect together as a nation on a remarkable moment in history 244 years ago, when 56 men from 13 colonies gathered in Philadelphia to sign the Declaration of Independence. There, our founders declared with one voice: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This act of political and moral courage changed the world forever. Since 1776, the values and ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution have been exported to democracies around the globe and have lifted millions of people out of tyranny, poverty, and oppression.

Unfortunately, some in America seek to diminish America’s founding, rewrite our history, and invalidate the spirit of independence which led our founders to create the greatest, freest, and most prosperous nation on Earth.

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Commentary: Recent History Suggests FBI Involvement in January 6

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Remember Christopher Steele?

The author of the infamous 2016 “dossier” was an impeccably credentialed former British intelligence officer who, we were assured, had the goods on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. Nearly every major news and opinion outlet vouched for his reputation and reliable sources inside the Kremlin.

Steele frequently was described as an “ex-spy” in charge of a well-respected global consulting firm in London; he was alternatively a victim of Trump’s public taunts and a hero willing to risk his life and reputation to spare America the election of a Putin puppet.

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Commentary: What Greek Epics and Their Teachings on the Special Relationship Between Fathers and Sons

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Greek statue of man's face

Father’s Day inspires mixed emotions for many of us. Looking at advertisements of happy families could recall difficult memories and broken relationships for some. But for others, the day could invite unbidden nostalgic thoughts of parents who have long since died.

As a scholar of ancient Greek poetry, I find myself reflecting on two of the most powerful paternal moments in Greek literature. At the end of Homer’s classic poem, “The Iliad,” Priam, the king of Troy, begs his son’s killer, Achilles, to return the body of Hektor, the city’s greatest warrior, for burial. Once Achilles puts aside his famous rage and agrees, the two weep together before sharing a meal, Priam lamenting the loss of his son while Achilles contemplates that he will never see his own father again.

The final book of another Greek classic, “The Odyssey,” brings together a father and son as well. After 10 years of war and as many traveling at sea, Odysseus returns home and goes through a series of reunions, ending with his father, Laertes. When Odysseus meets his father, however, he doesn’t greet him right away. Instead, he pretends to be someone who met Odysseus and lies about his location.

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Donald Trump Commentary: A Plan to Get Divisive and Radical Theories Out of Our Schools

RealClearWire
Teacher holding book, reading to boy student

As a candidate, Joe Biden’s number one promise was to “unite” America. Yet in his first months as president, his number one priority has been to divide our country by race and gender at every turn.

There is no clearer example than the Biden administration’s new effort aimed at indoctrinating America’s schoolchildren with some of the most toxic and anti-American theories ever conceived. It is vital for Americans to understand what this initiative would do, what drives it and, most importantly, how we can stop it.

For decades, the America-blaming left has been relentlessly pushing a vision of America that casts our history, culture, traditions, and founding documents in the most negative possible light. Yet in recent years, this deeply unnatural effort has progressed from telling children that their history is evil to telling Americans that they are evil.

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Commentary: America’s Civics and History Class Failures

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Six former U.S. education secretaries, who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents, are sounding the alarm about the grave danger our constitutional democracy faces. Years of political polarization have culminated in riots in our cities spanning months, along with the storming of the U.S. Capitol. These events point to a root cause of our plight: our failure to provide sound civics and history teaching in America’s K-12 schools.

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Commentary: A History Lesson for Democrat List Makers and Election Thieves

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As we noted in our recent column Democrat Socialists Are Coming For You, the Left has begun to make lists of supporters of President Trump and the MAGA movement with the intention of driving all those whom they can identify out of the public square and depriving them of employment, education and other societal benefits.

The latest examples of this Democrat system of oppression are the targeting of lawyers representing President Trump and a petition being circulated at Harvard University demanding that former Trump administration officials be prohibited from attending, teaching or speaking at the university.

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Commentary: As Americas Culture Suicides-By-Woke, a New Dark Age Looms

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by Victor Davis Hanson   In February, New York was the world’s most dynamic metropolis. By August, the city was more like the ruins of Ephesus. It is not all that hard to blow up a culture. You can do it in a summer if you haven’t much worry about others. When you loot and burn a Target in an hour, it takes months to realize there are no more neighborhood Target-stocked groceries, toilet paper, and Advil to buy this winter. You can in a night assault the police, spit at them, hope to infect them with the coronavirus, and even burn them alive. But when you call 911 in a few weeks after your car is vandalized, your wallet is stolen, and your spouse is violent, and no one comes, only then do you sense that you earlier were voting for a pre-civilized wilderness. You can burn down a Burger King in half an hour. But it will take years to find anyone at Burger King, Inc., who would ever be dumb enough to rebuild atop the charred ruins – to prepare for the next round of arson in 2021 or 2023. Today’s looter carrying off sneakers and smartphones in 10 years will be tomorrow’s…

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Leahy and Carmichael Talk About the History of Statues Calling for Public Discussion and Not Mob Rule

Julie Carr

  Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. –  host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist, Crom Carmichael in the studio. During the third hour, Leahy and Carmichael discussed the history of statues in Tennessee and how some of those well-known figures represent slavery yet later in their lives made amends. The duo agreed that the purpose of statues and public art is there to remind us of our history and that legislative and public discussions would be the best way to convene decisions and not mob rule. (Amazing Grace plays) Leahy: John Newton was a slave trader in 18th century England. He was captain of a slave ship. There is a statue of him in Ireland. Should that statue be torn down because in the 18th century he was a slave trader? Carmichael: Well, according to the left it should absolutely be torn down. Leahy: The thing about John Newton is he had a conversion experience after he was a slave trader. After he was a captain of slave ships and realized that it was absolutely…

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Leahy and Benson: Seattle’s New Math Curriculum Tied to Ethnic Studies Citing Origin, Identity, and Agency

Julie Carr

Live from music row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 am to 8:00 am – Leahy was joined on the newsmakers line by former public education teacher and author of Can America’s Schools Be Saved, Edwin Benson to discuss Seattle’s current public school curriculum which somehow manages to correlate ethnic studies with mathematics. 

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Carol Swain Talks to Leahy About the Problems in Public Education and Societies Lack of History and Civic Knowledge

Julie Carr

During a specific discussion Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 am to 8:00 am –Leahy spoke with in-studio guest and former Mayoral candidate Dr. Carol Swain about public education issues and Obama’s 2014 executive order called restorative justice through a document issued by his Department of Education (Guiding Principles: A Resource Guide for Improving School Climate and Discipline). This allowed for more often than naught black students to remain in the classroom despite high levels of discipline problems. The program also added those of disabilities to its initiative.

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Commentary: How Twitter Is Corrupting the History Profession

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About a week ago I began scrutinizing how the New York Times’ 1619 Project relied upon the work of the controversial “New History of Capitalism” genre of historical scholarship to advance a sweeping indictment of free markets over the historical evils of slavery. The problems with this literature are many, and prominent among them is its use of shoddy statistical work by Cornell University historian Ed Baptist to grossly exaggerate the historical effect of slave-produced cotton on American economic development. Baptist’s unusual rehabilitation of the old Confederacy-linked “King Cotton” thesis is unsupported by evidence and widely rejected by economic historians. His book The Half Has Never Been Told has nonetheless acquired a vocal following among historians and journalists, including providing the basis of a feature article in the Times series on slavery.

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The Human History of Counting and Numbers

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by Peter Schumer   The history of math is murky, predating any written records. When did humans first grasp the basic concept of a number? What about size and magnitude, or form and shape? In my math history courses and my research travels in Guatemala, Egypt and Japan, I’ve been especially interested in the commonality and differences of mathematics from various cultures. Although no one knows math’s exact origins, modern mathematicians like myself know that spoken language precedes written language by scores of millennia. Linguistic clues show how people around the world must have first developed mathematical thought. Early clues Differences are easier to comprehend than similarities. The ability to distinguish more versus less, male versus female or short versus tall must be very ancient concepts. But the concept of different objects sharing a common attribute – such as being green or round or the idea that a single rabbit, a solitary bird and one moon all share the attribute of uniqueness – is far subtler. In English, there are many different words for two, like “duo,” “pair” and “couple,” as well as very particular phrases such as “team of horses” or “brace of partridge.” This suggests that the mathematical concept…

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The Humble Origins of Silent Night

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by Sarah Eyerly   One of the world’s most famous Christmas carols, “Silent Night,” celebrates its 200th anniversary this year. Over the centuries, hundreds of Christmas carols have been composed. Many fall quickly into obscurity. Not “Silent Night.” Translated into at least 300 languages, designated by UNESCO as a treasured item of Intangible Cultural Heritage, and arranged in dozens of different musical styles, from heavy metal to gospel, “Silent Night” has become a perennial part of the Christmas soundscape. Its origins – in a small Alpine town in the Austrian countryside – were far humbler. As a musicologist who studies historical traditions of song, the story of “Silent Night” and its meteoric rise to worldwide fame has always fascinated me. Fallout from war and famine The song’s lyrics were originally written in German just after the end of the Napoleonic Wars by a young Austrian priest named Joseph Mohr. In the fall of 1816, Mohr’s congregation in the town of Mariapfarr was reeling. Twelve years of war had decimated the country’s political and social infrastructure. Meanwhile, the previous year – one historians would later dub “The Year Without a Summer” – had been catastrophically cold. The eruption of Indonesia’s Mount…

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Commentary: The Fight Being Waged on the Academic Battlefield

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By Garland Tucker   The violent events in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 have fueled a deep-seated leftist desire to re-write American history. Demands to topple statues, remove portraits, rename buildings, and repudiate founders—all in an effort to cleanse any objectionable reality from our history—have reached a fever pitch. The parallel to George Orwell’s 1984 is unmistakable. Orwell wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future, and who controls the present controls the past.” College campuses, including Yale, Brown, Harvard, Williams, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke, etc., have become battlefields. Consider recent events at my college alma mater, Washington & Lee University. Founded in 1749, W&L has a history that is longer than most American colleges and as rich as any. Established as Augusta Academy on what was then the western frontier of colonial America, the school was elevated from obscurity in 1796 by a gift from General George Washington. The name was promptly changed to Washington College and it survived as a provincial, liberal arts college until the outbreak of the Civil War. With the war-torn devastation of the Shenandoah Valley, Washington College was threatened with imminent extinction in 1865. Shortly after Appomattox, in an inspired…

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The History Russians and Communists Want Us to Forget

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by Jarrett Stepman   The Soviet Union did not free the world of tyranny in World War II. It merely helped defeat one evil while ruthlessly attempting to supplant it with another one. But you wouldn’t know that from reading an Associated Press article from early September. The Associated Press originally stated that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were “allies” at the beginning of World War II. It then issued the following correction:  … In 1939, despite sharp ideological differences, the two powers entered into a non-aggression pact that paved the way for them to carve up Poland and for the Soviet Union to take the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. That pact was never formally recognized as an alliance, and in 1941 Germany attacked the Soviet Union. It’s noteworthy that according to Haaretz, this correction took place after Russia put pressure on the publication. The Daily Signal reached out to AP about the correction, but it didn’t respond to the request for comment. The truth is that the USSR and Nazi Germany were functionally allies in the early stages of World War II, as historian Timothy Snyder explained in his book “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.” The “sharp ideological differences”…

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