William Mack Lee – Body Servant of General Robert E. Lee

He stayed with General Lee throughout the war and until the day Lee died in 1870. Mack said of General Lee after his death “I was raised by one of the greatest men in the world. There was never one born of a woman greater than General Robert E. Lee, according to my judgment. All of his servants were set free ten years before the war, but all remained on the plantation until after the surrender.”

General Lee left Mack $360 in his will, which Mack used to go to school and started 14 churches. He became an ordained Missionary Baptist minister in Washington, DC

The Moral Judgments of Henry David Thoreau

Why, given its fabrications, inconsistencies, and myopia, do we continue to cherish “Walden?

An illustration of Henry David Thoreau in a pond: Why, given his hypocrisy, sanctimony, and misanthropy, has Thoreau been so cherished? – Illustration by Eric Nyquist

In the evening of October 6, 1849, the hundred and twenty people aboard the brig St. John threw a party. The St. John was a so-called famine ship: Boston-bound from Galway, it was filled with passengers fleeing the mass starvation then devastating Ireland. They had been at sea for a month; now, with less than a day’s sail remaining, they celebrated the imminent end of their journey and, they hoped, the beginning of a better life in America. Early the next morning, the ship was caught in a northeaster, driven toward shore, and dashed upon the rocks just outside Cohasset Harbor. Those on deck were swept overboard. Those below deck drowned when the hull smashed open. Within an hour, the ship had broken up entirely. All but nine crew members and roughly a dozen passengers perished.

Two days later, a thirty-two-year-old Massachusetts native, en route from Concord to Cape Cod, got word of the disaster and detoured to Cohasset to see it for himself. When he arrived, fragments of the wreck were scattered across the strand. Those victims who had already washed ashore lay in rough wooden boxes on a nearby hillside. The living were trying to identify the dead—a difficult task, since some of the bodies were bloated from drowning, while others had struck repeatedly against the rocks. Out of sentiment or to save labor, the bodies of children were placed alongside their mothers in the same coffin. Continue reading

Thomas Paine, Political Activist and Voice of the American Revolution

Paine’s Pamphlet “Common Sense” Inspired the Patriot Cause

Thomas Paine was an English-born writer and political activist who became, shortly after his arrival in America, the leading propagandist of the American Revolution. His pamphlet “Common Sense,” which appeared anonymously in early 1776, became wildly popular and helped sway public opinion to the radical position of splitting from the British Empire.

Paine followed up by publishing, during the bitter winter when the Continental Army was camped at Valley Forge, a pamphlet titled “The American Crisis,” which urged Americans to remain steadfast to the patriot cause. Continue reading

JFK’s Cold War Chains

President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev took the measure of each other when they met for the first time, in Vienna in 1961. (Google Images)

Editor’s note: The past is prologue. The stories we tell about ourselves and our forebears inform the sort of country we think we are and help determine public policy. This moment is an appropriate time to reconsider our past, look back at various eras of United States history and re-evaluate America’s origins. When, exactly, were we “great”? Continue reading

‘YES’ on School Choice – But It Requires Parental Involvement

There is a connection between bad schools and lack of parental involvement.

Question my sanity, but I’m considering running in this election to recall California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. Here’s a big reason why.

No one doubts that bad K-12 public school teachers exist. There is a phenomenon known as the “turkey trot,” in which bad teachers wind up in the worst schools. Why? Continue reading

School CHOICE Only Option in Divided Nation

Let parents decide what their children will learn, and give parents the freedom to select a school for their child that teaches the worldview and the values that they want.

The issue of critical race theory is raising a more fundamental question about our nation: education.

Education is about more than teaching children to read and write. It is about transmitting values, transmitting a worldview, that will define how our youth think and how they will live. Continue reading

They Are Using ‘Smart’ Devices to Entrain Your Children

Children represent the great hope of any civilization, imbued as they are with a natural curiosity and awareness of the truth and charged with energy and vitality. In almost all indigenous traditions, the natural world represented the gateway to the cosmos, or higher realms of wisdom, and so new-borns were quickly offered exposure and freedom to explore this lush meta-physical inheritance. In the Americas, some communities would even allow giant eagles or condors to take toddlers on flights of wonder above the canopy of trees — the exaltation and awe induced by these experiences would open psychic gateways in the child’s brain that imbued it with a life-long connection to the ecological neural network of the planet. Continue reading

The Real Jim Crow

~ Foreward ~
I am delighted to publish this article by Mike Scruggs, historian, author, columnist for The Times Examiner out of Greenville, South Carolina. I have Mike’s 359 page illustrated book, The Un-Civil War, Shattering the Historical Myths, which promises to be outstanding. I look forward to reviewing it in the next few weeks.

Thomas D. Rice, the original Jim Crow, in costume.

This article contains much historical detail and makes it clear why Southern states, after the horrors of Reconstruction, felt an imperative to copy the Jim Crow laws of the Northern states. Before Reconstruction, the South was integrated, by necessity, according to C. Vann Woodward in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, which produced an intimacy between blacks and whites not found anywhere else in the country. That’s not to say that race relations were always great, but they were far better in the South than in the North and the West. Blacks and whites in the South did not recoil from each other as did the white Yankee women at the end of Gone with the Wind with the thought of Mammy touching their children. Scarlett O’Hara found that absurd. That is a good case of fiction perfectly illustrating reality.

The North and West were the opposite of the South. Blacks and whites were rigidly segregated, by custom, law, or both. ~ Gene Kizer, Jr. Continue reading

Harry Truman – AMERICAN

Harry Truman was a different kind of President. He probably made as many, or more important decisions regarding our nation’s history as any of the other 32 Presidents preceding him. However, a measure of his greatness may rest on what he did after he left the White House.

The only asset he had when he died was the house he lived in, which was in Independence, Missouri. His wife had inherited the house from her mother and father and other than their years in the White House, they lived their entire lives there.

When he retired from office in 1952 his income was a U.S. Army pension reported to have been $13,507.72 a year. Congress, noting that he was paying for his stamps and personally licking them, granted him an ‘allowance’ and later, a retroactive pension of $25,000 per year. Continue reading

The Rise of Black Homeschooling

Victoria Bradley hoped that homeschooling would let her learn at her own pace. Photographs by Cydni Elledge for The New Yorker

When Victoria Bradley was in fifth grade, she started asking her mother, Bernita, to homeschool her. Bernita wasn’t sure where the idea came from—they never saw homeschooling on TV. But something always seemed to be going wrong at school for Victoria. In second grade, a teacher lost track of her during parent pickup, and she wandered off school grounds. Bernita went to see the principal, intent on getting the teacher fired. The principal asked if she would consider taking an AmeriCorps position at the school. Bernita cut back her hours at the hair salon she owned and started doing community outreach, assisting teachers and hosting parent meetings.

Often underserved by traditional schools, Black families are banding together to educate their children, sometimes with an unexpected funding source: the Koch family and other conservative donors. Continue reading

Smith: America’s End Is One Check-Mate Away

“Blessings on the hand of women! Angels guard its strength and grace. In the palace, cottage, hovel, Oh, no matter where the place; Would that never storms assail it, Rainbows ever gently curled, For the hand that rocks the cradle Is the hand that rules the world.” ~ William Ross Wallace, 1865

The conservative and Christian parents of America’s multitude of children certainly must wish they had done more in past decades to prevent the ideas of Marx and communism from being inserted into the U.S. public education system, by advocates who infiltrated its halls in its earliest years, as they have seen an exponentially intensified hard assault on our traditional beliefs and principles over the past eleven years, starting with the introduction of Common Core. Now, the new tactic of America’s Marxists centers on the implementation of Critical Race Theory concepts, premises and philosophy within public schools for the purpose of indoctrinating America’s children completely in the Democratic Party’s Marxo-fascist worldview. Continue reading

How Blacks Enslaved and Colonized, Just Like Whites

The narrative today is that all of white America must practice penitence for the past sins of their forefathers. It doesn’t matter a whit that for many whites, the likes of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln weren’t even their forefathers; it is estimated that 40% of Americans can trace an ancestor to Ellis Island, which was open only between 1892 and 1954. But by the racist standards of the left, white skin is white skin, regardless of where it originated or when it arrived here. Black immigration to America since the Civil War tells a similar story. At least 4 million black Africans have immigrated to the United States since 1980 alone, accounting for as much as 15-20% of the entire black population in the United States.

But all whites should be punished by all blacks for crimes committed over 150 years ago because … racism. Institutional racism. Structural racism. Systemic racism. Foundational racism. Apparently, COVID was racist. CNN shared a recent story about environmental racism. What’s next, being nice and treating everyone decently is racist? OOPS. Continue reading

1638-1639: The Oath of a Freeman…OR?

The following description and image has been provided by Heritage Auctions through a recent offering. ~ Ed.

[Mark Hofmann, forger]. The Oath of a Freeman. Printed broadside comprising a forgery of the first document printed in English North America. [The Oath of a Freeman. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Stephen Daye, circa 1638-1639 but Salt Lake City, Utah: Mark Hofmann, March 25, 1985]. Text arranged in 28 lines within an ornamental border, measuring approximately 5.875 x 4.125 inches (149 x 105 mm), with uneven edges and several tears. Docketed on verso, “Oath of a freeman” in ink in a 17th century-like hand [Mark Hofmann’s], small hole affecting “h” in “Oath” imitating iron gall ink oxidation. Housed in a polyester folder within an elaborate linen case with cover label, produced by the Library of Congress.

The Oath of a Freeman is thought to have been printed by Stephen Daye in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1638 or 1639. Daye was a locksmith by trade; he set up the press in America when the first printer died on the journey across the Atlantic. Continue reading

Teachers Told to Hide Curricula From Parents, Create Phony Materials

Facing public outrage over racialist indoctrination of children, government-school teachers in Missouri were instructed to hide the extremist content they were using and create fake materials to deceive parents about what was being taught. The incident has now become a national scandal as the district goes into damage-control mode. Continue reading

1495 ~ Performing a Historectomy on America

Published in the ‘American Journal’ on the first generation Federal Observer, January 14, 2002

If you want to destroy a house, undermine the foundation. If you want to destroy a nation, do the same. If you want to debase people who are defined by ideas, destroy the ideas. If you want to bring down a society that is sustained by its history, perform a historectomy.

First, let me make clear that I am not referring to a hysterectomy, or removal of the uterus, but a historectomy, or removal of our history. Continue reading