OPINION
July 4, 2013 | By David Lefer
Had it not been for America's founding conservatives, we would not be celebrating Independence Day on July 4. In fact, it's unlikely we would be celebrating our independence at all. Few people today realize how similar the Revolutionary era was to our own: Endless war, financial crashes and mounting public debt, popular outrage against rich bankers and taxation, and such bitter partisan dispute that Congress was frequently deadlocked for months on...
NATIONAL
May 7, 2013 | By David Horsey
One hundred prisoners held in the American detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are engaged in a hunger strike -- a desperate attempt to get the attention of President Obama, who was elected in 2008 having promised to shut the place down. Not only did Obama fail to close the facility, his administration has neglected to appoint anyone to oversee repatriation of the 86 current prisoners who have been cleared for release. Among the 166 detainees at Guantanamo, some, no doubt, are true enemies of the United States.
NATIONAL
April 18, 2013 | By Michael Muskal and Molly Hennessy-Fiske
BOSTON -- Amid heightened security and facing a packed audience, President Obama on Thursday urged this city and nation to put aside its fears and tragedies and reclaim the spirit and grace that had been disrupted by terrorist bombs. The crowd, including civic and political dignitaries and some of the runners and families caught in the twin blasts at the finish line of Monday's Boston Marathon, looked on as Obama stepped to the lectern at Boston's famed Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Cross for an interfaith service.
OPINION
January 10, 2013
Re "Holocaust's children," Column One, Jan. 4 Doris Small's story, in which she escaped Nazi Germany before World War II thanks to the rescue mission Kindertransport, is indeed very moving and poignant. But let's not forget that there was an effort by a few Americans to actually try to do the same thing the British government was doing then. It was Eleanor Roosevelt who in 1939 urged her husband to support a bill in Congress to allow 20,000 Jewish children to come to America and be temporarily adopted by American parents for the duration of the hostility.
OPINION
May 6, 2012 | Joseph J. Ellis, Joseph J. Ellis is the author of biographies of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and, most recently, John and Abigail Adams
The most famous speech in American history begins this way: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. " Lincoln's eloquence at Gettysburg was lyrical but not historically accurate. For no such thing as a "new nation" had been proposed in 1776; only a temporary union of sovereign states, declaring their independence from Britain, then presumably going their separate ways.
ENTERTAINMENT
April 1, 2012 | By Susan Josephs, Special to the Los Angeles Times
At first, Dayna Hanson says, she felt "a little intimidated" when she decided to create a "multimedia extravaganza" about the American Revolution. As an artist, she says, "I don't often undertake such sweeping topics, and I didn't feel like I had a ton of knowledge about this part of history. " Best known for co-founding the Seattle-based dance-theater company 33 Fainting Spells, Hanson wound up embarking on a rigorous research-based quest to expose the contradictions she observed between America's founding principles and current political and economic realities.