She Almost Won

 Henrietta Maria came very close to helping her husband and Prince Rupert win the English Civil Wars. From Atlas Obscura:

Around midday on July 4, 1643, in the countryside just north of Birmingham, Queen Henrietta Maria was in her battle tent. Outside, shells exploded. Musket balls* zoomed past. Anxiously, the Queen of England waited. Taking Burton-Upon-Trent, a strategic town with a river crossing connecting northern and southern England, was her army’s first real challenge. Defeat was not an option. But the fighting had already raged for five hours—how much longer would it take to deliver a victory? Three hours later, the queen got her answer. Her royalist army had finally broken through the town’s defenses. Victory was secured.

Eighteen years earlier, the queen had arrived on English shores as a 15-year-old French bride. And now, at 34, she was a warrior queen. The queen would jokingly call herself “she-majesty generalissima.” Lines from a contemporary poem, its author unknown, portrayed her as not just defeating but unmanning Parliament’s forces, literally: “Tis here a woman leads; but one would swear, the armies did consist of women there.” Her skill garnered wide respect from diplomatic elites; the Venetian ambassador observed, “Without [the queen’s] encouragement and aid the king would never have put himself into a position to resist.” During the English Civil War, Queen Henrietta Maria was, it seems, all that stood between King Charles’s sure defeat at the hands of Parliament. (Read more.)

Henrietta Maria and her household hiding in a ditch during the bombardments at Bridlington in 1643

Henrietta Maria hiding from Parliamentarians during her escape to France in 1644

 

The novel Generalissima is available HERE.

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Queen Victoria, the Stuarts and Scotland

Victoria and Albert as Catherine of Braganza and Charles II by Winterhalter

Gown worn by Victoria at her Stuart Ball

Tartan dress of Queen Victoria

Royal Family in Highlands

Scotch air, Scotch people, Scotch hills, Scotch rivers, Scotch woods, are all far preferable to those of any other nation in or out of this world.~Queen Victoria, ca. 1849. 

 In the mid-18th century, in an uprising known as "The 45" Prince Charles Edward Stuart tried to reconquer the thrones of England and Scotland for his father James III, known as the "Old Pretender." The thrones had been usurped by the German and Protestant House of Hanover in spite of the fact that the legal Catholic sovereign was alive and well. The Scots in particular did not take well to their rightful sovereign being disinherited because of the English preference for German Protestants. The uprising failed miserably, bringing more hardship and tragedy to the Scottish people for the remainder of the century. Meanwhile many songs, tales and legends of that time imprinted themselves upon the land and the people. Many of those tales and legends found their way into the writings of Sir Walter Scott, one of the first historical novelists, whose Waverley novels of the early 19th century brought the lost Stuart rebellions and their heroes to life for a new generation. The prince Regent, the future George IV, rebelled against his Hanoverian patrimony after reading the Scott novels, and headed for Scotland.

From Peter Harrington:

The romanticisation of Scotland can be most definitively linked in literature with the Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott. The first of the Waverley novels was published in 1814 and was set during the Jacobite uprising which took place almost a century earlier. The novels were so popular that Scott was propelled to fame, and was invited to dine with King George IV, (then Prince Regent). When, several years later, the Scottish ‘Radical War’ of 1820, inspired by the American and French Revolutions, caused King George to plan the first royal visit to Scotland in over two hundred years in an effort to quell unrest, it was Scott he called on to carefully stage manage the visit. By now a baronet with numerous valuable connections to Scottish nobility, Scott saw the opportunity both to avert an uprising and to promote highland culture. He reasoned that, because of George’s lineage, the king could legitimately claim as much Stuart heritage as Bonnie Prince Charlie and could thus present himself as a Jacobite prince, properly accoutred Royal Stuart tartan. Kilts at this time were no longer generally worn, having been banned by the Dress Act of 1746, which made the wearing of ‘Highland dress’ illegal. Though the act was repealed in 1782, kilts had only come back into fashion with the Scottish gentry, a number of whom set up ‘Highland Societies’.... For the king to appear so attired was not only an attempt to appeal to the heritage of the Scottish people but also to gloss over old wrongs.

George’s visit sparked an interest in Scottish dress, and, in its wake, the demand for kilts grew so high that Scottish weaving mills were unable to cope with the demand. It was in this period that (contrary to the generally assumed belief that individualised tartans are a much older tradition) many of the clan tartans were designated. (Read more.)

 George IV died and was succeeded by his brother William IV, who in turn left the throne to their niece Victoria in 1837. It was the Romantic Era, and Queen Victoria also loved the Waverley novels. In general she found the Stuarts far more romantic than her own Hanoverians and decided to fill her life with tokens of the Stuart homeland of Scotland. Her beloved husband Prince Albert shared her predilection, in spite of being German himself and in the 1840's they began spending as much time as possible in their northern kingdom.

From Quartermile Blog:

The first land to capture the Queen’s heart wasn’t Scotland, but Ireland. Early in her reign, Victoria spent her holidays in. Yet after the potato famine of 1845 irreparable damage was done to the relationship between the British government and the people of Ireland. Despite Victoria’s personal donation of £5,000 to the cause (nearly £600,000 in today’s money) and her visit to the country in 1849, the relationship never recovered....Scotland fared much better in Victoria’s eyes. In fact, Victoria made frequent visits north of the border during her reign despite the fact that Scotland had only been visited twice by reigning monarchs in the previous two centuries.

Victoria and Albert’s love for Scotland drove them to take out a long-term lease on the stunning Balmoral Castle in Deeside in 1848. Later, in 1852, the royal couple permanently purchased the property for £31,500 (£4million today) and had it significantly extended. From this point on, Victoria and Albert spent a section of each summer in Balmoral, thanks to the advances in British rail travel....Victoria’s ever growing affection for Scotland didn’t just stretch to the land itself, but to the culture and fashion too. Through their experience of Scotland, Victoria and Albert both became big fans of tartan, and helped to elevate the status and reputation of the pattern south of the border.

According to accounts from the time, Victoria and Albert enthusiastically redecorated Balmoral Castle with reams of “Balmoral tartan, in red and grey” furnishings. They even included “innumerable stags’ antlers” in their décor. For Victoria, the use of tartan was an outward sign of being connected to her favourite part of the world. (Read more.)

Victoria showed that she not only loved Scotland but cherished the memory of the Stuarts, masquerading as Catherine of Braganza, consort of Charles II, at a ball. She had an Italian sculptor create a marble statue of Princess Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of Charles I who died in prison at age thirteen, reputedly with her head on her murdered father's Bible. She passed the interest on to her children, as can be seen from a water color of Mary Queen of Scots by the Princess Royal. The Stuarts must have fulfilled Victoria's vision of a monarchy in which the kings and queens did not only reign but ruled, had adventures, tragedies, romances and died for love.

Princess Elizabeth Stuart: "Go ... And see the tomb of Charles's child wet with Victoria's tears"

Carl Haag’s "Luncheon at Cairn Lochan" depicts the royal family picnicking in Scotland.

Balmoral today with flock wallpaper ordered by Queen Victoria

Painting of Mary Queen of Scots by Queen Victoria's daughter the Princess Royal

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NO Global Government and NO Global Taxes

 From Tierney's Real News:

Today, President Trump addressed the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly and delivered a powerful message: America is back and we’re not putting up with nonsense any longer...

President Trump declared that under his leadership, America is stronger than ever — and we will use our strength to confront our enemies, protect our interests, forbid communism, combat terrorism, reject global control, make the world a safer place for all and always defend our sovereignty.

The camera focused on each of our adversaries while he warned them of his resolve and some walked out in fear and anger. I loved every minute!

Here are some highlights followed by a transcript of the entire speech. I strongly encourage you all to read or watch the entire thing. He covered two months worth of news in just 30 minutes - telling us the truth about many issues that the fake news refuses to accurately report or report at all:

• “Two and a half centuries after the cause of liberty found its home on this continent, I can report to you with pride that America is back, and our country is stronger today than ever before.” (Watch)

• “As President of the most extraordinary nation in history, I have no interest in leaving dangers to grow for another day. I do not believe in letting problems fester; they only become harder to solve. So, while others have talked, I have acted. While others have spoken of peace, I have made peace. While others have ignored threats, I have confronted them. While others have talked of courage, America has shown it. While others have promised strength, I have used it to make America the most powerful country in the world. Working with many nations in this room, we are solving decades of intractable challenges — and we are settling years of unfinished business.” (Watch)

• “There is no better example of a danger that was allowed to gather strength at the world’s peril than the number one sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran… From the first day I entered the political arena, I have been unwavering — I will never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” (Watch)

• “In America, we just marked the 25th anniversary of the worst terror attack in history, September 11th, which killed 3,000 people just a few miles from here. In two weeks, we will mark the third anniversary of the October 7th attack in Israel, where terrorists funded by Iran tortured, mutilated, and killed 1,200 very innocent civilians, including dozens of Americans… Iran’s Supreme Leader celebrated that massacre and called it a ‘service to humanity.’ The same regime slaughtered over 72,000 of its citizens this year; recently, 10,000 were killed for protesting. Just imagine if such a vile regime were ever empowered to carry out large-scale terror attacks from behind a nuclear shield. This was the reality we had to confront — a reality that far too many preferred to ignore.” (Watch) (Read more.)

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1918 and the End of Christendom

 From The Maistre Institute:

The charter of the modern state was signed at Westphalia in 1648 by exhausted men who wanted the killing to stop and were prepared to pay almost anything for it. What they agreed was that the religion of a territory would follow the conscience of its prince, and that no authority whatsoever stood above the sovereign to adjudicate the question. We remember this as the birth of toleration. It was also, and more consequentially, the moment the universal Church was subordinated to the territorial ruler as a matter of public law. Innocent X saw exactly what had been done and declared the settlement null and void insofar as it prejudiced the Catholic religion. Nobody listened. A pope proposing terms of peace would be disregarded again in 1917, on the same reasoning and by the same sort of men, though by then the disregard was so habitual that hardly anyone thought to remark on it.

After Westphalia the sovereign state acknowledged no superior on earth. Christendom, which had always meant something standing above the princes rather than beside them, survived mainly as a family inheritance maintained by one dynasty out of stubbornness and piety in roughly equal measure.

The Revolution then took what Westphalia had built and knocked out the last support. Sovereignty no longer descended from God to the prince. It rose from below, from the people, and it needed no warrant from heaven at all. Napoleon abolished the Holy Roman Empire outright in 1806, the title simply lapsing after eight hundred years, and the Habsburgs withdrew to the merely Austrian crown. Then came the nationalisms, lyrical in their poetry and homicidal in their politics, each teaching a people that its destiny required a state of its own. Then 1848. By the time Princip fired in Sarajevo the intellectual demolition was finished and had been for some while. Only the building was still standing, and buildings come down fast once the footings are gone. (Read more.)

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China’s New Defense Mobilization Law Prepares Chinese Civilians And Companies For War

 From WLT Report:

It appears China is preparing for war. A new law enacted by China that will take effect in October will allow the Chinese government to easily transition into a wartime economy during a military conflict. The new law will essentially allow the Chinese Armed Forces to have unfettered access to all companies and civilian resources in the time of a war.

The Military Times reported more on the move by China:

China’s armed forces will get every possible resource from the home front if needed during a war, according to a change in the law to take effect in October.

And its militarily less endowed neighbors such as Taiwan and the Philippines would bear the brunt of a fully kitted People’s Liberation Army, which the updated National Defense Mobilization Law says may draw from deep within the civilian population for resources, analysts say.

Australia, Japan and the United States also would note Beijing’s revised law as they’re most likely to become involved in any Taiwan “contingency” or conflict in the South China Sea, said Carl Thayer, an Asia specialist and emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

Australia, India and the United States have their own issues with Beijing, he added.

(Read more.)

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Henrietta Maria and Her Mother, Marie de’ Medici

 

 My guest post for Tony Riches.

First of all, I would like to thank Tony Riches for opening his popular blog to other historical writers so that we may share our research. I am the author of a biography of Marie-Antoinette as well as six historical novels. The latest two novels are about Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I and they are entitled My Queen, My Love and Generalissima. They are part of an unfinished trilogy; the third installment Avalon will be out sometime in 2027 or 28. 

In my readings about Henrietta of France, I have found that her mother Marie de’ Medici played an enormous role not only in her upbringing but in her ongoing political decisions, as well as shaping her faith, her love of the arts, of music, theater, and architecture. Queen Marie has ended up playing a much larger role in my novels than I originally would ever have imagined, due to the sheer force of her personality as much as to her real adventures, which included leading rebellions against her son, climbing out of windows to escape the royal guards, and hiding with her entourage of dwarves in a German brewery. All of this followed a glittering career of being Queen Mother Regent of France. Most of the Queen’s life is captured in the spectacular series of twenty-four huge paintings by Rubens, now at the Louvre. (Read more.)

 

Books available HERE.

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No Winged Hussars This Time

From Unlicensed Punditry:

It is 2026 and the Ottoman Empire is still at the gates, only now, there are people who don’t care because they have no concept of what living in an Ottoman civilization (or under the Taliban’s interpretation of sharia law) looks like.

We should not believe it wasn’t this way before 9/11 because there have always been haters of this nation, not because it didn’t give them of its bounty, but because, in their opinion, it didn’t give them enough.

9/11 changed that – albeit temporarily.

For a while, the bitchers, whiners and anti-Americans were too afraid to be exposed as making common cause with 7^th Century savages who figured out how to use the very freedoms against us that the anti-Americans take for granted. They saw the anger that average Americans rightly focused on Islamic terrorists – and they also saw the fear in those who were not confident enough in America’s goodness to stand up.

That soon faded and America’s ADHD returned. Not only did the anger wane, it became tiresome, but the fear subsided as well. Twenty-five years ago, there were no marches to “free Palestine”, a state and a people who do not exist and protest featuring open hatred of Israel, a state and people who do exist.

Over the span of just a few years, we not only forgot who the enemy was, we hold seminars to protect Muslims from “Islamophobia” and openly import them while actively denying Islam’s role in the murder of thousands of people here in America and abroad. We even elect the radical among them to office.

The tolerance we have for Mamdani, Omar, El Sayed, Rashida Tlaib, and other agitators has eclipsed our outrage that we were attacked on our home soil on 9/11, that outrage has become performative. (Read more.)

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How Iran-Backed Pirates in Yemen Are Raising Your Gas Price

 From Tierney's Real News:

Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis just seized the strategic port of Mocha (Mokha), pushed into the coastal town of Dhubab, and took Perim Island (also known as Mayyun) in the heart of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Multiple reports confirm the group now effectively controls Yemen’s entire Red Sea coastline and the critical island that splits the narrow strait’s shipping lanes.

The stretch between Perim and Ras Siyyan in Djibouti is the most narrow point of strait, measuring just 20 km. This will give the Houthis excellent opportunities to block this maritime trade route leading up to the Suez Canal. If the Houthis decide to expand their naval blockade from just Saudi ships to all international cargo vessels, then all maritime trade will have to be rerouted around Africa again.

Bab el-Mandeb is the southern gateway connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden—the “other” strait that has become Saudi Arabia’s primary remaining outlet for crude. It normally carries about 10–12% of global seaborne trade and, pre-crisis, 8–9+ million barrels per day of oil and products. India, China, Japan, South Korea and others depend on it for Middle Eastern and Russian crude.

The Houthi forces have publicly stated that their blockade explicitly targets Saudi-linked shipping. Despite their public assurances that wider international commercial traffic is safe, energy markets react to the geographic proximity of heavy weapons to a channel that is only 18 miles wide. (Read more.)

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A Look Back at Two 9/11 Investigations

 From Sharyl's Substack:

I did many stories for CBS on the Islamic extremist terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya on 9/11/12. That scandal was three-fold:

Dying for Security: The poor American who were murdered had begged for security beforehand. The State Dept. under Hillary Clinton had received specific warnings about a 9/11 terrorist attack on that installation and others but drew down security rather than reinforcing it.

Dying to be Rescued: I was able to show that the Americans could have been rescued— or at least genuine attempts made, as the assaults went on for so long. But the Obama administration turned back rescuers on several fronts. The poor victims were left helpless. They never had a chance.

The Coverup: I also proved many facets of an elaborate coverup at the highest levels just prior to President Obama’s re-election to a) pretend it wasn’t related to 9/11, particularly because Obama claimed he’d send terrorists on the run b) pretend the attackers weren’t terrorists, but rioters-gone-amok c) pretend the attacks were “spontaneous” rather than preplanned with lots of warnings d) coverup the repeated security requests and denials e) coverup the availability of rescue operations that were turned back. (Read more.)

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Forgotten Catholics of the Civil War South

 From Sensus Fidelium:

Irish immigrants marched in gray uniforms. French Creoles filled the pews of New Orleans. German Catholics worshipped across Texas. Jesuit priests served as chaplains. Religious sisters staffed hospitals. Bishops struggled to shepherd their flocks through one of the darkest periods in American history. Although Catholics remained a minority in most of the South, they were far from insignificant. Their story has too often been overlooked.

One of the best modern studies of Southern Catholic life during the Civil War is historian Gracjan Kraszewski’s Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South. Kraszewski argues that many Southern Catholics did not see themselves as outsiders living within the Confederacy. Instead, they identified deeply with their states and communities, viewing their Catholic faith and their Southern loyalties as compatible. He describes this process as the “Confederatization” of Southern Catholics—a perspective that helps explain why Catholic clergy, religious, and laypeople participated so fully in Confederate society. His work challenges the common assumption that the Civil War was solely a Protestant story. (Read more.)

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The Falling Man

 From Tierney's Real News:

One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame—the Falling Man—became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose END we have not yet seen.

Never forget that 19 radical Islamic terrorists, funded by the Globalist NWO, the Global Communist Party, the Muslim Brotherhood & the terror state of Iran, did something we never thought possible on US soil. They slaughtered 3,000 innocent Americans and maimed 20,000 more.

9/11 was perpetrated by the same evil cabal behind the GREAT RESET and the RED-GREEN axis - who today are trying to finish the job, enslave us & overthrow us through fear and scare us into submission!

Since September 11, 2001, America has suffered hundreds more Jihadi attacks and Communist false flags and thousands more have died. Their atheist, Communist, Islamist & Satanist partners in America are kneeling before false idols, rioting in our streets, mocking our God, burning our flag and looting, torching & destroying our traditions and our country. That's what evil does - kills, burns, loots & destroys.

The fake news media and Globalist Islamo-Communist pirates who hate America want you to blame yourself, not the terrorists. They want you to replace the memory of 9/11 with January 6th - a phony 'insurrection' and military coup they engineered themselves to hurt America and remove Trump from office. Our enemies want you to forget the truth, and rewrite the past. (Read more.)

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Hamas Counts Its Dead Children as Wins, and American Students Are Celebrating Their Victories

 From The Enterprise:

In 2023, with roughly 1.4 million Gazans displaced and some 641,000 of them crowded into 150 UN shelters running at nearly 3 times their intended capacity, Ismail Haniyeh appeared on Al-Mayadeen television and said it plainly. Speaking of the women, children, and elderly of Gaza, the chairman of Hamas’s political bureau declared, “We are the ones who need this blood.” That blood, he said, awakens the revolutionary spirit. It is worth noting that Haniyeh’s net worth was between $3 and $4 billion.

Two years of American argument have treated those deaths as if they arrived by accident, or as if the only live question were whether Israel has been careful enough. Haniyeh told his audience the deaths were useful to him.

Urban guerrillas have always fought in cities. That fact, by itself, proves almost nothing. Human shielding is the deliberate placement of fighters and weapons among civilians so that the enemy must either hold fire or kill innocents. The laws of war forbid it because it exploits the protections those laws give civilians. Hamas has gone further. Its leaders have treated the resulting deaths as a political harvest: mobilization at home, pressure on governments that watch the footage. Photographs of rubble cannot prove that intent. Hamas’s own recorded words can.

The words are not new. In February 2008, years before this war, Hamas parliamentarian Fathi Hammad boasted on Al-Aqsa TV that “death has become an industry” and praised human shields assembled from women, children, and the elderly. On October 24, 2023, Ghazi Hamad told Lebanese television that Hamas was proud to sacrifice martyrs and promised to repeat the October 7 attack again and again. The next raid was already priced in. (Read more.)

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The Teutonic Knights

 From The Collector:

Also known as the Deutscher Orden and the Brothers of the German House of St. Mary in Jerusalem, the Teutonic Order was a key player in the medieval expansion in Eastern Europe. During the Baltic Crusades in Prussia, present-day Latvia and Estonia, and Lithuania, the Teutonic Knights virtually wiped out the pagan population living in these areas, replacing the established authorities with a theocratic state. Read on to learn more about the Teutonic Order and its role in the Christianization of Europe’s last strongholds of paganism.

In 1189, the Crusading forces led by Guy of Lusignan were besieging the town of Acre, which was then controlled by Saladin, the sultan of Egypt and Syria. In 1187, Saladin had also conquered the city of Jerusalem, leading to the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, a Crusader state established by the Crusaders in 1099 after the end of the First Crusade.

When news of the fall of Jerusalem reached Europe, Pope Gregory VIII initiated the Third Crusade to restore the city to Christian control. In 1190, during the siege of Acre, a number of German merchants, mostly from Bremen and Lübeck, decided to form a fraternity to care for the sick. A year later, after the Crusaders managed to capture Acre, the fraternity established its headquarters in a hospital in the town, and it became known as the Hospital of St. Mary of the German House in Jerusalem. (Read more.)

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Remembering the Battle of Mohács

A brilliant article which shows how the European powers' fears over the growth of Habsburg hegemony contributed to the triumph of Islam. From Chronicles:

Hungary’s defeat coincided with larger European developments. The Habsburgs were then emerging as a major European power, considered by many players—and most dishonorably by the French—to be more threatening than the 100,000-strong devastating Turkish host advancing up the Danube Valley. The Habsburgs were able to establish control over the westernmost fifth of Hungary, and from there, 150 years later under the leadership of their brilliant commander Eugene of Savoy, to advance steadily south to the Military Frontier established along the northern banks of the Sava and the Danube east of Belgrade. In the Hungarian heartland under Turkish rule, however, and in  autonomous Transylvania in the east,  because so many Catholic hierarchs and priests died at Mohács, the Hungarian Reformation consolidated its territorial hold.

In 1526 there was a structural imbalance between Europe’s acute political fragmentation, while the Ottomans, under Suleiman, had achieved an impressive level of administrative centralization and military efficiency. The Turkish edifice would start crumbling only decades after Suleiman’s death in 1566, but in the meantime Europe faced immense danger from the east. It loomed just as Europe engaged—during the Thirty Years’ War—in the most destructive episode of self immolation until that time. The Ottoman threat finally retreateed after the second siege of Vienna in 1683.

The battle lost in 1526 has had a defining role in forming Hungarian historical consciousness. The “Mohács Trauma” appeared in the public discourse soon after the battle, and eventually became synonymous with continuing Hungarian misfortune in the public mind. For a long time that trauma was restricted mainly to the upper social stratum. This was in contrast to Serbia and other Serb lands, where the epic saga of the Battle of Kosovo and its mystical transformation of military defeat into moral victory lived on even among illiterate peasants, indeed especially among them. (Read more.)

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The Invasion of America

 From Tierney's Real News:

Last week, President Trump told reporters he was thinking about renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America. Many laughed and mocked him. But, in my gut I knew he wasn’t kidding—just as he wasn’t kidding about renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America or about the strategic importance of Greenland.

President Trump said: “I am changing the name of Lake Ontario effective immediately to LAKE AMERICA by executive order. From this day forward it will be known as Lake America. Most of its volume is in the United States. We’re gonna call it Lake America — and all it takes is a good pen and some intelligence.”

I’m glad. I believe that our enemies (China, Russia, Iran) intend to use the Great Lakes as a vehicle to invade our country from the north in the states of Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Iran’s IRGC are already training thousands of troops in Canada. That’s a documented fact. WAKE UP.

Look at the map. Our adversaries—Communist China, Russia, and Iran—could exploit the Great Lakes corridor to threaten the northern states. They are already doing it with pollution and invasive species and Ilhan Omar’s tribe - not to mention they did it with the Wuhan virus! (Read more.)

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La Reine Margot and the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre

A first hand account from a notorious lady, who nevertheless saved the life of her husband Henri de Navarre, the future Henri IV. Henri IV, through his second marriage to Marie de' Medici, was the father of Queen Henrietta Maria.

Five or six days afterwards, those who were engaged in this plot, considering that it was incomplete whilst the King my husband and the Prince de Conde remained alive, as their design was not only to dispose of the Huguenots, but of the Princes of the blood likewise; and knowing that no attempt could be made on my husband whilst I continued to be his wife, devised a scheme which they suggested to the Queen my mother for divorcing me from him. Accordingly, one holiday, when I waited upon her to chapel, she charged me to declare to her, upon my oath, whether I believed my husband to be like other men. "Because," said she, "if he is not, I can easily procure you a divorce from him." I begged her to believe that I was not sufficiently competent to answer such a question, and could only reply, as the Roman lady did to her husband, when he chid her for not informing him of his stinking breath, that, never having approached any other man near enough to know a difference, she thought all men had been alike in that respect. "But," said I, "Madame, since you have put the question to me, I can only declare I am content to remain as I am;" and this I said because I suspected the design of separating me from my husband was in order to work some mischief against him....(Read more.)

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The Death of Richard III

From Medievalists:

On 22 August 1485 Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England was killed at the Battle of Bosworth. Exactly how and who carried out the killing remains shrouded in mystery. Having seen his battle line collapsing under the French flank attack, Richard charged Henry Tudor and his bodyguard. He immediately killed William Brandon, Henry’s standard bearer. The standard crashed to the ground only to be picked up, according to Welsh tradition, by Rhys ap Maredudd (Rhys Fawr).

Henry must have been close, because we are told by Vergil that next in Richard’s path was the 6 foot 8 inch John Cheyney. with great force drove him to the ground. Vergil tells us that at this moment ‘Henry abode the brunt longer than ever his owne soldiers wold have wenyd, who wer now almost owt of hope of victory.’ Holinshed says that Richard was no more than a sword point away from Henry, and Michael Drayton in his poem says they were ‘scarce a lance length’ apart. Victory was now within Richard’s grasp. (Read more.)

 More on Richard III: HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.

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Did the Hittites Record the Fall of Homeric Troy in Cuneiform?

 From The Collector:

Homer’s account of the Trojan War in the Iliad, written in the 7th century BC, is one of the world’s most enduring stories. But was it purely fantasy, or based on real historical events? In the search for confirming evidence, scholars have examined clay tablets containing the historical archives of the Hittite kings at Hattusa. They preserve details of Anatolian politics in the 13th century BC, the time when the Trojan War was supposed to have been fought. While these administrative texts do not speak of golden armor or meddling gods, they do record a century of real conflict over the legendary city the Hittites called Wilusa, which many scholars believe was ancient Troy.

The Hittite Empire ruled over much of Anatolia throughout the Late Bronze Age, the era between approximately 1550 and 1150 BC. Numerous Hittite documents have been uncovered and translated. In particular, thousands of clay tablets were unearthed at Bogazköy in modern Turkey in the early 20th century, containing administrative records kept by Hittite royal scribes of the Hittite capital of Hattusa. This collection contains diplomatic letters between rulers, quite a few of which refer to attacks on western Anatolia by a nation called the Ahhiyawa. While not universally accepted, the majority of scholars agree that the Ahhiyawa were the Mycenaean Greeks. The ethnonym “Ahhiyawa” is held to be a Hittite version of “Akhaioi,” the Greek form of “Achaeans.”

As soon as these documents were uncovered and translated, historians began to realize their potential significance regarding the Iliad. According to Homer’s epic poem, a thousand Greek ships were launched against Troy in western Anatolia in the 13th century BC. This was not a war against just one city but against Troy’s many allies all over western Anatolia as well. Hittite documents dating to the same period appear to confirm that the Ahhiyawa were engaged in large-scale warfare in western Anatolia at this time. (Read more.)

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The Hessians and the American Revolution

 I remember visiting the Hessian Barracks in Frederick, MD as a child. From Smithsonian:

On August 15, 1776, a flotilla of British ships arrived on Staten Island, New York, just south of Manhattan. On board the vessels were more than 8,600 foreign soldiers, the first major contingent of German troops to reach the American Colonies. (Another group had set up camp in Quebec several months earlier to reinforce British forces in Canada.) 

There was no mistaking the new arrivals. Unlike their British allies, who were famously known as the redcoats, the Hessians usually wore blue or green coats, sometimes accompanied by tall, pointy brass headgear called miter caps.

For more than a year, the British Army had been battling rebellious colonists intent on establishing an independent nation. In October 1775, a fed-up George III announced his intention to “put a speedy end to these disorders by the most decisive exertions.” The British king added that he had “received the most friendly offers of foreign assistance.” Despite vigorous objections from some lawmakers, Parliament backed George in taking up those offers, expecting that the added manpower would soon crush the rebellion once and for all.

The Germans apparently shared that optimism. “None of the soldiers that went to America in 1776 anticipated that the war would last more than a year or two,” writes Friederike Baer, a historian at Penn State Abington College, in her 2022 book, Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War. (Read more.)

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Our Sea Ports

 From ColonelRETJohn:

Not since World War II did we seriously show concern over the security of our ports from enemy threats.

Now with drones being used regularly to attack ships in the Black Sea, Mediterranean ports of Egypt, and the U.S. conducting its first drone attack against the Iranian Bandar Abbas Naval Base, the realization is that our own ports may be vulnerable to attack.

What’s to keep a drone from coming into Puget Sound in Washington State, New York Harbor, or the Chesapeake in Virginia and striking one of our many naval installations or container terminals?

Right now, not much.

The U.S. Coast Guard is in overdrive to figure out ways to ensure our ports are protected.

“Faced with a growing threat from uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs), the USCG is seeking technology not just to detect these weapons, but to defeat them. Ports and other maritime facilities are vulnerable to this kind of attack vector, and our adversaries surely know it. The effort is being led by the Coast Guard Futures Development and Integration (FD&I) Directorate, which oversees research, modeling and simulation, technology forecasting, and field experimentation. It is part of the service’s role to protect U.S. maritime assets and comes as adversary militaries and non-state actors alike, are developing a wide array of UUVs for surveillance, strike and sabotage.”

Threat actors like Iran and China watch everything we do and try to play it back at us, so it is important that the Coast Guard comes up with solutions fast to protect our ports. (Read more.)

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