History

On a cold December evening in December 1773, American colonists, members of the Sons of Liberty protested the British Tea Act by disguising themselves as American Indians and threw an entire shipment of tea from England into Boston Harbor. This political protest and the subsequent reactions of the English government, set in motion a series of […]

A good friend of mine is a career law enforcement professional here in New England and although we don’t hang out on a regular basis, whenever we run into one another we’ll stop and catch up. So weaving around a stoppage in the road a few weeks ago, I saw my friend trying to make […]

One of the best-known cavalrymen of the Civil War was John Singleton Mosby. He served under J.E.B. Stuart for the Confederacy during the Fredericksburg and Gettysburg campaigns and started his own cavalry unit, the 43rd Battalion of Virginia Cavalry, which became known as Mosby’s Rangers, or Mosby’s Raiders. Mosby’s Rangers operated out of Middleburg, Virginia. […]

Operation Citadel, which resulted in the Battle of Kursk took place in July 1943 around the Soviet city of Kursk in western Russia, as Germany launched their last great offensive of the war. After the devastating defeat at the hands of the Soviet Red Army at the Battle of Stalingrad, it was the last chance […]

Opinion: Our Special Operations Command has been in the news these days for much of the wrong reasons. And with the number of questions we’ve gotten asking about the different Selection courses for SOF with an increasing number from potential officers, I felt it was time to address an issue. An increasing number of Special […]

There are some things that stand the test of time and Richard Gatling’s invention of the earliest days of the American Civil War has certainly fit that description. Gatling was an inventor who fashioned the first machine gun, although a different design by most standards. His basic design with many modern variants is still in […]

As we continue to see in the modern era, human history has seen no shortage of brutality and bloodshed, which can often make archeological work seem pretty grim. At its most basic, archaeology is all about the exhumation of things that have long been defunct or dead: people, items and even cultures. With so much […]

During the battle on February 6-7, 1968 at the Special Forces A-Camp at Lang Vei, NVA troops used armor for the first time against American and South Vietnamese positions. Lang Vei had to be taken before the NVA unleashed 40,000 troops against the Marine base at Khe Sanh. During the battle, as the SF camp […]

With the recent move by President Trump to issue pardons to some U.S. soldiers that were either charged with or convicted of war crimes, it is fitting that the largest war crimes trials in history and the ones that changed how the world treats war crimes began on this day in 1945. These trials would […]

In late November 1863, President Lincoln gave perhaps one of the most important speeches in American history. On the 19th of November that year, the government was dedicating the National Cemetery at Gettysburg Pennsylvania where the bloodiest battle of the Civil War had been fought just a few months before. Between North and South, there […]

On April 12th, 1961, a Russian man named Yuri Gagarin made history aboard a Soviet Vostok 3KA-3 spacecraft. For years, the United States and Soviet Union had been using the barrier between our world and beyond as a benchmark to test each nation’s greatest technological and engineering advances, and on that day, Gagarin achieved an […]

When one mentions Julia Child, the first thing that comes to mind is the marvel and ease of French cooking that she brought to the United States. But long before she was a culinary artist, she served as an intelligence officer during World War II in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to […]