While the idea of finding a missing submarine in the Pacific Ocean, even when they had a general idea of where to search, proved so daunting to the Soviets that they’d ultimately given up looking, Bradley was fairly optimistic. He had a better way of locating it. //
Four boats were lost in 1968, including the USS Scorpion and the Soviet Union’s ballistic missile boomer K-129, which the Soviets never did locate — until the United States handed them the wreck’s location six years later.
How did the United States find it? Credit Project Azorian, a massive top-secret CIA mission to salvage the wreck. The six-year effort cost a half-billion dollars, and involved some of the U.S. Navy’s most impressive tools, many of them still classified. It was arguably the single most impressive feat of naval engineering in history.
The hunt for the Soviet sub is the subject of journalist Josh Dean’s gripping new book, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History.
The first submarine to enter the waters of the American Great Lakes was UC-97 – a World War I-era German submarine operated by the U.S. Navy to pay for the war. //
sunk according to the treaty's stipulations. UC-97 couldn't really move under her own power and was towed to the middle of Lake Michigan, where she was sunk for target practice by the USS Wilmette, forgotten by the Navy for decades after.
The early Aztecs were basically the Hell's Angels of the Meso-American world.
Before settling in the Valley of Mexico, they were considered brutish, rude, boorish, savage, barbaric, violent and worst of all, they didn't understand their place on the social ladder.
Damned barbarians. Have they no manners?
Looks like the proto-Aztecs got kicked out of every City-State and Empire in Mexico and spent most of their formative years as unwilling nomads.
Finally, they settled in (long tongue-twisting word with waaaay too many consonants, we'll just say, "Valley of Mexico") because one of their leaders saw an eagle perched in a cactus with a snake in its talons and marked it as a sign from the Gods.
Only the truly cynical would think that Azzie High Command had cued in on the fact that the troopies were getting seriously tired of wandering and were contemplating staging the Aztec version of the Change of Command ceremony as a factor in the choice of location. Cue Hernando Cortez and his Merry Band of Multi-cultural Marauders.
Once while choosing a new General, Napoleon is said to have ignored his list of certificates and medals, instead asking, "How lucky is he?"
Little after they landed, Henry and the boys got jumped by the Tlaxcalans. The Tlaxcalans outnumbered Cortez's people by a factor of three hundred to one, and fought three pitched battles against the invaders before deciding to ally with the Spaniards.ou want to talk about incredible dumb luck? Pale-skinned Hank could have shown up at any time plus or minus 15 years or so, but noooo, he has to show up when the locals were expecting their pale-skinned Quetzacoatl to reappear.
If I had tried that, the first Aztec I'd run into would have said, "Gods, huh? Well, if you're Gods, then getting whacked with this club shouldn't bother you...Hmm. Oops, he broke. Obviously not Gods. Kill them all."
Some folks get all the luck.
Anyhoo, Henry rode the "I am your God Quetzal-geshundteit. Give me all your gold as sacrifice.
Five hundred years ago, Spanish explorer Hernando Cortez and his native allies helped put an end to a gruesome regime with one of the greatest underdog victories ever recorded.
Let’s take a brief recess from the 1619 Project to explore another project. Call it the “1519 Project.” A full century before The New York Times’ proposed re-dating of the American founding and 2,200 miles southwest of Jamestown, European contact sparked a native uprising against a gruesome cult of cannibalism and mass murder.
Graphically described in the 1855 book, “Makers of History: Hernando Cortez,” John S.C. Abbott paints a picture of desperation for a tiny band of Spanish soldiers and their native allies. Next year marks the 500th anniversary of the Battle of the Dismal Night, where an initially successful Cortez was nearly crushed by superior Aztec forces. //
The Aztecs brutal system depended on a steady supply of prisoners of war and human children collected from the empire’s subjects as “taxes.” The scale of the murder one could find in just a single outlying Aztec city was astounding. Abbot relays, “they witnessed the most appalling indications of the horrid atrocities of pagan idolatry. They found, piled in order, as they judged, one hundred thousand skulls of human victims who had been offered in sacrifice to their gods.” //
Cornered, and out of options, Cortez decided to lead his men into a final, suicidal charge against the overwhelming odds. Cortez led his rag-tag forces in a frontal assault, mustering all the speed he could out of his wounded, exhausted, and starving forces.
Before the Aztecs could drown them with superior numbers, Cortez’s forces reached the Aztec’s blood-red banner and he seized it. Cortez had fought enough battles with the Aztecs to recognize the banner was a sacred symbol of Aztec authority. With their banner gone, the Aztecs lost morale and panicked, breaking into disorganized chaos. With the chain of command destroyed, Cortez seized one of the most audacious military victories in human history.
Cortez later recaptured the capital city. While Abbott acknowledges that human rights among the Spaniards of the 16th century “were but feebly discerned,” in contrast to the Aztecs, Cortez “treated all the prisoners he took very kindly, and liberated them with presents.” Cortez ended the grotesque practice of human sacrifice and, according to Abbott, “treated the vanquished natives with great courtesy and kindness.”
Cortez was no saint. //
Cortez will never satisfy a 21st century standard of human rights, and many not even be an exemplary leader. Nor did he set out to liberate anyone. Yet, regardless of his motives in Mexico, the outcome must be conceded: Cortez toppled a mass-murdering cult with the assistance of the oppressed.
Maybe more than you think... //
Moscow subsequently declared war on Tokyo on August 8, 1945, two days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and one day before the second bomb fell on Nagasaki (though Western historiography has long emphasized the role of the nuclear attacks in compelling Japan’s surrender, newly available Japanese documents emphasize the importance of the Soviet declaration of war in forcing Tokyo’s hand). //
The dispute over these islands has prevented an agreement formally ending hostilities between Japan and Russia (as the USSR’s legal successor) up to the present. //
With both Russia and Japan increasingly wary of Chinese power in the Asia-Pacific, four sparsely populated outposts at the edge of the Sea of Okhotsk remain in many ways the biggest impediment to a rapprochement between Moscow and Tokyo that could reshape Asian geopolitics.
Stalin’s intervention in the war against Japan came late in the day, but in many ways it continues shaping the Asian security environment six decades later.
Moscow, 4 August, 1945. The European chapter of World War Two was over, and the US and the USSR were pondering their future relationship.
At the American embassy, a group of boys from the Young Pioneer Organization of the Soviet Union made a charming gesture of friendship between the two superpowers.
They presented a large, hand-carved ceremonial seal of the United States of America to Averell Harriman, the US ambassador. It was later to become known simply as The Thing.
Naturally, Harriman's office would have checked the heavy wooden ornament for electronic bugs, but with neither wires nor batteries in evidence, what harm could it do?
Harriman gave The Thing pride of place, hanging on the wall of his study - from where it betrayed his private conversations for the next seven years.
He could not have realised that the device had been built by one of the true originals of the 20th Century.
Leon Theremin was famous even then for his revolutionary eponymous electrical musical instrument, which was played without being touched.
He had been living in the US with his wife, Lavinia Williams, before returning to the Soviet Union in 1938. His wife later said he had been kidnapped. In any case, he was promptly put to work in a prison camp, where he was forced to design, among other listening devices, The Thing.
Eventually, American radio operators stumbled upon the US ambassador's conversations being broadcast over the airwaves. These broadcasts were unpredictable: scan the embassy for radio emissions, and no bug was in evidence. It took yet more time to discover the secret.
The listening device was inside The Thing - and it was ingeniously simple, little more than an antenna attached to a cavity with a silver diaphragm over it, serving as a microphone. There were no batteries or any other source of power. The Thing did not need them.
It was activated by radio waves beamed at the US embassy by the Soviets. It used the energy of the incoming signal to broadcast back. When that signal was switched off, The Thing would go silent.
Much like Theremin's unearthly musical instrument, The Thing might seem a technological curiosity. But the idea of a device that is powered by incoming radio waves, and which sends back information in response, is much more than that.
The RFID tag - short for Radio-Frequency Identification - is ubiquitous in the modern economy.
My passport has one. So does my credit card, enabling me to pay for small items simply by waving it near an RFID reader.
Commander Lightoller gives his version of events on the fateful night in April 1912. He lays great weight on the fact that a warning message about the amount of ice in the area was never delivered to the bridge, seeming to imply that if this news had been received, the accident could have been avoided. The picture depicts the crew of the Titanic, including Captain Edward Smith (centre), who went down with his ship, and Second Officer Charles Herbert Lightoller (third in from right), who was the most senior officer to survive the disaster.
Photo credit: Mary Evans Picture Library.
↗ Originally broadcast 1 November 1936.
Using the coast guard record and other data, the researchers also developed a computer simulation to examine the likely trajectories of icebergs in 1912. Using this model, they were able to trace the likely origin of the iceberg that sank the Titanic to southwest Greenland.
They suggest that it broke off a glacier in that area in early autumn 1911 and started off as a floating hunk measuring roughly 500m long and 300m deep.
Its mass by mid-April 1912 - as predicted by the computer model - agrees very closely with the size of an iceberg bearing a streak of red paint that was photographed by Captain William Squares DeCarteret of the Minia, a ship that joined the search for bodies and wreckage at the site of the disaster. //
"From the moment we left Belfast we had marvellous weather. Even when we got out on the western ocean - the Atlantic as you probably know it - it was as smooth as the proverbial millpond. Not a breath of wind and the sea like a sheet of glass.
In any other circumstances those conditions would have been ideal. But anyone with experience of ice at sea knows that those very conditions, and the moonless night, only render the detection of icebergs more difficult and call for the additional alertness of both officers and men."
-Charles Herbert Lightoller, second officer, RMS Titanic
The first people to dive down to the Titanic in nearly 15 years say some of the wreck is deteriorating rapidly.
Over the course of five submersible dives, an international team of deep-sea explorers surveyed the sunken ship, which lies 3,800m down in the Atlantic.
While parts of the wreck were in surprisingly good condition, other features had been lost to the sea.
The worst decay was seen on the starboard side of the officers' quarters.
Titanic historian Parks Stephenson said some of what he saw during the dive was "shocking".
"The captain's bathtub is a favourite image among Titanic enthusiasts - and that's now gone," he said.
"That whole deck house on that side is collapsing, taking with it the state rooms. And that deterioration is going to continue advancing."
The RMS Titanic has been underwater for more than 100 years, lying about 600km (370 miles) off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.
The passenger liner, which was the largest ship of its time, hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York in 1912. Of the 2,200 passengers and crew onboard, more than 1,500 died.
The dives took place in a 4.6m-long, 3.7m-high submersible - called the DSV Limiting Factor - which was built by the US-based company Triton Submarines.
In August 1976, North Korean soldiers attacked a group of US and South Korean men trimming a poplar tree in the heavily-guarded zone that divides the two Koreas.
Two US officers were bludgeoned to death with axes and clubs.
After three days of deliberations going all the way up to the White House, the US decided to respond with a colossal show of force.
Hundreds of men - backed by helicopters, B52 bombers and an aircraft carrier task force - were mobilised to cut back the poplar.
Rowland Hill was a former schoolmaster, whose only experience of the Post Office in the 1830s was as a disgruntled user.
Nobody had asked him to come up with detailed proposals for completely revamping it. He did the research in his spare time, wrote up his analysis, and sent it off privately to the chancellor of the exchequer, naively confident that "a right understanding of my plan must secure its adoption". //
What were the problems Hill identified? Back then, you did not pay to send a letter. You paid to receive one. The pricing formula was complicated and usually prohibitively expensive.
Hill's solution was a bold two-step reform.
Senders, not recipients, would be asked to pay for postage; and it would be cheap - one penny, regardless of distance, for letters of up to half an ounce, 14g.
Hill thought it would be worth running the post at a loss, to stimulate what he called "the productive power of the country".
But he made the case that profits would actually go up, because if letters were cheaper to send, people would send more of them.
A few years ago the Indian-born economist CK Prahalad argued that there was a fortune to be made by catering to what he called "the bottom of the pyramid", the poor and lower-middle class of the developing world.
They did not have a lot of money as individuals, but they had a lot of money when you put them all together.
Hill was more than 150 years ahead of him.
In 1840, the first year of Penny Post, the number of letters sent more than doubled. Within 10 years, it had doubled again.
It took only three years for postage stamps to be introduced in Switzerland and Brazil, a little longer in America, and by 1860, they were in 90 countries. Hill had shown that the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid was there to be mined.
Half a century on from Hill's Penny Post, deliveries in London were as frequent as hourly, and replies were expected by "return of post".
But did the Penny Post also diffuse useful knowledge, and stimulate productive power?
A group of economists recently came up with an ingenious test of this idea in the United States. They gathered data on the spread of post offices in the 19th Century, and the number of applications for patents from different parts of the country.
New post offices did indeed predict more inventiveness, just as Hill would have expected.
A history lesson that needs to be learned and understood.
How did this accident even happen? Some articles in the press characterized the subs as having been involved in a cat-and-mouse game that had gone too far. Indeed, such games were common between the attack submarines of rival nations, and had resulted in collisions in the past.
However, that account remains unlikely because a submarine can only play a cat-and-mouse game if it is able to detect the other ship. And in the shallow waters off of Kildin Island, it is unlikely either vessel could.
It’s tempting to think of sonar as a sort of radar that works underwater. However, water is a far less compliant medium than air even for the most modern sensors, and wind conditions, temperature variations and sounds rebounding off the ocean floor can all dramatically degrade its performance. When attempting to detect the extremely quiet submarines currently in use, just a few adverse factors can turn a very difficult task into an impossible one.
Therefore, a submarine spying close to an adversary’s home port might not be able to spot another submarine heading towards it until after the collision—which can be worse than embarrassing for everyone involved.
On February 11, 1992, the USS Baton Rouge, a nuclear-powered Los Angeles–class attack submarine, was lurking twenty meters deep in the shallow waters off of Kildin Island, fourteen miles away from the Russian port of Murmansk.
Lost in ancient Londinium: "I went to Rome, and all I brought you was this pen." //
"I have come from the City. I bring you a welcome gift with a sharp point that you may remember me,” reads the Latin inscription on the 2,000-year-old iron stylus. “I ask, if fortune allowed, that I might be able [to give] as generously as the way is long [and] as my purse is empty." The “City" almost certainly refers to Rome, and the souvenir stylus essentially boasts a more flowery version of today’s “I went to Rome, and all I brought you was this pen.”
The stylus dates to around 70 CE—about 20 years after the founding of Roman Londinium, a decade after a Celtic uprising burned it to the ground and about 50 years before the first stones were laid for Hadrian’s Wall. It’s among 14,000 artifacts unearthed during the construction of Bloomberg’s European headquarters starting in 2013, and conservators are finally ready to put it on display. //
These finds speak to a reality of this ancient world: people travelled constantly from North Africa and across Europe along the Roman road system, and then by ship to London, bringing ideas and beliefs with them. One of those travelers also seems to have brought a cheap souvenir for a friend back home.
In England, Guglielmo Marconi began his wireless experiments in 1895, and on 2 June 1896 filed his provisional specification of a patent for wireless telegraphy. He demonstrated the system to the British Post Office in July. The British patent was accepted on 2 July 1897, and the US equivalent on 13 July 1897. In March 1896, Alexandr Popov demonstrated a similar wireless system in Russia, having demonstrated a more rudimentary system a year earlier.
Apollo Guidance Computer software engineer, "invented" virtual machines for AGC (which explains how it was able to prioritize during the 12-02 alarms in Apollo 11 landing).
Irredeemability
As an adjective, irredeemable means “not redeemable; incapable of being bought back or paid off,” but Hamilton took the term one step further. Irredeemability is a noun largely credited to the founding father, who used it in a letter to then President George Washington in August 18, 1792.
Un-apportioned
Sometimes all it takes to popularize a new word is to add a prefix (or suffix) to an old one. Apportioned means “distributed or allocated proportionally.” Un-apportioned, on the other hand, means the opposite, something scholars believe we owe to Maria Reynold’s famous beau.
Misstep
These days most people know that to make a misstep is “to commit an error or slip in conduct.” But, it’s believed that we wouldn’t have the word if it weren’t for old Alex H., who combined the prefix mis-, which negates the second part of a word, with step in the book: The Federalist.
Implied powers
The average citizen may not use this term every day, but it’s no less important. Hamilton is thought to have written a 15,000-word essay laying out the counter doctrine of implied powers in just one night, an essay that would convince Washington to approve the creation of the first bank of the United States.
Receivable
It’s no surprise that many of the terms Hamilton is believed to have added to the lexicon relate to finance. He was the father of our modern banking system, after all. The entire accounts receivable department has Eliza’s husband to thank for their job titles.
Skeleton
OK, so technically the word for ‘dem bones existed before Hamilton came along, but he’s credited with offering a new usage that’s still used today: “reduced to the essential or minimal parts or numbers.” If you’ve ever worked with a skeleton crew, you can raise a glass (or a fist out of frustration) to Alexander Hamilton for giving you the word to describe it.
H. Ross Perot was more than an eccentric Billionaire turned politician. David Webb says he was “larger than life. Red State’s Colonel Mike Ford agrees. //
Perot is also a legend in American Military circles. We’ve all heard the old adage: There are 3 types of people; Those Who Make Things Happen, Those Who Watch Things Happen, and Those Who Wonder What Happened. Perot wasn’t someone who things happened to, or who continually wondered, “What happened?” He made things happen. //
Mr. Webb wrapped up the segment declaring Ross Perot as “larger than life.” He’s right. H. Ross Perot, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, understood what any military commander knows; Your subordinates/employees are more than just that, they are your personal responsibility.
Two hundred years after the first Africans were transported to America against their will, their descendants sailed back to the land of their ancestors. Soon, thousands of freeborn Blacks and former slaves settled on Africa's west coast, in the land that would become Liberia, named for the liberty they so dearly sought. Liberia's growth from a "colony" with a coastline barely 600 miles long to a modern state was not without challenges, but nothing prepared Liberians for the country's devastating civil war that began on Christmas Eve, 1989, and lasted seven long years.
The untold story of America's African progeny is presented in Liberia: America's Stepchild. This dramatic documentary follows the parallel stories of America's relationship with the African republic of Liberia -- founded and backed by the American Colonization Society (ACS) and the U.S. government as a home for freeborn Blacks and former slaves -- and the settlers' relationship with the indigenous people. As seen through the eyes of Liberian filmmaker Nancee Oku Bright, the film also explores the causes of the turmoil that has ravaged Liberia since 1980.
"Today people generally think of Liberia as a disaster, but it was not always so," says producer Nancee Oku Bright. "Liberia was a founding member of the United Nations and one of the key initiators of the Organization of African Unity. It was the only Black republic in the sea of colonial Africa, and it made the colonizers very uncomfortable and the Africans very proud.
It's nearly 50 years since the US became the first country to land men on the Moon.
The Apollo 11 mission was a huge moment in US and world history, but what exactly happened and why does it matter?
Overview of Liberia's history, ca. AD1200 - AD2000