30 MAY-3 JUNE 1997 OPERATION “NOBLE OBELISK” The Clinton administration’s National Security Strategy emphasized “selective engagement” in world affairs where US interests were at stake. And by the mid-1990s, US armed forces had executed a dizzying succession of peacekeeping, non-combatant evacuations Read More
26 MAY 1960 GREAT SEAL BUG On 4 August 1945, as WWII ended, a Moscow school children’s group, the Young Pioneers, presented US Ambassador W. Averell Harriman with a gift of friendship–a 2-foot carved wooden likeness of the Great Seal of Read More
200th ANNIVERSARY 22 MAY 1823 AVENGING CAPTAIN PERKINS On 1 March 1823 the American merchant brig Belisarius of Kennebunk, Maine, departed Port au Prince, Haiti, bound for Mexico. The new-found independence of such former Spanish colonies as Venezuela, Colombia, and Read More
17 MAY 1987 ATTACK ON USS STARK On 22 September 1980, years of animosity between Iran and Iraq erupted into a shooting war. Early in that conflict Iranian jets destroyed Iraq’s only Persian Gulf oil terminal, greatly hindering the flow of Read More
100th ANNIVERSARY 12 MAY 1923 THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF PETE ELLIS After World War I several of defeated Germany’s Pacific island possessions passed to Japan under a League of Nations mandate. Japan’s subsequent fortification of these islands in defiance of the Read More
5 MAY 1863 QUEEN’S CREEK RAID Evasion by a Confederate blockade runner was no small embarrassment to the Union ships whose job it was to isolate the South. And when a small cutter was observed running goods up the Piankatank River Read More