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Swan Song for the CSS Shenandoah

By Mark Simmons

The River Mersey was fog shrouded on the morning of November 6, 1865, and the city of Liverpool was scarcely visible from the deck of the CSS Shenandoah. Read more

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Survival: The Story of the USS Franklin

By Chuck Lyons

The USS Franklin was not a lucky ship. In March 1945, off the Japanese mainland, the Essex-class aircraft carrier was hit by two 550-pound bombs that struck her flight deck and penetrated into the hangar deck. Read more

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Mark Twain Joins the Marion Rangers

By Roy Morris, Jr.

Twenty-five-year-old Mississippi River pilot Samuel Clemens (not yet known by his famous pen name, Mark Twain) was in his home port of New Orleans in late January 1861 when word reached the city that Louisiana had seceded from the Union. Read more

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From Sahara’s Heart: Unearthing A Curtiss P-40 Kittyhawk

By Michael Haskew

The ghosts of World War II continue to surface in remote corners of the globe.

Decades after the war in North Africa ended, another reminder of the early and uncertain days in that theater came to the attention of the media and excited historians with a snapshot of a pilot’s ordeal in the unforgiving Egyptian desert where he was forced to land a crippled fighter plane. Read more

Hours after their marriage in the depths of the Führer's Berlin bunker, Adolf Hitler and his longtime mistress Eva Braun took their own lives.

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Eva Braun’s Final Days

by Michael Haskew

With his dream of Nazi domination of the world shattered, Adolf Hitler went underground in April 1945. Beneath the smoldering ruins of the Nazi capital city of Berlin, he lived out his last delusional days in the Führerbunker, a somber subterranean prison of steel and concrete. Read more

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Cornelius Gurlitt’s Secret Nazi Art Collection

By Michael E. Haskew

Reclusive 80-year-old Cornelius Gurlitt kept his secret for nearly 70 years. Apparently, in February 2012, a treasure trove of paintings confiscated or stolen by the Nazis was recovered in the old man’s Munich apartment. Read more

Forty years after the death of Napoleon Bonaparte on the island of St. Helena, his body was entombed in a sarcophagus at Les Invalides in Paris.

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The Tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte

by Michael Haskew

Exiled on the island of St. Helena since his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte, once Emperor of France and master of the greatest expanse of European territory since the days of the Roman Empire, died at the age of 51 on May 5, 1821. Read more

Tanks entered combat for the first time in history on September 15, 1916, with British troops at Flers Courcelette during the Battle of the Somme.

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The Birth of Tank Warfare at the Battle of the Somme

By Michael Haskew

“We heard strange throbbing noises, and lumbering slowly towards us came three huge mechanical monsters such as we had never seen before,” remembered Bert Chaney, a 19-year-old officer in the Signal Corps of the British Army. Read more

Locals still live with reminders of the Chattanooga Campaign and its aftermath 150 years after the American Civil War.

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The Chattanooga Campaign: Then and Now

by Roy Morris, Jr.

Living in Chattanooga is a little like living inside a museum. American Civil War reminders are all around: many of us remember going as students on field trips to Point Park and Chickamauga Battlefield and spending long Sunday afternoons driving with our families along the winding, monument-strewn Crest Road on Missionary Ridge. Read more

Though hydrofoil boats were very effective in their initial combat tours, financial difficulties prevented further implementation after Vietnam.

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Famous Navy Ships: The Hydrofoil Boat

by Brad Reynolds

Hydrofoil boat technology was first tested during Operation Market Time in the Vietnam War. This technology, invented in the early 1900s, had never been applied to combat vessels until the U.S. Read more

The long retreat during the Russian winter of 1812 doomed Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grand Armee, and brought defeat at the hands of the Sixth Coalition.

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Napoleon Bonaparte & The Russian Winter of 1812

by Michael Haskew

Although the French Empire and Imperial Russia were nominal allies following their agreement of mutual support concluded at Tilsit in 1807, divergent interests drove a wedge between them in subsequent years. Read more

On the Obersalzburg, Eva Braun remained in the shadows of Hitler's entourage although it was apparent to the gathering that their relationship was in fact quite close.

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Adolf Hitler & Eva Braun At the Obersalzburg

by Michael Haskew

Eva Braun was only 17 when she met Adolf Hilter in 1929, and 33 when she joined her husband of only a few hours on the sofa in a sitting room of the Führerbunker, deep beneath the war-torn streets of Berlin. Read more