July 2011
2 posts
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Delaware Makes First Quasi-War Capture, 7 July... →
The title says it all. If you are at all interested in this war, time period, or what have you, then I highly suggest picking up Ian Toll’s book, Six Frigates. He gives an excellent, rousing account of the Quasi-War and the War of 1812. Click the title to go to the original post from the Naval History Blog.
June 2011
2 posts
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Evidence of fish tanks on Roman ships →
(Original article link in title) A lead pipe found on a wreck of a Roman ship has led experts to suggest that this may be the only remaining evidence of on-board fish tanks. We do know that the Romans possessed the technology necessary for such a device to have been a reality (i.e. pump and piston mechanisms). Some researchers say that the fish tanks open up all new possibilities of trade and...
May 2011
2 posts
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USS Triton Circumnavigates the Globe | Naval... →
May 10, 1960
(Link in title) The USS Triton completes a submerged circumnavigation of the globe in only 84 days. The mission was called Operation Sandblast and was a first in history. The sub followed routes taken by Magellan, making the voyage even more historically relevant. At the time, the Triton was the largest and most expensive submarine the world had ever known.
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Scurvy Awareness Day | May 2nd →
This site was too awesome not to post (click title for link). Enjoy, and happy Scurvy Awareness Day to everyone!!
April 2011
1 post
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Confirmed: Y. pestis bacteria caused the Black... →
A very interesting blog post from The History Blog (click on above title for link) concerning the (now-known) microbial origins of the Black Death. Yersinia Pestis, the causative pathogen, is known to infect hosts, such as rats and fleas, and then be transmitted to humans. The three known types of plagues (i.e. bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic) were responsible for countless deaths in the...
March 2011
2 posts
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February 2011
3 posts
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Leaving comments FYI
The comments link might be easy to use, but it’s even easier to miss! Should anyone want to leave a comment on any post on my main blog page, just press the “n comments” link (n = however many comments that post has) which is located at the bottom of the post usually next to the date and time stamp. Insightful/not-so-insightful comments are always welcome.
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Some interesting maritime links from the last...
Image via Wikipedia
Picked up a few links in my browsing over the last few weeks that I thought were worth sharing. Enjoy and let me know what you think of any of the stories!
1861: Superior Naval Bureaucracy (Naval History Blog)
New York City Honors USS United States, 7 January 1813 (Naval History Blog)
The Navy and the Nation in the 1740s (NMM Collections Blog)
Dear Diary, You’ll...
January 2011
1 post
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Watercolor Images from The Battle of Waterloo
Above is a watercolor image originally painted by a Scottish surgeon and gifted artist named Charles Bell. During the Battle of Waterloo, Bell witnessed many horrific and gruesome injuries, many of which he was careful to record and then transform into medical artwork.
From the Wellcome Library’s blog:
Leaving for Belgium on 26 June 1815, Bell took with him his surgical instruments...
December 2010
3 posts
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Any good books on The Restoration, naval or...
Image via Wikipedia
I recently completed J.D. Davies’ fiction work, Gentleman Captain, my first foray into the world of naval historical fiction, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I am preparing a review of it shortly, but wanted also to ask readers if they had any recommendations on books pertaining to this period in British history? I am mainly referring to the period involving Oliver...
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Turning bombs into...furniture? →
Old Salt Blog just posted an interesting albeit slightly odd story about an Estonian sculptor named Mati Karwin, who is apparently creating furniture with the marine mine husks left behind by the Soviets when they pulled out of Naissaar Island area following the Cold War. Go to his site here. Pictures from the website below.
A bit of the story, and the history, behind Karmin’s...
November 2010
4 posts
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John Wesley Powell's Water-based States: How the... →
A very interesting article that gives us a “what if” scenario where the layout of the states in the American West would have been based on irrigation systems and watershed areas. The map is the product of John Wesley Powell’s, a mogul in the history of the exploration and management of the western states, proposed borders for states based upon said water sources. The face of...
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Wasp vs. Frolic -- The Story
Image via Wikipedia
To give a little background to the picture I put up the other day from the Naval History Blog, I figured I would give some more details on just what the battle between the USS Wasp and the HMS Frolic was.
The Frolic had left the Gulf of Honduras on September 12, 1812 to convoy fourteen merchantmen to Britain. A strong gale soon scattered the convoy and forced the Frolic to...
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Some interesting maritime links from the last...
Image via Wikipedia
I have collected some very interesting and worthwhile maritime history and naval history-related links over the past month or so, and figured I would collect and share them here. Enjoy and comments welcome, as always.
A Good Boatswain is Hard to Find - Naval History Blog
Eyewitness to Trafalgar 205 Years Ago Today - Old Salt Blog
Ships Ahoy! They don’t make ships...
October 2010
8 posts
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Added a Tag Cloud link
I added a “Tag Cloud” link to the navigation at the top of my blog. I figured this would make it easier for people to navigate my posts based on which topic they were interested in. Just click the link and it should generate a list of all the tags from my posts in alphabetical order with the most-used tags being a larger size than those used less often.
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NOAA releases Civil War chart collection
Next year is the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and in recognition of that fact the NOAA has crafted and released a package of Civil War era maps, nautical charts, and documents called “Charting a More Perfect Union”. These documents were actually prepared during the Civil War (1861-65) by the U.S. Coast Survey.
From the statement by the NOAA:
Coast Survey’s collection...
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Murder and "True Crime" Pamphlets at the National... →
Morbid Anatomy posted on a research collection that any historian would die for (cheese — but how could I resist?) This collection over the NLM seems to be a very unique composite source for those interested in the history of medicine, the history of forensics and homicide, or even a view into the human mind’s perpetual (and seemingly timeless) fascination with “true...
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10 Fascinating (and strange) Maps →
“From the USSR’s Be On Guard! map in 1921 to Google Earth, a new exhibition at the British Library charts the extraordinary documents that transformed the way we view the globe forever”
This collection of maps (click title) from the exhibition at the British Library has some very unique entries. Right now my favorite is a toss up between the Chinese globe and the...
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Binding Wounds, Pushing Boundaries -- African... →
A very interesting site (click the title) concerning a little-known (at least to me) role that many African Americans played in the Civil War. The site has a number of great educational resources to help inform as to how the Civil War, in many ways, actually helped to break down the barriers preventing blacks from careers in medicine. It was, of course, quite some time before they were fully...
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Happy Birthday to USNI →
An interesting post from the Naval History blog at the link above (click the title), detailing the founding and mission of the US Naval Institute to honor the Navy. Rear Admiral Bradley A. Fiske said of the Institute in 1919:
“Without some such stimulus as the Institute, the navy would be less a profession and more like a trade; we would less like artists, and more like artisans; we would...
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A Review of Six Frigates by Ian W. Toll -- Part 1:...
USS Chesapeake - Image via Wikipedia
Where to begin with such an astounding accomplishment of a book? Though I try to read quite often, particularly in the fields of maritime and naval history, it is a rarity that I find a book as fulfilling and inspiring as this one. From the author’s own website: “Ian W. Toll has been a Wall Street analyst, a Federal Reserve financial analyst, and a...
September 2010
7 posts
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Did Nelson's Medals Make Him a Target at... →
This article says it very well might have. It seems that one of the descendants of Admiral Sir Richard Goodwin Keats, the man who received Nelson’s medals upon his death in 1805 at the Battle of Trafalgar, decided to put the medal on auction (on October 22nd) after all these centuries.
The medal is Nelson’s Breast Star of the Order of the Bath, pictured at left. It is quite...
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A Discussion of Lincoln and His Admirals by Craig...
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I recently finished Lincoln and His Admirals by Craig Symonds, Professor Emeritus at the Naval War College in Rhode Island. In it he goes to great lengths characterizing a lesser-known aspect of the Civil War, namely the naval war. This is not to say that such actions have not been characterized previously, in fact, reading Symonds’ work has piqued my interest in the naval...
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Some interesting maritime links
Image via Wikipedia
Thought these were some interesting maritime history-related links that I came across while browsing RSS feeds, and were worth sharing. I found the piece on the quest to find John Paul Jones’ flagship, the Bonhomme Richard, to be particularly of interest. Enjoy!
New Titanic Pictures Mark 25th Anniversary of Discovery
BBC News - Divers steal from Holland 5 submarine...
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A Forest of Masts: The Image of the River Thames... →
Thought this was an interesting post (title is the link) from the National Maritime Museum of the UK’s blog. I hope to write up some more of my own stuff soon; we were without internet for sometime…I’d like to think that qualifies as “roughing it” in this day and age.
More to come!
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Ancient Brain Surgery!
Image via Wikipedia
http://bit.ly/932zHv
The above link leads to an article detailing how archaeologists have discovered what appear to be tools utilized in brain surgeries performed nearly 4000 years ago.
The obsidian blades have been found in the Black Sea province of Samsun in Turkey. Questioning of the archaeologists yielded some very interesting finds as detailed below:
What makes you...
August 2010
6 posts
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Friend of mine trying to publish...any ideas?
A friend of mine has been working on a broad work of American History, and though much more work in the way of editing and finalizing needs to be done, I offered to ask here if anyone had published any similar type of historical work, and if so, which publisher they used?
Any information from anyone who has published similar work, or a dissimilar work but published somewhat independantly would be...
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Some pictures from Mystic Seaport
Image via Wikipedia
Just got back from our trip to Mystic Seaport. It was a great time despite torrential rain, and we really enjoyed seeing the tall ships and perusing the dank holds; it really gives you a sense of what these whalers and seamen had to go through on their months-years long voyages. There’s a great museum there that explores the ocean’s impact on American history...
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Commenting on posts...
Should anyone want to post a comment, this can be done by clicking on the number of comments shown below (i.e. 0 comments as shown below this post [sad]). It might be slightly less obvious than before so figured I’d mention it.
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New blog layout is up at Tumblr!
Hello all, I’ve finally manages to (mostly) migrate my blog over to Tumblr complete with a new, somewhat streamlined layout as you can see. I’d love feedback on the new design! The web address and RSS feed should be exactly the same as the previous blog, requiring no effort on the part of the reader. In other words, you should not need to change a thing.
I have a trip to Mystic...
July 2010
3 posts
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New containment cap may have been created by...
Joe the Plumber (not that one) says he helped stop Gulf oil spill leak - CSMonitor.com
See the above link to the Christian Science Monitor’s article. My previous post(s) may have been more prescient than I anticipated! It seems that BP did indeed use about 100 ideas (of the more than 300,000) that were submitted to them in one way or another as they attempted damage control of the oil...
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Lessons From the Past: Longitude and the BP Oil...
NOTICE: Written before the new cap was placed over the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
“Time is to clock as mind is to brain. The clock or watch somehow contains the time. And yet time refuses to be bottled up like a genie stuffed in a lamp. Whether it flows as or turns on wheels within wheels, time escapes irretrievably, while we watch. Even when the bulbs of the hourglass...
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18th Century Ship Found Buried in Lower Manhattan
18th Century Ship Found Buried at New York’s World Trade Center Site : Old Salt Blog – a virtual port of call for all those who love the sea
Old Salt Blog put out the above article detailing the remains of an 18th century ship found buried below ground in lower Manhattan. It always amazes me when I hear about historical artifacts or architecture found in areas that one least expects. I...
June 2010
4 posts
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Wellcome and NIH to study African Chronic Disease...
I thought this was a noteworthy undertaking. The prevalence of disease in Africa can hopefully be better understood and TREATED through the use of genetic analysis. Obviously a huge undertaking with many consequences and factors, but interesting and with wide-reaching implications nonetheless. The article is from Nature’s blog The Great Beyond (link: http://bit.ly/aTsbCO). Wellcome and...
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Phew!
Anyone here ever had to move? Had to pack up all your precious belongings into tiny boxes and evaluate which things to keep or throw away? It was pretty stressful, but thankfully it’s now over (for the most part) and things can return to some semblance of normal. I have my medical licensing boards later this summer, so I cannot say that posting will be super-regular, however I’ll do...
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Hornblower TV Series
Image via Wikipedia
To tide some folks over, I have uploaded the first part of the first episode of the Hornblower TV series starring Ioan Gruffudd. The wife and I watched the series in its entirety recently and really enjoyed it. If you follow this video to YouTube, you can find the other parts along the right hand side (I believe the first episode, The Duel, is split into 11 parts). There...
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Just an FYI...
We are in the process of moving to a new apartment and all that might entail. It isn’t too exciting (understatement) but it is time-consuming. Posts might be light for the next 2 or 3 weeks as things are relatively hectic around here! Thanks for all the recent views and comments.
May 2010
8 posts
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Happy Memorial Day!
Remembering all those who served, and thanking those who continue to serve in the US armed forces.
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A "Top Kill" Animation
Below is an animation detailing how BP’s “top kill” operation will work, in theory. They are funneling thick, heavy mud down into the oil piping in order to stop the flow. They are also considering adding a “junk shot” on top of that, comprised of golf balls and old tires amongst other things. The video speaks for itself. Here’s hoping it actually...