(Photo of fireworks over Ft. Henry by Rich Dennis...  ...and naval professionals might well be enough.The geography of Baltimore offered the defenders substantial ad...

(Painting by Julian O. Davidson)For Americans, Se...  ...tions also grasped its significance. In his naval history of that war, Theodore Roosevelt referred to the B...  ...le of the war.” Winston Churchill, in his A History of the English Speaking Peoples, called it the &l...

(Photo: Dr. Russ Bellico/Bateaux Below)That headline requires a bit of unpacking. If you do some math, you'll find that that number gives us an origin of 1758, which is 18 years before the United States came into existen...

USS New OrleansWe are now in the midst of the bicentennial of the War of 1812. I find this war fascinating and my interest has led me to write numerous posts on the subject for Neatorama. For example, last Sunday, I pub...

(Photo: Maria Ly)Guangxi Province, on China’s border with Vietnam, contains this natural wonder known as Moon Hill. The mountain is called that because the hole that goes straight through it is shaped like the moon...

(Photo via Afflictor)Camels existed in the Americas until about 10,000 years ago, when they were most likely hunted to extinction. The New World was then camel-less until 1856, when the US Army imported dromedary (one-hu...

(Mural by Allyn Cox, U.S. Department of State)Two hundred years ago, the United States was locked in a bitter struggle against the British Empire known as the War of 1812. For the new republic, the stakes were profoundly...

(Photo: Mac Dor)This is the Levanter Cloud, an unusual and beautiful cloud formation that appears on Gibraltar. That promontory rises high into the air before the Levanter, a wind that blows west out of the Mediterranean...

(Photo: Nicholas Jones)And you would, too, if your local temperatures regularly rose to 125ºF!Coober Pedy is a mining town in Australia. If it weren't for the huge opal reserves here, no one would live in this hells...

(Photo: Yellow.Cat)This is the Tower of Hercules near La Coruña, Spain--the northwestern tip of the Iberian peninsula. It may be the only ancient lighthouse still in use. It's possible that a Phoenician work prece...