In the last months of the American Civil War, the upper Texas coast became a hive of blockade running. Though Texas was often considered an isolated backwater in the conflict, the Union’s pervasive and systematic seizure of southern ports left Galveston as one of the only strongholds of foreign imports in the anemic supply chain to embattled Confederate forces.
USS Tang was a Balao Class submarine commissioned in October 1943, and served in the Pacific Theater of operations during World War II. Her gifted and aggressive skipper, commander Richard O’Kane, was a man after the heart of Britain’s ghost admiral, Horatio Nelson, whose advice to any English Navy Captain during the Napoleonic War was, “To hell with manuveurs! Go straight at ’em.”
Can history help us forecast America’s future? Which are the patterns and leveraging powers that determine a nation’s global leadership? Since their inception millennia ago, sea transport and logistics practices have shaped the history of mankind, via the global exchange of commodities and the use of technologies, military strategies, sciences, languages, cultures and rules
The Bicentennial Project of the Port of Houston by artist Judith-Ann Saks depicts the amazing history of a determined little inland town that wanted to be a port. From a meandering bayou to a first class port, Houston has achieved remarkable accomplishments – a port that is first in the United States in foreign waterborne tonnage, first in US imports and exports, and second in US total tonnage.
The challenges of man and machines operating in the harsh arctic winter environment have led to progressively more sophisticated marine vessels and machinery. The evaluation of arctic environmental conditions both weather and topography have challenged naval architects to continuously seek unique solutions to navigation and indeed vessel survival.
The USS Westfield wreckage lay in the murky waters of the Texas City ship channel until 2009, when the disarticulated artifact debris field was recovered by Atkins Global (formerly PBS&J) during a dredging operation organized and orchestrated by the U.S. Corp of Engineers, making this Texas’ largest marine archaeology rescue project to date.
James Dunwoody Bulloch’s central place in history has always rested on his Civil War era achievements as a secret agent of the Confederate States Navy in Europe. He gained fame for having brought into being the Confederate States cruisers Florida, Alabama and Shenandoah. Less well known are his illustrious Georgia ancestors, who were so firmly entwined with the earliest American colonial experience, and his prominent family connections—he was the uncle of the 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt
On March 24, 1989, Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker bound for Long
Beach, CA, struck Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska at 12:04 a.m. local time, and spilled 260,000 barrels of crude oil in the first couple tides.
To reach the Port of Houston’s Turning Basin, a ship must travel 50 miles along a narrow and twisting channel that passes through Galveston, the San Jacinto River, and Buffalo Bayou. Despite this improbable location, Houston has the world’s largest landlocked port. The Port of Houston is cited as “irreplaceable,” by Colliers International, as “the defining engine of our economy and culture,” by Cite magazine, and as the generator of more than one million jobs and $180 billion of regional economic activity by Marin Associates.
The Vietnam War was the longest in American history, and challenged naval aviation not only on carrier decks, but along the coasts and rivers as well. Captain T.J. Brown will take a candid look at U.S. naval airpower in Southeast Asia from his adventures as an attack pilot on the USS Hancock from 1971 to 1974 and later experiences on the USS Enterprise and USS Constellation.
