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Gibraltar finally joined the official list of British cities on Monday (Aug 29), after 180 years in which its status, granted by Queen Victoria, had been overlooked due to an administrative error. The British overseas territory bid to become a city earlier this year as part of the celebrations for Queen Elizabeth's Platinum Jubilee, but research in the National Archives established it had in fact been granted city status in 1842. "It is excellent to see official recognition given to the City of Gibraltar, a huge accolade to its rich history and dynamism," British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in...

Ah, Alaska, America's 49th state and the Last Frontier. The home of salmon, gold, oil, and many kinds of wildlife. And a potential place of origin for World War III. In 1867, the Russian Tsar sold the territory of Russian America to the United States. The territory wasn't doing the Tsar much good, never really turning a profit, and proving to be an unnecessary thorn in the Empire's already strained relationship with the UK (which owned Canada), so the Russian government was open to any reasonable opportunity to offload it. Russia and the US being rather buddy-buddy in the 1850s...

For a brief moment, the isolated port of Petropavlovsk became an active front in the Crimean War. The ensuing battle was more farcical than heroic. The Crimean War is usually considered a Black Sea conflict, but it actually took place on several frontiers of the Russian empire, including the Baltic and White Seas. In the summer of 1854, the Pacific squadrons of three nations—Russia, Great Britain, and France—fought the most unusual and anachronistic action of the war on the distant and forbidding Kamchatka Peninsula. The ships, tactics, and commanders involved in that battle seemed more appropriate for Admiral Horatio Nelson’s...

Camelot and King Arthur's Court, Knights of the Round Table, Guinevere, Sir Lancelot, Sir Galahad, and the search for the Holy Grail ... (The Holy Grail was Jesus' cup at the Last Supper.) Our imaginations soar with history and legend immortalized in "Idylls of the King," written 1859-85 by poet Alfred Lord Tennyson. Alfred Lord Tennyson embellished the medieval legend of the Lady of the Lake who gave the sword Excalibur to the courageous young King Arthur. Scenes of this were portrayed in Disney's 1963 animated musical fantasy movie, The Sword in the Stone. Born AUGUST 6, 1809, Alfred Lord...

Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt (wiki) in 1415, when the English under King Henry V defeated the French on St. Crispin's Day (25 October) of that year. Henry (1387-1422) followed his father King Henry IV to the throne in 1413 and two years later announced his claim to the French throne and rekindled the Hundred Years War by invading Normandy. This is also the anniversary of the "the charge of the Light Brigade" (wiki) at the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854. Although of relatively little importance in the larger context of the Crimean War,...

When an army is engaged in war at a considerable distance from the frontiers of its own country, and, consequently, from the base of operations on which it must chiefly rely for stores and reinforcements, it is a fundamental principle of military administration to prepare and keep up, as it were, in an unbroken stream, those supplies on which the efficiency of the army depends. The troops actually in presence of the enemy form but a part, and sometimes a small part, of the force to be included in the whole estimate of the campaign. They are the head of...

The Crimean War was the first major war to be covered by professional foreign correspondents, who reported on the disastrous blundering of commanders and the horrors of medical treatment at the battlefront. Today, we remember fragmentary stories: the charge of the Light Brigade, symbolizing the blundering; Florence Nightingale, for the medical treatment. But the real war has faded away, eclipsed by the two vastly worse world wars that were to come. Still, the Crimean War — in which three-quarters of a million soldiers and untold multitudes of civilians perished — shattered almost four decades of European peace. It inflamed Russia’s...