In the early months of the war, the sheltered waters of Pamlico Sound provided a perfect base for Confederate privateers to breach the Union maritime blockade and raid passing commercial shipping. To protect its raiders, North Carolina built two forts, Hatteras and Clark on a narrow island shielding the Sound.... More
The Dismal Swamp canal and the Pasquotank River connected Elizabeth City to the Norfolk naval base in Virginia. The Union army had intelligence that a small fleet of Confederate ‘ironclads’ (steam propelled warships) were being built at Norfolk, with the intention of destroying the Union blockade further south. The Union’s... More
Millennial Southeast Asia was a cockpit of contending powers, with city-states, land-based and maritime empires jockeying for dominance. For Srivijaya, control of the seas was key, in particular, the Straits of Malacca and Sunda skirting its Sumatran power base, Palembang. From here, it exploited the lucrative China-India trade, feeding the... More
The Chinese Jin Dynasty had driven the Song Dynasty to the south of China. But, in 1161, they won two decisive naval battles using new-fangled paddle-wheel warships mounted with trebuchets. Thereafter, they remained secure until the arrival of the Mongols. To the south, Srivijaya was in decline, enervated by competition... More
Kublai Khan conquered, but did not occupy, Burma, preferring to leave it weak and fragmented. The Shan hilltribes exploited the resultant instability, raiding constantly before strong successor states emerged in the late 14th century: the Ava kingdom of Upper Burma and the Hanthawaddy kingdom in Pegu. The poetically named ‘Kingdom... More
During the 15th century, Muslim traders and itinerant Sufist mystics spread Islam widely through Southeast Asia. As the Hindu maritime empire of Majapahit collapsed (finally conquered by the Sultanate of Demak in 1526), a throng of Islamic sultanates filled the vacuum. The Bruneian Empire had outposts in the Phillippines and... More
Spain began colonization of the Philippines in the 1560s, and through Philip II’s annexation of Portugal (1580) effectively inherited the latter’s established East Indies trading network. Desperate to emulate Spanish colonial wealth, the British and Dutch moved into the region, both opening bases in Bantam (1602, 1603), centre of the... More
The maritime kingdom of Srivijaya was the most powerful society in Southeast Asia for much of the latter half of the first millennium CE and the beginning of the second millennium CE. It was a thalassocracy (sea-based empire), and came to prominence as a large trading, manufacturing, commercial and religious... More
The first sustained British colony in the Americas was established in Virginia in 1607. To Virginia’s south, some patchy settlement occurred in Albemarle in the 1650s, but formal colonization of the Carolinas would only occur after the granting of a Royal Charter in 1663. In 1670, the Treaty of Madrid... More
Following the Allied landings in Italy at the beginning of September, the new Italian leadership reached an armistice with the Allies on 3 September, following the ousting of Mussolini on 25 July. This left the Germans to retreat northwards as the Allies made quick progress through the southern regions of... More
The Lwów–Sandomierz Offensive was launched in July 1944 using troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front under the command of General Ivan Konev. The offensive coincided with other Red Army operations further north, including the Lublin–Brest Offensive and Operation Bagration, which aimed to liberate Belorussia, in an attempt to draw German... More
Spanish exploration of the Southwest in the 16th century was spurred by a vain search for the fabled Seven Cities of Gold. Their expeditions fed on native reports – no doubt filtered through a prism of avarice – which probably derived from folk memories of the Anasazi Great Houses. Centred... More