This past Thursday the USS Intrepid returned to New York harbor to take-up her post at Pier 86 along Manhattan’s West Side. The Intrepid’s arrival marked the end of a two-year hiatus during which time the ship (and its Hudson River berth) underwent a $120 million restoration. A veteran of the Second World War, Korean [...]

Readers interested in commentary regarding the ongoing conflict between Russia and Georgia should head over to The Russian Front. There, Dr. David Stone has posted a thoughtful (and, to my mind, quite accurate) article describing how American foreign policy in the Balkans during the 1990s established (unintentional) precedents for the current Russian actions in the [...]

This coming Sunday, 15 June at 9 pm (CST) the Discovery network’s Military Channel debuts a new program aimed at aviation history buffs. Showdown: Air Combat uses restored aircraft and interviews with veteran pilots to recreate aerial combat encounters from the First World to the (almost) present.

I just returned this evening from a trip to Lawrence, KS. I headed out there late last week to deliver a couple of talks at my alma mater, The University of Kansas and ended up staying a couple of extra days.
Many thanks to my friends and colleagues in the Department of History for their kindness [...]

Just before Christmas I took a break from blogging in order to clear up a backlog of obligations that had piled up. I wrote a couple of book reviews, attended yet another conference, finished a book proposal, and ploughed through a collection of grant applications. [I also spent time in front of the TV watching [...]

Earlier this week the University of Pittsburgh’s Digital Research Library announced the expansion of Stalinka, its on-line gallery of pictures and artifacts depicting Josef Stalin.
The searchable collection currently contains over 500 images of the Soviet dictator in photographs, posters, painting, cartoons, sculpture, and the applied arts. Each image is accompanied by a (sometimes very) brief [...]

Like most institutions associated with academia, the academic conference is a curious thing. It’s a combination of educational seminar, professional retreat, class reunion, and subsidized junket. It’s also an integral (and unavoidable) part of being professional scholar.
I attended my first conference as an undergraduate in the spring of 1988. It was a meeting held [...]

A: The Wright brothers, of course.
Although it’s the sort of thing that any American grade-school student should know, the answer to the question “Who invented the airplane?” hasn’t always (or everywhere) been so.
Had that same question been posed to a Soviet citizen, he (or she) would most likely have responded with a name you’ve probably [...]

Of all the major construction projects that graced the decade of the Triumph of Soviet Socialism none, arguably, was a greater success than the Moscow Metropolitan named for Lenin. True, the project was a mass of confusion that fell behind schedule and went over budget while squandering natural resources and human lives, but what else [...]

[From a meteorological standpoint, my arrival in Moscow last Friday came at just the right time. I managed to escape entirely an unusual spring heat-wave during which temperatures soared into the mid and upper 80s. Since then, the weather has been nothing short of marvelous (highs in the low to mid-70s, sunny, light breeze). After [...]

Twenty years ago Monday, a nineteen-year-old West German named Mathias Rust shocked the world by landing a rented Cessna 172B near Moscow’s Red Square following a six-hour flight from Helsinki.
As this article in today’s Moscow Times notes, the last two decades have been almost as tumultuous for Rust as they have been for Russia. [...]

In the clearest sign yet that the concept of irony is often wasted on state officials, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov today rebuked foreign governments that attempt to re-write history in order to serve contemporary political ends.
In a televised appearance at a ceremony honoring Russian diplomats who died during the Great Patriotic War (i.e. World [...]

In light of the “war scare” that gripped a certain small corner of the Internet earlier this month, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to pass along news from Moscow about plans to construct a new museum devoted to the Cold War. The most interesting aspect of the proposed project is its location: inside a [...]

One of the disadvantages to having your head buried in books all day long is that you sometimes miss out on those few occasions when there’s something (other than South Park) that’s really worth watching on the tube. Tonight was almost one of those occasions.
Fortunately, I recovered just in time this evening to tune [...]

A little under two weeks ago I published an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor about the continuing practice of dedovshchina within the ranks of Russian army. (For those unfamiliar with the term, dedovshchina refers to the longstanding practice in which senior non-commissioned soldiers “initiate” the first-year conscripts under their command through physical punishment and [...]

For those who haven’t yet seen it, Michael Specter’s recent New Yorker article on Putin’s Russia is a must-read.
Go here.
ScP

Although the construction of over-sized planes has been a defining element of Russian aviation culture from the dawn of the air age (Il’ya Muromets) to the present day (Antonov An-225), Russia, of course, is hardly the only nation to have designed and built really big aircraft. The U.S. has had its fair share, too. (The [...]