When the delegates to the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia on 10 May, they soon learned that armed men commanded by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold had captured the British forts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point on Lake Champlain in New York. The constitutional crisis, in which Americans sought a redress of grievances from…

Flag Day is the American holiday honoring the adoption of the Stars and Stripes on June 14, 1777, when the Second Continental Congress resolved: "the flag of the United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation." Pushed by advocates…

The United States Coast Guard, one of the country's five armed services, is a unique agency of the federal government. We trace our history to 4 August 1790, when the first Congress authorized the construction of ten vessels to enforce tariff and trade laws and to prevent smuggling. Known variously through the nineteenth and early…

Patriot Day commemorates the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 when al-Qaeda hijackers crashed four planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field, killing nearly 3,000 people. Established by Congress in December 2001 (P.L. 107-89) and first observed in 2002, it honors the innocent lives lost, first responders' heroism,…

The history of the Air Force dates back to the Signal Corps when it began testing its first airplane at Fort Myer, Virginia, on August 20, 1908, and on September 9, Lt Thomas E. Selfridge, flying with Orville Wright, was killed when the plane crashed. Subsequently, after more testing with a second, improved Wright Flyer,…

“Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness! Let the thirteen States, bound together in a strict and indissoluble Union, concur in erecting one great American system, superior…