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The beginnings of the US Navy: John Adams

In 1775 the Continental Congress while assembled in Philadelphia, charged seven members of a "Marine Committee" the task of standing up a navy.  John Adams of Massachusetts was one of the seven.  And he along with the other six were all perfectly unaware of how to organize a new navy. Excerpt from a letter from John Adams to Elbridge Gerry (future Vice President to James Madison) It is very odd that, I, who have Spent my Days in Researches and Employments so very different, and who have Read more [...]

Habitual Leadership

The Internet tells me that it takes about 21 days (or 21 actions) to create a habit. Can we become better leaders (and better members of society) by keeping ourselves accountable by checkboxing leadership traits? Let's find out. Below is a table with each of the 14 leadership traits the Navy wants its leaders to embrace. Print it out and check a box when you recognize your own action as meeting the description of one of the traits. For easy printing, here is a single page copy as a PDF: Leadership_Traits-checklist.pdf Habitual Read more [...]

Navy Women in 1917

The last few days of This Day in US Navy History had an interesting theme among some of the bullets: Women. On 21March1917, Loretta Walsh became the first female Navy Petty Officer when she was sworn in as a Chief Yeoman (link).  She was also the first woman allowed to serve in any of the US Armed Forces as anything but a Nurse (link). On 19March1917, the Navy Department authorized enrollment of women in the Naval Reserve with ratings of yeoman or radio electrician (link). Now I am Read more [...]

Wikify your paragraph

Recently I started a US Navy History blog that is (so far) doing nothing except re-posting what is found on the "this day in history" page of navy.mil.  I did this for a couple reasons.  The first reason was that they don't have an RSS feed over there that I can subscribe to.  The second reason is that I wanted to add to the usability of the article.  To do this, I wanted to insert links to Wikipedia for quick and easy reference to topics covered in the paragraphs. First I found wikify@appointment.at. Read more [...]

E-Libraries

What are libraries doing in this age of electronic and i-everything?  It looks like they are keeping up! While I do not know the behind the scenes legalities that the libraries are working with the publishers, I really do like the results.  Libraries have lists of books that can be 'checked out' onto your Kindle/iPhone/iPad/Mac/PC/etc...  You check them out for a certain amount of time and then they are automatically returned. It is as simple as that.  So here's some links to help you get Read more [...]