Matt Fratus is a staff writer for Coffee or Die and contributes regularly to Free Range American. He prides himself on uncovering the most fascinating tales of history by sharing them through any means of engaging storytelling. He writes for his micro-blog @LateNightHistory
Sunisa Lee, an 18-year-old Hmong American, took gold in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics women’s gymnastics all-around event on Thursday. With her victory, Lee became the first Hmong American to win an Olympic medal. In coverage of the Games, Lee's ...
On the morning of Sept. 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov saved the world from a potential nuclear holocaust. A few hours into the overnight shift at Serpukhov-15, a secret command center about 75 miles south of Moscow where the Soviet Union's military ...
In the 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, Army 1st Lt. Amber English, a 31-year-old logistics officer in the Army Reserves, set a new Olympic record to take home a gold medal in women’s skeet shooting. English isn’t the first and won’t be the last ...
Harrison Dillard arrived at the 1948 Summer Olympics — the first Olympics since the 1936 Berlin Games — prepared to run. The remnants of the war in Europe remained, while life moved on in its wake. The composition of the track surface at Wembley ...
On the morning of July 25, 1946, a spectacular explosion shot radioactive seawater some 6,000 feet into the air at a Bikini Atoll lagoon in the Marshall Islands. A mushroom cloud climbed above the epicenter of the blast, where a nuclear device — ...
In 1874, while on assignment in the Nantucket Shoals, a New York Times reporter overheard three brawny sailors in conversation, admiring the ink on each other's arms. “Bill, that’s the prettiest picture on your arm I ever see,” one sailor ...
North Africa's Great Sand Sea served as a secret highway into Italian territory, and British Maj. Ralph A. Bagnold knew it. During the 1920s and 1930s, the World War I veteran and sapper officer had acquired expertise exploring the unmapped desert ...
On July 1, Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos revealed that he'd invited Wally Funk, a white-haired and spunky 82-year-old aviation pioneer, to join him on a flight into space. Bezos' space tourism enterprise, Blue Origin, planned the launch ...
World War II was the golden age of American submarine warfare. By war's end, seven submarine commanders and one enlisted crew member had received the Medal of Honor. The US submarine fleet, often referred to as the “Silent Service” for its secretive ...
Of the original 855 members of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, seven are still alive, according to the most recent records. Better known as the “Six Triple Eight,” the only all-Black, all-female battalion in World War II processed ...
When three Japanese destroyers attacked the USS Gregory as it sailed off the coast of the Solomon Islands in September 1942, a Black cook from the ship plunged into shark-infested waters and — with a rope tied around his waist — swam for eight hours, ...
This article was written to chronicle the long-standing work by US intelligence agencies and their heroic engineering corps to keep brave pilots of spy planes safe from sharks, should their Cold War reconnaissance duties land them in shark-infested ...
In the clear, sunny skies of July 8, 1991, an E2-C Hawkeye early warning and command control aircraft flew over a deep blue Mediterranean Sea. The plane held a steady course, its prop engines turning beneath its huge, round radar array. It had ...
Gen. George S. Patton led the 7th Army during the invasion of Sicily and pushed his armor across France into the heart of Nazi Germany to cripple Axis forces. But even before he earned his larger-than-life persona of “Old Blood and Guts,” Patton was ...
Sislin Fay Allen, the first Black and Caribbean woman to join Britain’s Metropolitan Police Service, died Monday at age 83 in her home in Ocho Rios, Jamaica. Described as a pioneer and civil rights icon, Allen served as a trailblazer in the United ...
On July 4, 1918, the biggest sports competition in Europe wasn’t soccer, rugby, or cricket. Rather, two teams of "Yanks" — one from the Army and another of Navy personnel, drawn from soldiers and sailors sent to England for World War I — squared off ...
Franklin D. Miller served six tours over six years in Vietnam. For his first two, he was an infantryman, mainly conducting long-range reconnaissance patrols. The next four years were with Military Assistance Command, Vietnam — Studies and ...
In 1935, five women died in a fire on Wimpole Street in London. A neighbor witnessed smoke and, using an early telephone, immediately dialed zero, which connected to a switchboard controlled by telephone operators. But with just a few operators ...
On Dec. 4, 1942, a New York Times headline screamed out: “Barney Ross Wins a New Title In Fierce Battle on Guadalcanal." Ross was one of America's best-known athletes when World War II arrived. He was famous as both a champion boxer and for his ...
South Vietnamese air force pilot Maj. Buang-Ly (sometimes spelled Buong Le or Bung) and his family raced to the runway on Con Son Island in South Vietnam. It was April 30, 1975, and the US military was in the midst of Operation Frequent Wind, the ...
Lockheed Martin’s legendary Skunk Works division has built top-secret projects for more than 75 years, including some of the most technologically advanced and — once declassified — beloved airplanes to ever fly. Small teams of scientists, ...
In the early morning hours of Nov. 28, 1970, a C-130 circled 17,000 feet above a drop zone in Laos. A six-man element dubbed Recon Team Florida inched forward to the edge of the ramp. Sgt. 1st Class Cliff Newman waited for the signal from jumpmaster ...
In the Vietnam War, apart from the “Blue Water Navy” arsenal of aircraft carriers, battleships, and destroyers, there was a small fleet of Patrol Craft, Fast (PCF), otherwise known as Swift Boats. These high-speed, unarmored aluminum vessels were ...
It started with a bet. Sgt. Gilbert Bates was a Civil War veteran of the 1st Wisconsin Heavy Artillery Regiment. Bates had returned to Wisconsin as a farmer when he told some neighbors he thought he could march across the just-defeated rebel ...
On Sept. 15, 1966, 5th Special Forces Group established the Military Assistance Command Vietnam, or MACV, Recondo School at Nha Trang. The school served as an extension of Project Leaping Lena and Project Delta. Project Delta’s Detachment B-52 became ...
On June 4, 1965, a nine-man advanced element of the Seabee Technical Assistance Team 1104 was sent to the village of Dong Xoai, an American camp located about 55 miles north of Saigon. This mission was supposed to be another building job, but it ...
Gilbert Baker is remembered today as the man who created the rainbow flag, the universal symbol of the LGBTQ rights movement. But he might never have created it if not for his two years in the Army. Baker was drafted into the Army in 1970, at the ...
The most famous telling of the D-Day invasion is the second scene of Saving Private Ryan. When it landed in theaters in 1998, the gore- and death-filled, 20-minute sequence delivered a raw emotional punch of terror to audiences, presenting the story ...
A scientist named Flute met a secretive man named Remus in Switzerland in 1944. Inside a laboratory in Zurich, Flute spent hours scribbling atomic chain reactions on a piece of paper. Remus took a pencil and, on the back of the paper, sketched a ...
Early in World War II, the British army went looking for a few good dogs. Pet owners were asked to lend their animals to the 13th (Lancashire) Parachute Battalion, which aimed to create a pack of "paradogs." The program would train capable canines to ...
