Word: battleships
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...destruction of the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898 [Aug. 23]: truth at last came to the surface-proof once more that Spain was unjustly accused. Will the United States ever apologize? Will the cry "Remember the Maine" quiet down...
...night of Feb. 15, 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine mysteriously exploded and sank in Havana Harbor, where it had gone to protect American lives during the Cuban revolt against Spanish rule. Out of 354 men aboard the Maine, 260 died. Though the Spanish denied any responsibility, jingoistic U.S. newspapers charged that a Spanish mine had caused the explosion. "Destruction of the Maine was the work of an enemy," charged William Randolph Hearst's newly founded New York Journal as it offered a $50,000 reward for conviction of whoever had done the deed. Scarcely two months later...
Last week Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, 76, head of the Navy's nuclear-propulsion department, said it was all an accident. In his preface to a 173-page book entitled How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed, which is based on a resurvey of the evidence by two prominent Navy scientists, Rickover argues that there is no sign of the kind of "rupture or deformation which would have resulted from a contact mine." What did cause the blast? Probably, says Rickover, a spontaneous combustion of bituminous coal in the Maine's fuel hold, and then an explosion...
...shape and tone of the show is that of a Kabuki-styled operetta. It is audaciously ambitious and flagrantly pretentious. Pacific Overtures attempts to portray the Westernization of Japan after the arrival of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry's trade mission in 1853. The appearance of Perry's battleship is the evening's showstopper. First the prow with two baleful headlights looms in the dusk. Then, in accordion fashion, the rest of the ship spills into being like a black dragon. It is a breath-catching moment...
Half a century ago, when he was 19, Crown Prince Hirohito of Japan boarded the battleship Katori for a six-month grand tour of Europe. The trip only whetted his appetite for more: in Paris, he told an American newsman that he hoped a visit to the U.S. would only be a briefly "deferred pleasure." It turned out to be a long postponement. Soon after he returned home in 1921, Hirohito was declared Prince Regent for his deranged father; by 1926 he was Emperor, and a few years later Japan embarked on the ill-starred experiment in expansionism that finally...