Author: Hugh James Latimer

On this day in 1769, George Washington launched a legislative salvo at Great Britain’s fiscal and judicial attempts to maintain its control over the American colonies. He brought a package of non-importation resolutions, drafted by George Mason, before the Virginia House of Burgesses. This initiated a chain of events that led to Britain’s House of Lords demanding that men involved in the extra-legal Massachusetts convention of towns be tried in England. Britain’s plan backfired and created an American identity where before there had been none. o o o Dick Casull, the designer of the .454 Casull, passed away in Star …

On this day in 1868, the U.S. Senate votes against impeaching President Andrew Johnson and acquits him of committing “high crimes and misdemeanors.” In February 1868, the House of Representatives charged Johnson with 11 articles of impeachment for vague “high crimes and misdemeanors”. (For comparison, in 1998, President Bill Clinton was charged with two articles of impeachment for obstruction of justice during an investigation into his inappropriate sexual behavior in the White House Oval Office. In 1974, Nixon faced three charges for his involvement in the Watergate scandal.) The main issue in Johnson’s trial was his staunch resistance to implementing …

On May 15th, 1942, gasoline rationing began in 17 Eastern states as an attempt to help the American war effort during World War II. By the end of the year, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had ensured that mandatory gasoline rationing was in effect in all 48 states. Given the current economic state, are you ready for it?

On May 14th, 1948, in Tel Aviv, Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel, reestablishing the Jewish state after 2000 years. In an afternoon ceremony at the Tel Aviv Art Museum, Ben-Gurion pronounced the words “We hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine, to be called Israel,” prompting applause and tears from the crowd gathered at the museum. Ben-Gurion became Israel’s first premier. The British Army had withdrawn the day earlier and fighting broke out almost immediately. Egypt launched an air assault later in the evening. Despite a blackout in Tel Aviv–and the expected …

May 13th is the birthday of firearms engineer Theodor Koch (born 1905, died 1976.) Koch, along with Edmund Heckler and Alex Seidel salvaged tooling from the bombed-out Mauser factory at Oberndorf, and with it founded Heckler und Koch. o o o SurvivalBlog Writing Contest Today features another entry for Round 76 of the SurvivalBlog non-fiction writing contest. The nearly $11,000 worth of prizes for this round include: First Prize: A $3000 gift certificate towards a Sol-Ark Solar Generator from Veteran owned Portable Solar LLC. The only EMP Hardened Solar Generator System available to the public. A Gunsite Academy Three Day …

On May 12th, 1949, one of the first crises of the Cold War came to end when the Soviet Union lifted its 11-month blockade against West Berlin. A massive U.S.-British airlift had broken it. At the end of World War II, Germany was divided into four sectors administered by the four major Allied powers: the USSR, the United States, Britain, and France. Berlin, the capital, was also divided into four parts, though it was located well within the USSR sector. The future of Germany was hotly contested among the allies. The United States, Britain, and France eventually united their sectors …

On May 11, 1949, Israel was admitted into the United Nations. o o o 2005-2017 USB Archive Update We have discovered a bug in the software that managed the orders for the archive. Apparently, a certain small percentage of orders that were successfully paid through PayPal were marked as “canceled”. The software somehow missed the message from PayPal that the order had been paid and it timed out waiting for the payment. We are in the process of manually reviewing all orders that were marked as canceled and matching any corresponding payment that may be attributed to it. We do …

May 10th is the birthday of the late Col. Jeff Cooper (born 1920, died September 25, 2006). May 10th is also the birthday of the late Janis Pinups (born 1925, died 15 June 2007). He was one of the last of the Forest Brothers anti-communist resistance fighters. He came out of hiding, after five decades, to obtain a Latvian passport in 1994, after the collapse of eastern European communism. (He was never issued any communist government identity papers and by necessity lived as a nonexistent ghost during the entire Soviet occupation of Latvia.) o o o 2005-2017 USB Archive Update …