When the US secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, told an audience in Singapore recently that the US would not allow “coercion and bullying” of its allies by China, he must have been counting on a lack of historical knowledge (or a tolerance for hypocrisy) in his audience. Bullying and coercion, including threatened and actual military attacks, are not something new; they have been part of US policy in Asia (and elsewhere) for two centuries.
The world’s largest fleet command, the U.S. Pacific Fleet encompasses 100 million square miles nearly half the Earth’s surface from Antarctica to the Arctic Circle and from the West Coast of the U.S. into the Indian Ocean.
A ship’s bell that once rang out from the USS Hartford, the flagship of famous Civil War Rear Admiral David G. Farragut, sits in a lonely corner of Hartford’s Constitution Plaza office park, gathering tarnish in a granite base that is falling apart.
Capital Region Development Authority Executive Director Michael Freimuth stumbled upon the bell during a recent walk and is now on a mission to move it to a more prominent spot, where its place in history can be better acknowledged and where it can serve as an identifiable emblem and city landmark.
John Henry Aulick was born sometime around 1791 in Winchester, the second of five sons and one of ten children of Charles Aulick and Ann Mary Wetzel Aulick. He entered the navy as a midshipman in November 1809 and took his first extended cruise in 1811 aboard the schooner
Enterprise. During the War of 1812 he commanded the forecastle on the
Enterprise and later was aboard the brig
Rattlesnake when it surrendered to the British in June 1814. After eight months in captivity, he returned to duty in March 1815 aboard the frigate
United States. His war service earned him a medal with the thanks of Congress, a lieutenancy, and recognition as a young naval officer of talent and promise.