State of Delaware: Hit the Road To Liberty: Delaware Public Archives Launches Board Game. “The Delaware Public Archives is excited to introduce Road To Liberty, an original board game designed to teach kids about Delaware’s role in the Revolutionary War. Created by Archives staff, the game combines fun, quick play—about 10 minutes per round—with real historical documents from the […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/09/20/hit-the-road-to-liberty-delaware-public-archives-launches-board-game-state-of-delaware/

🗓️ On this day in 2011,
the U.S. military officially ended the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy — finally allowing gay, lesbian, and bisexual service members to serve openly.

Hip hip hooray for equality. 🏳️‍🌈
(And honestly? About damn time.)

#OnThisDay #LGBTQHistory #DontAskDontTell #QueerRights #MilitaryHistory #Equality #Pride

There's a new discussion group for anyone interested in #MilitaryHistory. Just mention !@militaryhistory in your post and it will boost the post to its followers.

So if you're interested in military history, follow the group account to get interesting posts in your timeline.

(The ! before the group name means this post doesn't get boosted).

#OnThisDay in #1942, Allied forces begin Operation Streamline Jane, to capture the remainder of #Madagascar.

It consisted of three related operations - Stream, Line, and Jane. The #VichyFrench forces put up a strong resistance, but they eventually surrendered on 6th November 1942, six months after the initial invasion to capture Diego Suárez.

https://russellphillips.uk/product/a-strange-campaign-the-battle-for-madagascar/

#histodons #MilitaryHistory #SecondWorldWar #WW2 #history
@militaryhistory @history

A new exhibition, "Regimental Fathers of the Russian Army in the Past and Present," opened at St. Petersburg's Museum of the History of Religion on Sept 3. It explores the history of Russian military clergy from the 17th to the 21st centuries. #Russia #MilitaryHistory

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Letters from an American – September 5, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

Letters from an American

September 5, 2025

By Heather Cox Richardson, Sep 05, 2025

Today President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War, although the 1947 abandonment of the Department of War name was not simply a matter of substituting a new name for the original one.

In 1947, to bring order and efficiency to U.S. military forces, Congress renamed the Department of War as the Department of the Army, then brought it, together with the Department of the Navy and a new Department of the Air Force, into a newly established “National Military Establishment” overseen by the secretary of defense.

In 1949, Congress replaced the National Military Establishment name, whose initials sounded unfortunately like “enemy,” with Department of Defense. The new name emphasized that the Allied Powers of World War II would join together to focus on deterring wars by standing against offensive wars launched by big countries against their smaller neighbors. Although Trump told West Point graduates this year that “[t]he military’s job is to dominate any foe and annihilate any threat to America, anywhere, anytime, and any place,” in fact, the stated mission of the Department of Defense is “to provide the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation’s security.”

As Amanda Castro and Hannah Parry of Newsweek note, in August, Trump said he wanted the change because “Defense is too defensive…we want to be offensive too if we have to be.” By law, Congress must approve the change, which Politico estimates will cost billions of dollars, although Trump said: “I’m sure Congress will go along if we need that. I don’t think we even need that.” By this evening, nameplates and signage bearing the new name had gone up in government offices and the URL for the Defense Department website had been changed to war [dot] gov.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has pushed the change because he sees it as part of his campaign to spread a “warrior ethos” at the Pentagon. Today he said the name change was part of “restoring intentionality to the use of force…. We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality, violent effect, not politically correct. We’re going to raise up warriors, not just defenders. So this War Department, Mr. President, just like America, is back.”

In 1947, when the country dropped the “War Department” name, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army—the highest-ranking officer on active duty—was five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower. It is unusual for anyone to suggest that Eisenhower, who led the Allied troops in World War II, was insufficiently committed to military strength. Indeed, the men who changed the name to “Defense Department” and tried to create a rules-based international order did so precisely because war was not a game to them. Having seen the carnage of war not just on the battlefield but among civilians who faced firebombing, death camps, homelessness, starvation, and the obscenity of atomic weapons, they hoped to find a way to make sure insecure, power-hungry men could not start another war easily.

The Movement Conservatives who took over the Republican Party in the 1980s leaned heavily on a mythologized image of the American cowboy as a strong, independent individual who wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone. That image supported decades of attacks on the modern government as “socialism,” and it has now metastasized in the MAGA movement to suggest that the men in charge of the government should be able to do whatever they want.

Just what that looks like was made clear on Wednesday when the Trump administration launched a strike on a boat carrying 11 civilians it claimed were smuggling drugs. Covering the story, the New York Times reported that “Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”

See also: My blog post about the last time the United States had a War Department, a historical glimpse. https://drwebdomain.blog/2025/09/06/the-last-days-of-the-u-s-department-of-war/

Continue/Read Original Article Here: September 5, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

#1947 #2025 #HeatherCoxRichardson #History #LettersFromAnAmerican #MilitaryHistory #TrumpSFolly #WarDepartment

The World War Two bomber that cost more than the atomic bomb

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250829-the-bomber-that-became-ww2s-most-expensive-weapon

#HackerNews #WorldWarTwo #Bomber #AtomicBomb #MilitaryHistory #ExpensiveWeapons #BBCFuture