Early years
On May 25, 1878, U.S. Army officer and civil engineer Frederick Mears was born in Omaha, Nebraska. His father, Frederick J. Mears, was a career Army cavalry officer, and the Mears family lived in a number of military posts in the American West toward the end of the Indian Wars period after the Civil War.
Mears was sent to and did well at the Shattuck Military School, which his father also attended. Shattuck is located in Faribault, Minnesota (although it is no longer a military...
The two Torrijos-Carter Treaties are treaties signed by the United States and Panama in Washington, D.C. on September 7, 1977. The 1977 treaties superseded the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty of 1903. The 1977 treaties guaranteed that Panama would gain control of the Panama Canal and the Panama Canal Zone on December 31, 2000, ending the control of the canal that the U.S. had exercised since 1903.
Between the signing of the treaties and the formal transfer of the Canal Zone, there were intermediate...
John Pierpont (J.P.) Morgan (1837-1913) was an “American financier and banker who dominated corporate finance on Wall Street throughout the Gilded Age.” He headed the banking firm that became J.P. Morgan and Co., and led the wave of industrial consolidation in the United States that spanned the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was so successful at developing and financing these consolidations that the process became known as “Morganization.”
In effect, Morgan “reinvented how monopolies...
As most people are aware, the Suez Canal was blocked earlier this year for six days (March 23-29). According to the Suez Canal Authority, which maintains and operates the waterway, the canal has closed five times since it opened for navigation in 1869. Interestingly, the Panama Canal has never been blocked, and has only been closed for a day. That occurred in 1989, when U.S. military forces staged an assault in Panama to depose the country’s leader, Manuel Noriega.
A shortcut to the Orient
The...