By Suzanne Stamatov The Japanese siege on the American forces in the Philippines transpired over a four-month period. Japan began aerial attacks on the Philippines on the same day it attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii (8 December in the Philippines as it is across the International Date Line). Ordered…
By Suzanne Stamatov As General Krueger pursued the fleeing enemy to the north, one of his officers approached him and informed him that the Cabanatuan prison stood in his path. That officer had spoken to an American guerilla leader named Robert Lapham. Lapham said that, once the Japanese believed…
By Michael Ann Sullivan Sandia National Laboratory was originally the engineering division (called Z-division) of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the central laboratory of the top-secret Manhattan Project during WWII. The Manhattan Project scientists developed an atomic bomb which was deployed against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on…
By Michael Ann Sullivan On 16 July 1945 the U.S. Army and civilian scientists attached to the Manhattan Engineering District detonated the first atomic device in the New Mexico desert at Trinity Site, a remote location sixty miles northwest of Alamogordo. At 5:30 am in the morning a brilliant…
Brig. Gen. Henry H. Sibley led his force of 2,500 men across the Rio Grande River and up the east side of the river to the ford at Valverde, north of Fort Craig, New Mexico, hoping to cut Federal communications between the fort and military headquarters in Santa Fe….
Glorieta Pass was a strategic location, situated at the southern tip of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, southeast of Santa Fe, and on the Santa Fe Trail. In March 1862, a Confederate force of 200-300 Texans under the command of Maj. Charles L. Pyron encamped at Johnson’s Ranch, at…
Cathy Williams or William Cathay? Source: St. Louis Daily Times, January 2, 1876 "My Father was a freeman, but my mother a slave, belonging to William Johnson, a wealthy farmer who lived at the time I was born near Independence, Jackson county, Missouri. While I was a small girl…
“Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.” –Major Howard Conner, 4th Marine Division Association Reunion, Chicago 1969 By Suzanne Stamatov When armies and marines engage in combat, they need a communications system to remain in contact with their fellow troops and their…
By Lauren Gray Though the Spanish and later the Mexican government had their own delicate relationships with traders in the Southwest and New Mexico, the American trader has had arguably the greatest impact on Navajo indigenous economy, livelihood and culture. Over the past 150 years, the traders’ presence has…
By Mary M. Serna and James W. Steely The present Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation lies within the northern range of the prehistoric Jornada Mogollon culture. The Tularosa Basin yields many Paleo-Indian sites with findings of specific artifacts unique to this period, including fluted Folsom and Clovis projectile points and…
