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USS Wisconsin, BB-64, was an Iowa-class battleship authorized in 1938 and commissioned in April 1944, the highest-numbered U.S. battleship ever built. She was 887 feet long, displaced over 57,000 tons fully loaded, carried nine 16-inch guns and made 32.5 knots from eight boilers and four geared turbines producing 212,000 shaft horsepower. That speed let her escort fast carriers, and in late 1944 she screened Admiral Halsey's Third Fleet. Typhoon Cobra in December 1944 sank three destroyers, while Wisconsin reported no structural damage and two injured sailors. In July 1945 she shelled Japan's home islands, and one raid of over 1,000 shells cut a copper plant's output from 40,000 to 1,500 tons a month. Mothballed in 1948, she was recommissioned in 1951 for Korea, where she served for a time as Seventh Fleet flagship.

Off Songjin in March 1952 a North Korean 155 mm battery scored her first combat hit, injuring three sailors, and she answered with a full nine-gun salvo. In May 1956 she collided with the destroyer USS Eaton in fog off the Virginia Capes, and a 68-foot, 120-ton bow from the unfinished USS Kentucky was grafted on in 16 days. Decommissioned in 1958, she returned in the 1980s with Tomahawk and Harpoon launchers, Phalanx guns and RQ-2 Pioneer drones. In Desert Storm she served as Tomahawk strike commander and fired 24 Tomahawks in the first two days. Off Faylaka Island in February 1991, Iraqi troops waved white flags at her spotter drone, the first recorded surrender to an unmanned aircraft. She was decommissioned that September and now sits at Nauticus in Norfolk.

• Her propellers were each roughly the size of a two-story house, and the Bureau of Ships thought she might reach 34 knots running light.
• After her nine-gun reply off Songjin, the escorting destroyer USS Buck signaled two words: temper, temper.
• Her 1958 decommissioning left the U.S. Navy with no active battleship for the first time since 1895.
• The Pioneer drones, loud like a two-stroke engine, were flown low on purpose so Iraqi troops would hear them after the Missouri's bombardment.
• The 2006 National Defense Authorization Act required her to be kept ready for reactivation even as a museum, until the Navy fully transferred her to Norfolk in 2009.

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The A12 Matilda II was a British infantry tank built for a doctrine shaped by the First World War. Thinkers such as Percy Hobart and Basil Liddell Hart split British tanks into fast cruiser tanks and slow infantry tanks that would walk alongside foot soldiers, crush wire and take enemy fire. Specified in 1936 after the two-man Matilda I proved too small, the Matilda II carried frontal armor up to 78 mm, roughly double that of early Panzer IIIs and IVs, and a 40 mm two-pounder gun in a three-man cast turret. To move 27 tons, designers bolted in two six-cylinder AEC or Leyland London bus diesels linked to one shaft, feeding a Wilson epicyclic gearbox shifted by compressed air. It managed about 15 mph on roads and 6 mph off them. When war began in September 1939, Britain had only two in service, partly because the cast nose came out too thick and had to be ground down by hand.

In May 1940 at Arras, 16 Matilda IIs broke into the rear of the German 7th Panzer Division as 37 mm shells bounced off, and Erwin Rommel had 88 mm anti-aircraft guns lowered to fire at them. In Operation Compass in 1940 and 1941 the tank earned the name Queen of the Desert against Italian tankettes and M11/39s. Then the Afrika Korps arrived with 88s, PaK 38s and PaK 40s, the twin engines and hidden springs choked on sand, and the two-pounder had no useful high-explosive round. A 54-inch turret ring left no room for a bigger gun, and by El Alamein in October 1942 the Valentine had replaced it. Australia received more than 400 and fought them in New Guinea, Bougainville and Borneo, where slow speed mattered little and armor mattered most.

• The bell crank suspension tucked its springs inside the hull behind armored skirts, which later trapped desert sand.
• Australian close support versions carried a 3-inch howitzer to fire high-explosive shells at Japanese bunkers.
• The Matilda Frog replaced the gun with a flamethrower fed by an 80-gallon fuel tank inside the turret and could reach 90 yards.
• The Matilda Hedgehog mounted a seven-tube naval anti-submarine mortar firing 65-pound bombs, aimed by pointing the whole tank, and the turret had to turn before the fifth tube fired.
• It was the only British tank in service from the first day of World War II to the last.

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The USS Enterprise, hull number CVN-65, was the world's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Its keel was laid at Newport News in 1958 and it was commissioned in 1961: 1,123 feet long and driven by eight Westinghouse A2W reactors, because the Navy scaled up smaller submarine reactors for a ship no one had powered before. The final cost of $451.3 million forced the Navy to cancel the five sister ships it had planned, and the carrier went to sea without its Terrier surface-to-air missile launchers. It relied instead on speed above 33 knots, unlimited range and up to 90 aircraft. In October 1962 it joined the Cuban Missile Crisis blockade, in 1964 it led Operation Sea Orbit, the first all-nuclear task force to sail around the world without refueling, and in December 1965 it became the first nuclear-powered ship in combat, launching a record 165 strike sorties in one day.

On January 14, 1969, near Hawaii, exhaust from a jet-starting Huffer cooked off a Zuni rocket on an F-4 Phantom, setting off a fire that killed 27 sailors, injured more than 300 and destroyed 15 aircraft; the armored flight deck pushed the blasts up and out, away from the reactors. On September 11, 2001, the homeward-bound carrier turned around without waiting for orders, and its aircraft later dropped 800,000 pounds of ordnance in Afghanistan. In 2011 executive officer Captain Owen Honors was relieved over crew videos with profanity and anti-gay slurs made in 2006 and 2007. The ship was deactivated in 2012 and decommissioned in 2017. Museum requests were denied, and dismantling its neutron-activated structure is expected to cost over a billion dollars and run to about 2030.

• The SCANFAR phased array radar gave the island its boxy look, but its vacuum tubes ran hot, drew heavy power and kept burning out.
• In 1983 Captain Robert J. Kelly ran the carrier aground on a San Francisco Bay sandbar with actor George Takei on the bridge, and Kelly later became a four-star admiral.
• In 1985 the ship hit Bishop Rock on Cortez Bank, tearing a 100-foot gash and wrecking a propeller for $17 million in damage, and that captain was relieved of command.
• In early 2026 a glitch on a government website forced the reopening of a $536 million dismantling contract in Mobile, Alabama.
• More than 35,000 pounds of uncontaminated CVN-65 steel is going into the new Ford-class carrier that will be named USS Enterprise, CVN-80.

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The British Centurion was drafted in 1943 as a heavy cruiser tank able to take hits from German 88mm guns, and it reached Europe in May 1945, just after the war there ended. The Directorate of Tank Design under Sir Claude Gibb was first bound by the 10-foot-8-inch British railway loading gauge until the War Office lifted the width limit and let weight rise to 50 long tons. Designers replaced Christie suspension with Horstmann bogies bolted outside the hull, which crews could swap after mine damage, and added a fully automatic gun stabilizer so gunners could fire accurately on the move. The gun grew from a 17-pounder to a 20-pounder and then the 105mm L7, driven by a 650-horsepower Rolls-Royce Meteor. A Centurion cost about £35,000 in 1950 and £38,000 by 1952, and the stabilizer's gyroscope accounted for only about £100.

In Korea, the 8th King's Royal Irish Hussars parked their Mark IIIs on straw and ran the engines every half hour through freezing nights, then covered the 29th Brigade's withdrawal at the Imjin River in 1951. U.S. General John O'Daniel concluded that anywhere a tank could go was now tank country. In 1973 about 125 Israeli Centurions, rebuilt as the diesel-powered Sho't, held the Valley of Tears on the Golan Heights against roughly 500 Syrian T-55s and T-62s. The strangest record belongs to Australian Army hull 169041. In 1953, during Operation Totem One at Emu Field, it sat fueled, loaded and idling 500 yards from a 9.1-kiloton nuclear blast that shoved it back five feet, sandblasted its optics and blew off its side plates. The engine ran until the fuel was gone, and three days later the tank was driven away.

• The atomic tank was decontaminated, returned to service and later fought in Vietnam, where an RPG hit injured its crew but left it battle-worthy.
• Australian crews in Vietnam from 1968 removed the armored side skirts so mud and vines would not jam the tracks, and fought at Coral-Balmoral.
• Australian logbooks show Meteor engines rebuilt and moved between hulls, one engine serving several tanks for over eight years.
• Diesel's higher flash point made the Sho't less likely to burn after a hit than petrol-engined Centurions.
• South Africa's Olifant tanks and Israeli heavy armored personnel carriers are built on the Centurion chassis.

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USS Missouri, BB-63, was an Iowa-class fast battleship ordered in 1940 and commissioned in 1944, the last battleship commissioned by the United States. More than 887 feet long and over 57,000 tons fully loaded, she had more than 200,000 shaft horsepower, up to 19.5 inches of armor on her turret faces, a 32.5-knot top speed and a narrow beam to fit the Panama Canal locks. Her nine 16-inch guns fired 2,000-pound shells. She screened carriers as an anti-aircraft platform and bombarded Iwo Jima and Okinawa. On April 11, 1945, a kamikaze hit just below her main deck and caused only superficial damage. On September 2, 1945, Japan signed the instrument of surrender aboard her in Tokyo Bay, anchored near where Commodore Matthew Perry anchored in 1853, with Perry's flag displayed under glass.

President Harry Truman, a Missourian whose daughter Margaret christened the ship, kept her active while her sisters went to reserve. In 1946 she carried a Turkish ambassador's remains to Istanbul amid Soviet pressure on the Turkish Straits. On January 17, 1950, Captain William Brown ran her aground in Chesapeake Bay, and freeing her took two weeks. Five months later the Korean War began; she was the first U.S. battleship in Korean waters and earned five battle stars before going to the mothball fleet in Bremerton, Washington, in 1955. Reactivated in 1984 with Tomahawk, Harpoon and Phalanx systems, she fired nearly 30 Tomahawks and her 16-inch guns in the 1991 Gulf War, then was decommissioned in 1992 and moved to Pearl Harbor as a museum in 1998.

• In Korea she fired on trains as they left coastal tunnels and shelled Samchok as a diversion from the Inchon landings.
• In 1989 Cher filmed the video for If I Could Turn Back Time on her deck, a public relations problem for the Navy.
• In the Gulf, HMS Gloucester shot down an Iraqi Silkworm missile tracking toward her with a Sea Dart.
• A Phalanx on a nearby U.S. frigate locked onto her chaff and hit her with depleted uranium rounds; no one was killed.
• At Pearl Harbor her bow points toward the USS Arizona, and her superstructure blocks the Arizona from view on the surrender deck.

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Project 1144 Orlan, known by NATO as the Kirov class, are the largest surface combatants in service apart from aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships, displacing about 28,000 tons fully loaded. First conceived to hunt submarines, the design shifted to attacking U.S. carrier strike groups with 20 P-700 Granit anti-ship missiles in silos below deck. Air defense came in layers: 96 S-300F long-range missiles, Osa-MA or Kinzhal point defense systems, and AK-630 Gatling guns or Kortik gun and missile mounts. Propulsion paired two nuclear reactors with two oil-fired steam boilers as a backup, producing up to 140,000 shaft horsepower and 32 knots. The transcript credits these ships with prompting the U.S. Navy to bring its World War II Iowa-class battleships out of retirement in the 1980s.

Five were planned and four finished; the fifth, to be named Kuznetsov, was canceled in 1990. Kirov, Frunze, Kalinin and Yuri Andropov were renamed in 1992 as Admiral Ushakov, Admiral Lazarev, Admiral Nakhimov and Pyotr Velikiy. Admiral Ushakov suffered a reactor accident in the Mediterranean in 1990 and was placed in reserve for lack of repair money. In March 2004 navy commander Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov said Pyotr Velikiy's reactor could explode "at any moment," and the ship spent a month in port while its crew lost a third of their pay. Scrapping of Ushakov and Lazarev began in 2021 because removing their spent fuel was costly and dangerous. Admiral Nakhimov, mothballed in 1999, went to the Sevmash shipyard for a long, delayed rebuild.

• The lead ship was laid down in 1974 and commissioned in 1980.
• Nakhimov's refit adds 174 vertical launch tubes, 80 for anti-surface and 94 for anti-air weapons.
• Its new weapons include S-400 missiles and up to 60 Zircon hypersonic anti-ship missiles with a range of at least 620 miles.
• At hypersonic speed a plasma sheath forms around the missile and can absorb radar waves, making it hard to track.
• Delivery slipped from 2022 to 2023 and 2024, and Pyotr Velikiy is slated for the same refit once Nakhimov is done.

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The Mall of America sits on the 78-acre site of Metropolitan Stadium, the old home of the Minnesota Vikings and Twins, demolished in 1985. Its original pitch included an indoor lake with six-foot surfing waves and submarines. Today it covers 5.6 million square feet and draws about 32 million visitors a year. A red seat high on a wall marks Harmon Killebrew's 520-foot home run of 1967, and floor plaques mark the old home plate and 50-yard line. Architect Jon Jerde split the building into neighborhoods, East Broadway, West Market, North Garden and South Avenue. The retail corridors have no central heating: skylights, lighting, equipment and people keep them near 70 degrees. Ownership began as a venture of the Ghermezian family's Triple Five Group, Simon Property Group and TIAA, which held 55 percent. In 1999 Simon secretly bought TIAA's 27.5 percent stake.

In 2003 U.S. District Judge Paul A. Magnuson heard recordings showing Simon hid the talks, called its conduct "boorish" and "the worst kind of self-dealing and subterfuge," and ordered the stake sold to Triple Five for $81.4 million; by 2006 Triple Five bought out Simon for $1 billion. After the 2000 Mardi Gras event, Fat Tuesday lost its liquor license, and in 2002 three Gators patrons were hospitalized after taking GHB. Triple Five banned smoking in 2004, and Knott's Camp Snoopy became Nickelodeon Universe in 2008. COVID-19 closed the mall for 12 weeks, the mall sued Hard Rock Cafe for over half a million dollars and locked out its staff, and Transformco held the shuttered Sears space on a lease of $10 a year, a fight that reached the U.S. Supreme Court twice.

• The mall employs behavior detection officers trained in Israel and in summer 2024 added facial recognition at its entrances.
• During Black Lives Matter protests in 2014 and 2015, thousands filled the rotunda and the mall sought restraining orders against organizers.
• In April 2019 a 24-year-old man threw a five-year-old boy from a third-floor balcony; the boy survived and the attacker got 19 years.
• In October 2026 the FBI arrested an 18-year-old from Richfield accused of plotting a shooting at a Hmong arts celebration in the mall.
• The indoor theme park floor rises and falls 15 feet between its high and low points.

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COSCO, the China Ocean Shipping Company, was founded in 1961 as a Chinese government agency. Its Guangzhou subsidiary bought a used British vessel, renamed it Guanghua and sent it on its maiden voyage to Jakarta in April 1961. After the U.S. and China resumed diplomatic relations, COSCO signed a 1979 agreement with the Lykes Brothers Steamship Company that opened commercial sea routes between the two countries, and that year it represented China in work with ITT to repair communication facilities in coastal cities. In 1981 it contracted with Pakistan's national tanker company to carry crude oil. Scrutiny followed. In 1991 the U.S. Federal Maritime Commission probed claims that China restricted U.S. flag carriers, in 1997 it looked at alleged underpricing but found too little evidence for a formal probe, and Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer pressed for an investigation of COSCO's lease of a former naval base in Long Beach, California.

In August 1993 the cargo ship Yin He lost civilian GPS off Oman when the U.S. disabled it over alleged chemical weapons materials bound for Iran. After 24 days at sea, inspectors from China, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. signed a certification that none were aboard. That year the company became the China Ocean Shipping Group Company, spinning off Chimbusco and COSCO Logistics and using backdoor listings such as the February 1997 purchase of Hong Kong-listed Shun Shing Holdings. After 2008 it gradually acquired Greece's Port of Piraeus, which went from about 400,000 containers a year to nearly five million by 2018. A 2015 and 2016 merger with China Shipping Group formed China COSCO Shipping, and in 2022 it kept shipping to Russia as most carriers halted service.

• The Yin He's operators said the cargo was paper goods, hardware and machine parts.
• COSCO Pacific listed in Hong Kong in 1994, and the group held a 20 percent stake in Chong Hing Bank for a decade.
• In July 2009 the bulk carrier Full City lost engine power in a storm off Norway, ran aground and spilled about 200 tons of bunker fuel.
• The Full City was Panama-flagged and run from COSCO's Hong Kong division, a chain that complicated accountability.
• Today the fleet tops 1,100 ships carrying over 1.5 million TEUs and calling at more than a thousand ports.

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William J. Levitt was born in Brooklyn in 1907 to a second-generation Jewish immigrant family. His father, real estate attorney Abraham Levitt, founded Levitt & Sons in 1929, and William left NYU to run the business while his brother Alfred designed custom homes on Long Island. Service in the Navy Seabees taught him rapid construction, and a 1,600-home project in Norfolk, Virginia, built with traditional methods, still had unsold units in 1950. In Hempstead, Long Island, he broke house building into 27 repeatable steps, poured concrete slabs instead of digging basements, sent non-union crews with spray paint guns from lot to lot, bought lumber and appliances direct and built his own nail factory. At peak the firm finished a house every 11 minutes. An $8,000 home could cost a veteran about $400 up front, or $1 down in some promotions, and Time put him on its cover in 1950.

Levitt's communities barred Black buyers through restrictive covenants in the deeds. In 1957 a Jewish couple in his Pennsylvania development resold to the first Black family there, sparking unrest, and in 1963 his Bowie, Maryland, project drew civil rights protests. The NAACP and ACLU opposed him, the FHA threatened to withhold financing, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his Willingboro case. In July 1967 he sold Levitt & Sons to ITT for $92 million, about $62 million in stock, with a 10-year non-compete, and ITT sidelined him. Later ventures failed, the ITT shares he pledged for loans fell 90 percent, a 1978 Prince George's County subdivision drew more than 2,500 code violations in 122 homes, and he was accused of misappropriating millions from the Levitt Foundation. He died in Manhasset, New York, in January 1994.

• The firm built 17,000 homes in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, plus Willingboro, Bowie, Puerto Rico and France, more than 140,000 houses in all.
• By the late 1960s his fortune topped $100 million, with a 30-room Mill Neck estate and the 237-foot yacht La Belle Simone.
• At his earlier Strathmore development he initially used similar tactics to bar Jewish families.
• Prince George's County revoked his license to do business after the 1978 inspections.
• Time later named him one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century.

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Salomon Brothers was founded in 1910 by brothers Arthur, Herbert and Percy Salomon with clerk Ben Levy; the brothers descended from Haym Salomon, a primary financier of the American Revolution. For decades it was a quiet bond brokerage. Percy's son William Salomon became managing partner in 1963, and in 1967 the firm sponsored Muriel Siebert as the first woman to hold a trading license on the New York Stock Exchange floor. By 1975 it was a bulge bracket firm and, with Morgan Guaranty Trust, organized a $1 billion bond sale to rescue New York City from insolvency. In 1979 Morgan Stanley walked away from IBM's $1 billion debt offering rather than share billing, and Salomon took top billing with Merrill Lynch. John Gutfreund, in charge from 1978, made the firm public through a 1981 reverse merger with Phibro and moved it into proprietary trading, while Lewis Ranieri pioneered the mortgage-backed security.

The 41st-floor trading culture described by Michael Lewis was ruthless and enormously profitable. In 1987 the firm took municipal bond losses, Ranieri was forced out, and Revlon owner Ronald Perelman, backed by junk bond financing, sought a 14 percent stake, so Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway bought $700 million of preferred stock with two board seats. Between December 1990 and May 1991, trader Paul Mozer broke the Treasury's 35 percent auction limit with unauthorized bids in clients' names, and management knew for months without reporting it. Salomon paid a $190 million fine and set up a $100 million restitution fund, Mozer was sentenced to federal prison, and Gutfreund resigned in August 1991 and was barred by the SEC from running a brokerage. Buffett served as chairman and CEO before handing over to Deryck Maughan.

• Salomon pooled thousands of local home mortgages from across the U.S. and sold shares of the pools to global investors as bonds.
• Travelers Group bought Salomon for $9 billion in 1997, and the 1998 merger with Citicorp created Citigroup and Salomon Smith Barney.
• By 2003 the Salomon name was gone, replaced by Citigroup Global Markets.
• Former fixed income chief John Meriwether and economist Myron Scholes went on to Long-Term Capital Management, which collapsed in 1998.
• Former employees and executives later announced plans to revive Salomon Brothers as a full-service investment bank.