USS Missouri (BB-11)
1901 Maine-class battleship

USS Missouri (hull number: BB-11), a Maine-class battleship, was the second ship of her class and of the United States Navy to be named in honor of the 24th state. Missouri was laid down in February 1900 at the Newport News Shipbuilding & Drydock Company, was launched in December 1901, and was commissioned into the fleet in December 1903. She was armed with a main battery of four 12-inch (305 mm) guns and could steam at a top speed of 18 knots (33 km/h; 21 mph).
Missouri spent her entire career in the Atlantic with the North Atlantic Fleet, later renamed the Atlantic Fleet. In late 1907, she and the rest of the Atlantic Fleet circumnavigated the globe as the so-called Great White Fleet, which ended in February 1909. The ship was decommissioned in 1910, with periodic reactivations for summer training cruises over the followed six years. After America entered World War I in April 1917, Missouri was brought back into service to train personnel for the expanding wartime Navy. She served briefly as a troopship in 1919, carrying American soldiers back from France, before being decommissioned in September that year. Ultimately, she was sold for scrapping in January 1922.
Description
The United States Congress passed a major naval construction program in response to the outbreak of the Spanish–American War in 1898; the program included three new battleships, which were to become the Maine class.
“USS Missouri (BB-11)” enters the record as 1901 Maine-class battleship. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Missouri, BB-11 and Maine-class can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1094412. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1900, 1901, 1903 and 1907.
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This entry incorporates text from “USS Missouri (BB-11)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.