The American Record

Ten months after Dallas, a chief justice who never wanted the job hands a president a report meant to close the case — and instead opens a debate that's still running.

Off Flamborough Head in 1779, John Paul Jones lashes his sinking ship to a British frigate and refuses to surrender, forging the founding legend of the American Navy.

On September 22, 1862, five days after Antietam, Lincoln issued a legal notice that quietly turned the Civil War into a fight over slavery itself.

A militia patrol near Tarrytown stops a rider in civilian clothes and finds papers that expose the war's most infamous betrayal — Benedict Arnold's plot to hand West Point to the British.

Nine days after the attacks of September 11, President Bush stood before Congress and gave America's response a name. That name would shape two decades of war.

On this day in 1796, George Washington's Farewell Address hit the Philadelphia press — a private letter of warning that became the country's first unwritten rule.

On September 18, 1947, a wartime turf war over the military finally settled — and quietly, without ceremony, America got a secretary of defense, a National Security Council, and a brand-new agency called the CIA.

On the bloodiest single day in American military history, Robert E. Lee's invasion of the North collapses along a Maryland creek, and the outcome reshapes the purpose of the Civil War itself.

Two days after his army broke and ran on Manhattan, George Washington needed his men to prove they could stand. In a buckwheat field above the Hudson, they finally did.

Before dawn on September 15, 1950, Marines scaled a seawall at Inchon in a landing the Navy itself called reckless — and turned the Korean War inside out within two weeks.

On September 14, 1901, a wagon-and-train dash through the night ends in a private library in Buffalo, where a judge and a borrowed room turn a vice president into the youngest president in American history.

Twenty-five hours of British bombs over Fort McHenry, a chain of sunken ships, and the dawn that gave Francis Scott Key his poem.

On a hilltop outside Mexico City, American guns pound a castle full of cadets and soldiers with nowhere to hide, setting up the assault that would decide a war.

A clear Tuesday morning, four hijacked planes, and the day that redrew American history. This is the story of September 11, 2001.

A 21-year-old schoolteacher-turned-officer volunteers for a mission with no precedent and no protection — the story behind America's first intelligence martyr.

Two months after declaring independence, the fledgling government still had no settled name for itself. The story of a single, quiet journal entry that made "United States" permanent.

Four weeks after Nixon's resignation, President Gerald Ford makes a Sunday-morning decision that closes off Watergate before it ever reaches a courtroom — and reshapes his own presidency in the process.

A one-man oak submarine, a British flagship, and two hours of darkness in New York Harbor: the strange true story of America's first submarine attack.

A president who refused to fear a handshake, an anarchist with a gun hidden in a handkerchief, and a coat button that briefly changed history. The story of the day William McKinley was shot in Buffalo.

On September 5, 1774, delegates from twelve colonies who had never sat in one room together gathered in Philadelphia to answer Parliament's punishment of Boston — and accidentally invented the machinery of American self-government.

On September 4, 1862, Robert E. Lee marched a battered, half-starving army across the Potomac into Maryland — a gamble that would end two weeks later at Antietam and change the meaning of the Civil War.

Two years after Yorktown, the war was still waiting on paperwork. On September 3, 1783, three American diplomats sat down in a rented Paris room to finally make independence official.

On the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Japan formally surrendered to end World War II. One ceremony, twenty-three minutes, and a symbolic flag that closed a ninety-two-year loop in American history.

A Korean airliner drifts off course into forbidden Soviet skies, and a fighter pilot pulls the trigger on 269 lives — the story of Korean Air Lines Flight 007.

On the last day of August 1864, a mistaken order and an exhausted Confederate army collided south of Atlanta at Jonesborough, opening the door to a city Sherman had spent four months trying to take.