The American Record

At dawn on a rocky ledge above the Hudson, a sitting Vice President and the architect of the American Treasury settled thirteen years of hatred with pistols. Only one of them meant to fire.

A wrecked Japanese fighter sits hidden on a remote Alaskan island for over a month — until a routine patrol pilot spots it and changes the air war in the Pacific.

On Saipan, a fanatical last charge and a cliff full of terrified civilians end a 24-day battle that puts Tokyo within reach of American bombers for the first time.

On July 8, 2011, the space shuttle Atlantis launched for the final time, closing out 30 years and 135 missions of the Space Shuttle program.

In 1846, a commodore who'd waited days for confirmation of war finally moved — and Monterey, California changed hands without a single shot fired.

On July 6, 1962, the Atomic Energy Commission detonated a thermonuclear device beneath the Nevada desert to prove the bomb could build as well as destroy. The blast carved the largest crater in America — and sent fallout drifting straight into the Midwest.

On a smoke-filled field near the Niagara River, a supply mix-up in gray cloth tricks a British general — and an American army built from scratch proves it can stand and fight.

On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress stopped petitioning the Crown and voted to become a nation. The story of the vote, the printing press that ran all night, and the war it guaranteed.

On the day before he'd take formal command, George Washington rides toward Cambridge to face an army that barely deserves the name — and a political gamble Congress needed to work.

On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress voted to sever ties with Britain — the legal act of independence that John Adams believed Americans would celebrate forever. He was off by two days.

On July 1, 1863, two armies collided by accident in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania — launching three days that broke Lee's invasion and left over 50,000 casualties in a small farming town.

On June 30, 1864, Abraham Lincoln signed a bill protecting Yosemite Valley — establishing the unprecedented idea that a government could hold land for the people's permanent enjoyment.

On June 29, 2007, thousands camped outside Apple stores as the first iPhone went on sale — a device Steve Jobs had promised would "reinvent the phone."

Six days before independence was declared, a half-finished fort made of spongy palmetto logs stopped a British fleet cold — and bought the South four years of breathing room.

Two days after North Korea invaded the South, President Harry Truman made the call that would define American military intervention for generations: he ordered U.S. forces into combat without a declaration of war.

June 26, 1945: Two months after Roosevelt's death, fifty nations signed the UN Charter in San Francisco — the architecture of postwar order that he had envisioned but never lived to see.