The American Record

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.

On August 30, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur walked unarmed off a transport plane at a Japanese airfield that had been an enemy base two weeks earlier, opening an occupation that would remake Japan.

On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. set aside his prepared remarks at the Lincoln Memorial and reached for a phrase he'd been testing in churches for three years — turning a stalled bill into a movement.

On Long Island in 1776, a young Continental Army faces European regulars in open battle for the first time — and learns, at terrible cost, how to survive to fight another day.

On the morning of August 26, 1920, a Secretary of State signs a two-sentence amendment alone in his home, quietly ending a 72-year fight and giving 26 million American women the vote.

On this day in 1944, a German general defied Hitler's order to burn Paris to the ground, choosing surrender over destruction as the city's four-year occupation ended in a single afternoon.

On this day in 1814, British troops marched into an undefended Washington and set fire to the Capitol and the President's House — and a violent storm arrived just in time to save what was left.

Four months after Lexington and Concord, King George III answers colonial pleas for peace with a proclamation that calls them traitors — before he's even read their olive branch.

A British siege in the Mohawk Valley collapses on a rumor. How a captured Loyalist and a bluff from Benedict Arnold helped set up the American victory at Saratoga.

Forty years after a Hawaiian prince first asked Congress for statehood, the islands finally got their answer — from their own voters. The story of how Hawaii became the 50th state.

A Soviet schoolteacher's fall from a New York window ignites a diplomatic crisis, ending with President Truman personally expelling a Soviet consul at the height of the Berlin standoff.a

A newspaper editor's decision to run an unverified story from the Pacific coast sets off one of the great migrations in American history. This is the story of the New York Herald's 1848 gold rush scoop.

On August 18, 1920, a 24-year-old Tennessee lawmaker breaks a tie in his state legislature and delivers the final vote needed to add the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution — all because of a letter from his mother.

On August 17, 1943, 376 American B-17s split into two forces to hit Germany's fighter and ball-bearing factories in one day — and paid the heaviest single-mission price the Eighth Air Force had yet suffered.

A pre-dawn collision on a sandy South Carolina road ends in an hour with an American army destroyed, a general disgraced, and command of the Southern war handed to the man who would finish it at Yorktown.

On this day in 1962, a demoralized Army private ran across a minefield at the Korean DMZ and vanished behind enemy lines for good. Plus, Lafayette returns to America and Hirohito's voice ends a world war.

On August 14, 1935, FDR signed the Social Security Act, creating America's first federal old-age pension. The story of the man with a flat-payment crusade who forced Washington's hand, and the law that followed.

In Manila Bay in 1898, Spain and America stage a battle that isn't real — until the Filipino army that actually won the siege gets locked out of the city, and the shots meant to be theater turn fatal.

On Guam in 1944, American Marines finally declare the island secure after three brutal weeks of jungle fighting — reclaiming territory the Japanese had held since three days after Pearl Harbor.

Three days after Hiroshima, a B-29 called Bockscar runs low on fuel over Japan, diverts through clouds and smoke, and drops the second atomic bomb before limping into an emergency landing with minutes of fuel left.

Before dawn on August 6, 1945, a B-29 named for a pilot's mother carried a weapon no one had ever used in war. What happened over Hiroshima that morning would end a world war and start an argument America still hasn't finished.

On a Gulf morning in 1864, a Union admiral lashed to his ship's rigging pushes his fleet through a minefield to close the Confederacy's last open port.