The American Record

On Armistice Day, 1921, President Warren G. Harding buried a soldier whose name no one could say — and gave a grieving nation one grave to stand before.

On November 9, 1979, a loaded test tape and one skipped switch sent warnings of a massive Soviet nuclear strike racing to America's command bunkers. The story of the night the machines lied.

On November 6, 1971, the U.S. detonated the largest underground nuclear test in American history beneath a remote Alaskan island — and a divided Supreme Court let it happen.

A Wyoming widow says no to a governorship — and is committed to running before she's finished deciding. The story of Nellie Tayloe Ross, the first woman elected governor in America.

A warship waits off Colón, two generals board the wrong train, and a nation is born before Bogotá even hears the news — the story of Panama's 1903 break from Colombia.

On a November night in 1988, a Cornell graduate student launched a program from MIT that he swore wasn't meant to break anything. By morning, thousands of computers across the country were dead in the water.

On a Pacific atoll in 1952, the United States detonated the first full-yield hydrogen bomb, vaporizing an entire island in seconds. The story of Ivy Mike, the engineers who built it, and the Washington argument that almost stopped it.

On a rain-soaked island in New York Harbor, France finally handed over a gift ten years in the making — and a copper woman's torch caught fire for the first time.

A sweltering Soviet submarine, a dying battery, and one officer's refusal to say yes — the untold moment the Cuban Missile Crisis nearly turned nuclear.

On October 26, 1774, the First Continental Congress closed seven weeks of argument in Philadelphia with a boycott, a petition, and a promise to come back — the rehearsal for a revolution.

Four months into the War of 1812, two frigate captains who once shook hands over a wager meet again at sea — and this time it's cannon fire, not a beaver hat, on the line.

A captured Nazi weapon falls back to the New Mexico desert in 1946 and shatters on impact — but the camera bolted to its side just brought back something no one had ever seen: the curve of the Earth from space.

Before dawn on October 23, 1944, two American submarines ambushed the most powerful column of Japan's navy in the Palawan Passage, opening the largest naval battle in history and sending its commander swimming for his life.

In 1777, a small force of Rhode Island soldiers behind an earthen wall outside Philadelphia stops a Hessian assault meant to break the siege of the Delaware River — and a French engineer's last-minute fix turns the tide.

On October 21, 1861, a sitting U.S. Senator led Union troops into a disaster above the Potomac. His death would reshape how Congress watched the war.

On a single Saturday night in 1973, two of Nixon's top law enforcement officials chose resignation over an unlawful order. The Saturday Night Massacre, and the men who walked away.

On this day in 1781, Lord Cornwallis surrendered his trapped army at Yorktown, Virginia — and sent a subordinate to hand over his sword rather than face Washington himself.

On October 18, 1775, a British warship gave the Maine town of Falmouth two hours to surrender — then burned it to the ground. The fire that followed helped push Congress toward building a navy.

On a battered Virginia peninsula in 1781, a lone drummer climbs onto a parapet and beats a signal that will end the Revolutionary War's final major battle — and open the door to American independence.

On October 16, 1859, John Brown led a small band into Harpers Ferry, Virginia, seizing a federal armory in hopes of sparking a slave uprising. It didn't come — but the raid still helped push the nation toward war.

On October 15, 1954, Hurricane Hazel slammed into North Carolina as a Category 4 storm, then raced north and tore through Toronto the same night. One hurricane, two countries, hundreds of lives lost in a single day.

On October 14, 1943, the Eighth Air Force sent 291 B-17 bombers back to the ball bearing factories of Schweinfurt without fighter escort the whole way — and paid a price that would reshape American air doctrine.

In an Atlanta lab in 1976, a virologist aims an electron microscope at a mysterious sample from Central Africa and sees something no one has ever named. This is the story of how Ebola got its shape.

A lookout's cry in the dark ends ten weeks at sea and opens a new world to Europe — on the day Columbus sights land, believing he's reached the Indies.

In 1906, San Francisco orders Japanese and Korean children into a single segregated school, igniting a diplomatic crisis that lands on Theodore Roosevelt's desk and reshapes American immigration policy for a generation.

On a Long Island beach in 1814, the crew of a wrecked revenue cutter dragged their cannon up a bluff and kept fighting the Royal Navy for three days straight.

Two months after Detroit fell, Lieutenant Jesse Elliott leads a hundred men in open boats against two anchored British warships on Lake Erie — and gives America its first naval win of the War of 1812.

On a drought-stricken Kentucky battlefield in 1862, two armies stumbled into the bloodiest fight the state would ever see — over nothing more than a few pools of stagnant water.

Four weeks after September 11, the Taliban refuses to give up Osama bin Laden. American and British warplanes open the skies over Afghanistan on a war that would last twenty years.

On October 6, 1777, a British force storms two half-finished forts guarding the Hudson River — and learns that breaking a chain is easier than winning a war.

On October 5, 1813, William Henry Harrison's cavalry shattered a thinning British line on the Thames River, and Tecumseh fell defending a confederacy he'd spent ten years building.

On this day in 1777, George Washington launched a daring four-column dawn assault on British-held Germantown — and watched a wall of fog turn his own army against itself.

On October 3, 1962, astronaut Walter Schirra rode Sigma 7 through six orbits of the Earth, a quiet, nearly flawless flight that gave NASA the confidence to aim for a full day in space.

On October 2, 1789, George Washington sent twelve proposed amendments to the states for ratification. Ten would become the Bill of Rights — though one waited two centuries to take effect.

A magazine editor's shock at a trampled meadow, a naturalist's two essays, and a president's signature combine to create Yosemite National Park in 1890 — but not quite the park John Muir wanted.

On September 30, 1949, the Berlin Airlift officially ended — fifteen months and over two million tons of supplies after it began, having proven American power could win a Cold War standoff without firing a shot.

Thirty-two months after Challenger, five veteran astronauts strap into Discovery to find out if America can still fly. This is the story of NASA's Return to Flight.

On September 28, 1781, George Washington led the combined American and French army out of Williamsburg to encircle a trapped British force at Yorktown — the last great maneuver of the Revolutionary War.

In Berlin, three foreign ministers sign a pact aimed less at each other than at a still-neutral America. The Tripartite Pact of 1940 drew the lines that would define the next five years of world war.