Wrapped in the flag.

Fort Macon was built on the North Carolina coast after the War of 1812 to guard Beaufort harbor from attacks by pirates or enemy warships.

And, for a few decades, the US Army garrisoned troops at the Fort.

But then, as the threat of foreign warships subsided, Congress cut back on funding.

The Fort fell into disrepair.

The troops left.

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Forced off the fence.

It is 1861.

The question of secession has deeply divided the people of Missouri.

The state entered the Union in 1821 as a slave state and Southern sentiment dominated rural parts of the state.

But St. Louis was pro-Union.

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Turmoil’s blessing.

It is 1757.

The British colonies are in the third year of the French and Indian War in the Ohio Valley.

Col. George Washington, of the Virginia militia, age 25, is Britain’s ambassador there.

The job requires that he work effectively with French officials as well as the leaders of the Iroquois Confederation, while offering protection to British residents.

This is a tall order.

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The President’s best day.

For Lincoln, it was Saturday, July 4, 1863.

At 10:00 that morning, Confederate forces in Vicksburg surrendered to General Grant, ending his forty-seven-day siege of the Confederate river and rail transportation hub.

Grant’s victory gave Union forces control of the Mississippi River, effectively splitting the Confederacy in two.

At 3:00 in the afternoon on the day before, Union forces in Gettysburg had repelled Pickett’s Charge, inflicting devastating casualties on Confederate troops on the third and final day of the battle.

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The dark path.

It is the morning of August 18, 1790, and the nation’s first president is in Newport, Rhode Island, meeting officials and representatives of religious groups.

Among them is Moses Seixas, the son of Portuguese immigrants, who leads Newport’s Jewish congregation.

The day before, Seixas had written to Washington seeking assurance that Jews, persecuted throughout history, would be entitled to all of the rights and privileges of American citizens regardless of their religious affiliation.

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Real leadership.

In March 1945, “Lightning Joe” Collins’s men of the Army’s VII Corps crossed into Germany.

They were driving east, toward Germany’s industrial heartland in the Ruhr Valley.

Then it was on to Berlin.

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The worried wife.

The Civil War’s first major battle killed or wounded almost five thousand men.

Among them was Captain James B. Ricketts, a Union artillery commander.

After receiving wounds, he was taken to a house on the edge of the battlefield which the Confederates had converted into a field hospital.

Four days later, Ricketts’s wife, Fanny, learned her husband had been injured.

She left her home in Washington and crossed Confederate lines to search for him.

And she found him in that house.

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Preparing for the debate.

It is the summer of 1854.

Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas’s bill to allow the people of Kansas and Nebraska, rather than the federal government, to decide whether slavery will be permitted in their region has become law.

The law is an expression of “popular sovereignty.”

It negates the antislavery provisions of the Missouri Compromise, which had prohibited the expansion of slavery in lands of the Louisiana Purchase above the 36th parallel of latitude.

And the law ignites long-simmering sectional divisions between North and South.

Slavery’s opponents are enraged.

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Judy Garland and Jack Kennedy

They met in 1954, at the Hollywood premier of A Star Is Born, a film long considered Judy’s finest performance.

At the time, Kennedy was thirty-seven and the junior senator from Massachusetts.

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Butting heads.

By 1944, Bill Mauldin’s “Willie and Joe” cartoons were appearing six times a week in the Stars and Stripes military newspaper.

Willie and Joe were bedraggled, ordinary Americans coping with the mud, tedium and fear of the infantryman serving on the front lines in Europe.

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