A drunken slip of the tongue named this California town. Decades later, a wine made here beat France's best in a blind tasting that changed how the world saw American wine for good.

A Wild West showman quit performing the frontier long enough to build a real town on it — irrigation canals, a railroad, and a rodeo that's run every single night since 1938.

Soldiers joked a prospector would only find his own tombstone here. He found one of the richest silver veins in American history instead — and thirty seconds of gunfire that's still being reenacted daily.

A South Dakota gold mine that ran for 125 years is now home to one of the world's leading physics labs, a mile underground, hunting for dark matter in the same tunnels miners once worked.

The Baseball Hall of Fame is built on a creation myth historians have debunked. What's real is the small town that produced America's first famous novelist — and quietly sheltered freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad decades before anyone played a game here.

A 1904 custody battle over Irish orphans placed with Mexican mining families in this Arizona copper town went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1870 this Texas town was bigger than Dallas — a steamboat port nicknamed "Baghdad on the Bayou" — until the river that built it stopped being deep enough to float a boat.

A single fingerprint on a car window, left by a Kansas bank-robbery gang in 1928, became one of the first uses of fingerprint evidence to solve a murder in U.S. history.

In 1850, Frederick Douglass chaired a convention here against the Fugitive Slave Act — with roughly fifty actual fugitive slaves in the room, captured in one of the only photographs of its kind.

The man who killed Jesse James for a reward and a pardon was himself shot in the back, in his own saloon, in this Colorado silver town two years after it was founded.