The American Record

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.

On September 25, 1789, Congress sent twelve amendments to the states, ten of which became the Bill of Rights. One forgotten amendment in that package would wait two centuries for its ratification.

Ten months after Dallas, a chief justice who never wanted the job hands a president a report meant to close the case — and instead opens a debate that's still running.

Off Flamborough Head in 1779, John Paul Jones lashes his sinking ship to a British frigate and refuses to surrender, forging the founding legend of the American Navy.

On September 22, 1862, five days after Antietam, Lincoln issued a legal notice that quietly turned the Civil War into a fight over slavery itself.

A militia patrol near Tarrytown stops a rider in civilian clothes and finds papers that expose the war's most infamous betrayal — Benedict Arnold's plot to hand West Point to the British.

Nine days after the attacks of September 11, President Bush stood before Congress and gave America's response a name. That name would shape two decades of war.