The American Record

Two months after declaring independence, the fledgling government still had no settled name for itself. The story of a single, quiet journal entry that made "United States" permanent.

Four weeks after Nixon's resignation, President Gerald Ford makes a Sunday-morning decision that closes off Watergate before it ever reaches a courtroom — and reshapes his own presidency in the process.

A one-man oak submarine, a British flagship, and two hours of darkness in New York Harbor: the strange true story of America's first submarine attack.

A president who refused to fear a handshake, an anarchist with a gun hidden in a handkerchief, and a coat button that briefly changed history. The story of the day William McKinley was shot in Buffalo.

On September 5, 1774, delegates from twelve colonies who had never sat in one room together gathered in Philadelphia to answer Parliament's punishment of Boston — and accidentally invented the machinery of American self-government.

On September 4, 1862, Robert E. Lee marched a battered, half-starving army across the Potomac into Maryland — a gamble that would end two weeks later at Antietam and change the meaning of the Civil War.

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.