Stories That
Shaped a Nation

In secret across 30 sites and 600,000 workers between 1939 and 1945, the United States built the first nuclear weapons. Trinity, July 16. Hiroshima, August 6. Nagasaki, August 9.

Drought, dryland farming, and the Great Depression turned the southern Plains into a wasteland. Two and a half million people left. The federal government rewrote what it owed them.

Six million Black Americans left the South between 1916 and 1970, remaking the cities of the North and West. Jacob Lawrence painted them in sixty panels.

On December 17, 1903, at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, Orville Wright lifted off the sands for twelve seconds and 120 feet. Five years later, Wilbur flew for over an hour.

Twelve million arrivals passed through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954. The 1924 Immigration Act closed the gates for the next forty years.

The Central Pacific and Union Pacific met at Promontory Summit on May 10, 1869. The Chinese laborers who built the western half were not in the photograph.

On January 1, 1863, Lincoln declared enslaved people in rebellious states “forever free.” The proclamation freed no one immediately. The army that came after did.

On December 26, 1862, thirty-eight Dakota men were hanged simultaneously in Mankato on President Lincoln’s order — still the largest mass execution in American history.

Four years of war, roughly 750,000 dead — historian J. David Hacker’s revised estimate. Ended at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Reconstruction lasted twelve.

James Marshall found gold at Sutter’s Mill on January 24, 1848. Three hundred thousand people arrived in two years. California became a state on September 9, 1850.

On July 19, 1848, three hundred delegates met in upstate New York and demanded the vote. Seventy-two years later, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.

Between 1838 and 1839, the federal government forced 16,000 Cherokee from their ancestral lands to Indian Territory. Roughly 4,000 died on the thousand-mile march.