Stories That
Shaped a Nation

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 5,043-mile march.

In an open square in New Orleans, enslaved Africans were permitted to gather on Sundays. Their music — call-and-response, polyrhythm, improvisation — became jazz a century later.

On April 30, 1803, France sold 828,000 square miles for $15 million. Napoleon needed cash; Jefferson doubled the country. The land was already inhabited by dozens of nations.

Ten amendments ratified December 15, 1791 — protecting speech, assembly, due process, and arms. Their application to the states would take another 150 years.

Drafted in Philadelphia over four months in 1787, ratified by nine states in 1788. The oldest written national charter still in force — and the three-fifths compromise was in its original text.

On July 4, 1776, fifty-six delegates signed a document declaring that government draws its just powers from the consent of the governed. Many of them held people in bondage.

The Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy — Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Tuscarora — governed by a constitution older than the country that borrowed from it.