Stories That
Shaped a Nation

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, the Continental Congress adopted a document declaring that government draws its just powers from the consent of the governed — most of the fifty-six delegates signed it that August. 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.

August 20, 1619: the White Lion landed at Point Comfort with twenty Angolans aboard — the first documented enslaved Africans in English North America.