The American Record

On October 14, 1943, the Eighth Air Force sent 291 B-17 bombers back to the ball bearing factories of Schweinfurt without fighter escort the whole way — and paid a price that would reshape American air doctrine.

In an Atlanta lab in 1976, a virologist aims an electron microscope at a mysterious sample from Central Africa and sees something no one has ever named. This is the story of how Ebola got its shape.

A lookout's cry in the dark ends ten weeks at sea and opens a new world to Europe — on the day Columbus sights land, believing he's reached the Indies.

In 1906, San Francisco orders Japanese and Korean children into a single segregated school, igniting a diplomatic crisis that lands on Theodore Roosevelt's desk and reshapes American immigration policy for a generation.

On a Long Island beach in 1814, the crew of a wrecked revenue cutter dragged their cannon up a bluff and kept fighting the Royal Navy for three days straight.