For eight years Rick Rescorla made a Manhattan bank practice walking down the stairs. On September 11, 2001, they knew the way.

A widow, four presidents, and the letter that finally worked: how Sarah Josepha Hale gave America a national Thanksgiving.

John Paul Jones won the most famous fight in American naval history by lashing his ship to a bigger one.

What one man did with seventy-five days in 1843, and what you could do with the hundred left in your year.

Twenty-five years ago, a president climbed onto a wrecked fire engine with a borrowed bullhorn and found his voice.

September 6, 1620: 102 people set out in one leaking ship. What they did before stepping ashore founded a country.

Benjamin Franklin arrived in Paris with nothing to bargain with. Seven years of relationships later, he signed the peace. The long game wins.

Christopher Wren's plan for London was rejected. He spent 35 years rebuilding anyway, and the hidden structure still holds the dome up.

Frank Serpico wouldn't take the money everyone else took. For that, his own department left him to be shot.

August 30, 1945: MacArthur landed unarmed in a nation of 70 million enemies, and set the terms of the occupation in an hour.

August 19, 1812: one American frigate against a British warship. Half an hour later, a discouraged country had its proof.

A failed painter steamed up the Hudson while the crowd waited for him to sink. He didn't invent the steamboat. He made it work.

August 16, 1940: forty-eight volunteers with no manual made the first official parachute jump in U.S. Army history. Airborne started with them.

For four years the war in France barely moved. Then on a foggy morning near Amiens it moved eight miles before breakfast.

The USS Indianapolis sank in twelve minutes after delivering the Hiroshima bomb. Correcting the record took 55 years and a 12-year-old.

In an election year he was expected to lose, Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces. The road began on a Greyhound bus.

What Homer's oldest lessons still teach about power, restraint, loyalty, and leadership, as Christopher Nolan's film sends millions back to the poem.

July 17, 1945: seventy scientists asked the President to warn Japan before using the bomb they had built. He never saw the page.

Seventy-four McKinsey Summer Associates walked Gettysburg with Heroes' Path. The minute made Chamberlain famous. The two years made the minute.

On America's 250th morning, an imagined George Washington returns to Mount Vernon, and a young woman waits at the gate with an unlit candle.