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.

What actually happened on June 19, 1865, two and a half years after emancipation, and why almost no one knows about it.

A roadside sign, a bullet-torn wool hat, and the 73-year-old who died for the Revolution seven months after it was supposedly won.

A rainy morning at Arlington, the quiet men of an earlier generation, and the question the fallen ask the living: will you carry it now?

A Memorial Day poem to a friend who didn't come home, and a warning to be slow when the next war is proposed.

WWII B-24 pilot Bud Berthold flew 35 missions, including D-Day. He died at 106. His advice: stay active.

An evening with Allen Packwood at the Churchill Archives Centre, and why the people who keep records keep a nation's memory.

A missing security check, a quiet choice in London, and fifty SOE agents who never came home from occupied Holland.

How two Czech paratroopers killed Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, what it cost the village of Lidice, and why their country still remembers.

How quiet houses on a Hampshire estate turned 3,000 ordinary men and women into the most dangerous people in Europe.

Billy Fiske had two Olympic golds and an American passport that made him illegal in the RAF. He talked his way in anyway.

At Audley End, Polish paratroopers swore an oath at a stone table and jumped into a country that wouldn't survive the peace.

Chained, tortured, and offered a plane to Lisbon for one name, the White Rabbit said no. He'd been practicing his whole life.

Walking the London high street where SOE hid above the shops and trusted a whole neighborhood to keep quiet.

Day 1 in London, on the anniversary of a death nobody remembers: the Belgian engineer behind a spy network that worked.

Etty Hillesum's diary began as a young woman's private practice and became a record the Nazi system couldn't control. Witness begins on the page.

Sophie Scholl carried a suitcase of leaflets into the University of Munich. Truth spreads when someone risks the first copy.

A woman hangs white sheets in a bombed city while, elsewhere, a man in a room full of light tells people to rise up.

A ten-year-old's diary from besieged Sarajevo reached the world before she did. A child's record can punch through propaganda.

Barred from gathering, Argentina's mothers walked two by two and kept the names. Their walk became a file that held a country accountable.