9 documentaries from this era
Robert E. Lee's entire battle plan for the Confederate invasion of the North, Special Order 191, was found by a Union soldier lying in a Maryland field wrapped around three cigars, days before Antietam became the bloodiest single day in American military history.
In the winter of 1811, an earthquake so powerful it made the Mississippi River run backwards struck the Missouri bootheel, rang church bells in Boston, and created Reelfoot Lake. The New Madrid fault line is still active today, and millions of people live inside its danger zone without knowing it.
Camp Peary held 3,000 Nazi POWs in 1943, then became the CIA training facility known as The Farm
In 1919 a 25-foot wave of molasses moving 35 mph killed 21 people and injured 150 more in Boston's North End
On December 17, 1903, the Wright Brothers made four powered flights at Kill Devil Hills. The famous 12-second first flight covered only 120 feet. The fourth and final flight of the day lasted 59 seconds and covered 852 feet — nearly seven times longer. North Carolina never puts that on the license plate.
On April 27, 1938, the town of Enfield held a farewell ball — at midnight, as the town legally ceased to exist, residents danced until dawn
On April 12, 1945, FDR collapsed while sitting for a portrait at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia. His last words were 'I have a terrific headache.' What happened next was kept secret for hours while the entire course of World War Two hung in the balance.
On May 27, 1962, the Centralia volunteer fire department set a trash fire that ignited an exposed coal seam. The fire spread through underground mines beneath the town. Over sixty years later, it still burns today. The federal government spent over $42 million relocating residents. By 2010, only ten remained of the original fourteen hundred.
American democracy didn't emerge from a vacuum -- Benjamin Franklin studied Iroquois governance at the 1754 Albany Congress, and the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace influenced core Constitutional concepts including federalism and impeachment.