history - united states

As the nation transformed itself into an induatrial gaint, railroads spanned the continent, vast fortunes were founded on oil and steel, the western farmers rallied around William Jennings Bryan in a crusade against the eastern financiers, and a legion of inventors was busy laying the foundations of the world we live in today.

They poured westward after the Civil War - gold miners and sodbusters, horse soldiers and cowboys. They built boomtowns with names like Deadwood and Abilene; they drove vast herds of cattle north to the railheads; they transformed a wilderness into an agricultural empire; and they fought the last battles against the doomed Plains Indians.

The fighting began with skirmishes in Texas and California and ended with General Winfield Scott's occupation of Mexico City. The southwestern border was secure at last, but in other parts of the country the slavery issue was boiling to a climax. The first fateful shots of the Civil War were fired on Fort Sumter in April, 1861.

The war lasted for four years and claimed hundreds of thousands of casualties, many remembered only with a simple cross on a grave far from home. Over the conflict loomed the towering figure of Abraham Lincoln until he, too, was cut down by a bullet. Many years of reconstruction were to pass before North and South were truly reunited again.

Lexington, Concord, Ticonderoga...the fighting had begun even as delegates to the Continental Congress debated the Declaration of Independence. Under George Washington, the Continental Army salvages victory from crushing defeat in the desperate winter of 1776, and survived Valley Forge to win the world-shaking victory at Yorktown in 1781.

With the adoption of the Constitution, the founding fathers created our present form of government. In 1803, Preident Thomas Jefferson's bold purchase of the Louisiana Territory more than doubled the size of the United States. But in 1812, another war broke out with Britain, and the new nation was again imperilled.

After the turmoil of the nation's birth came a time of building - roads amnd canals, railroads and homesteads, mills and cities. New invetions like the cotton gin and the reaper, began to forge a new economy. And the fearless, hard-bitten Andrew Jackson came into the Presidency, and with him brought a new kind of democracy, raw and vigorous.

Pushing west, men like John C. Fremont and Jedediah Smith opened up a breathtaking expanse of new country. As pioneer families followed the trail blazers through the forests and across the deserts, tension with Mexico flared into bloodshed at the seize of the Alamo, while hundreds of miles away, war was looming with Britain over our northern boundary.