Fort Snelling National Cemetery is one of 120 national cemeteries across the country. More than 160,000 brave men and women from the Upper Midwestern states of Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Iowa lie beneath the field of white marble grave markers. While the acres of white stones are a deeply moving memorial to the strength and sacrifices of a nation, they do not reveal the individual stories of courage.

From the sailors on the USS Ward who fired the first shots at Pearl Harbor to a Japanese-American army medic who served in a devastated Hiroshima, Stephen...

Texas was the South's frontier in the antebellum period. The vast new state represented the hope and future of many Southern cotton planters. As a result, Texas changed tremendously during the 1850s as increasing numbers of Southern planters moved westward to settle. Planters brought with them large numbers of slaves to plant, cultivate and pick the valuable cash crop; by 1860, slaves made up 30 percent of the total Texas population. No state in the South grew nearly as fast as Texas during this decade, and as the booming economy for cotton led the economic development, the state became...