10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America

Part 1 recalls the Battle of Antietam, the costly Civil War conflict fought on September 17, 1862, that allowed Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

Part 2 recalls the 1637 clash between English settlers and Pequot Indians in the Connecticut River Valley, where English forces burned the Pequot fort at Mystic and killed those who tried to flee.

Part 3 examines the letter sent by Albert Einstein to FDR in the summer of 1939 informing the president of the possibility of nuclear weapons and asking him to begin the research and development of new weapons based on nuclear chain reactions.

Part 4 recalls the assassination of President William McKinley, who was shot in 1901 by Leon Czolgosz while attending the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. McKinley died a week later.

Part 5 recalls Elvis Presley's 1956 appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show" and its powerful effect on popular culture.

Part 6 chronicles the California Gold Rush, initiated when gold was found at Sutter's Mill in January 1848 and thousands of fortune seekers began migrating west.

Part 7 recalls the 1925 Scopes "Monkey" Trial of John T. Scopes, a Tennessee high-school teacher who taught evolution in defiance of the Butler Act. The courtroom was the stage for legal powerhouses Clarrence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan.

Part 8 examines the 1892 strike at a steel plant in Homestead, Pa., where workers clashed with Pinkerton guards in a fight that left men dead and wounded.

Part 9 recalls the 1964 murders of civil-rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Miss., by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Recalling Shays' Rebellion in 1786, in which farmers, led by Daniel Shays, stormed a Massachusetts courthouse in protest of farm foreclosures and to stop the imprisonment of debtors.