On Desolation Peak, Jack Kerouac expected to find God. Instead he found himself, and his best book, The Dharma Bums.

One man.  A vision.  Thirty years working in his backyard. The Watts Towers are "as pure a work of art as this country can rightly call its own."

A century ago, in the bleakest of years, other poets despaired.  But one lit her candle -- at both ends.

Loss after loss, Harvey Milk kept battering at the door. If he could only “give them hope.” (As seen in “Milk.”)

A shrill song is stuck in our heads. Once it plays out, we should listen to the old tunes.

American art was pretty and pink until The Ashcan School took the streets as its canvas.

Radio news was dead on arrival until Edward R. Murrow went live from the rooftops of London.

Alone on an island rooftop, Maria Mitchell’s telescope “swept” the stars. Could a woman calculate the clockwork of heaven?

The guitar growls, moans, weeps.  A bass riff surrenders to a squeal of pain. . .

How Langston Hughes touched bottom during the Depression and wrote an American anthem.

Coal miners distrusted Barbara Kopple until she hunkered down with them -- for three years -- and came home with a living, breathing masterpiece.

Baseball was a fading relic. Then a Chaplinesque college kid put on a chicken suit.

Single mother of seven, Dolores Huerta left her teaching job and went into the fields.  The United Farm Workers was born.

History’s Mill Girls were models of labor. Until they went on strike and sowed the seeds of the Labor movement.

When the president and the naturalist camped in Yosemite, America got greener.

Took off for L.A. Landed in Ireland. Was “Wrong Way” Corrigan confused or just clever?