In Meriwether Lewis' mind Capt. James Cook was the modern-day Christopher Columbus...

Thanks to Capt. Robert Gray, geographers could finally tell how wide the continent of North America was...

In Weehawken, NJ, across the Hudson from New York City, two of the country's more famous statesmen, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, dueled. The confrontation cost Hamilton his life, a twisted ending for the man whose image adorns the $10 bill...

The third president of the United States, the man who sent Meriwether Lewis off to explore the terra incognita of the West, the man who crafted this country's Declaration of Independence, the man who spent a lifetime building an architectural masterpiece that still stands today, the man who founded a great university, Thomas Jefferson...

In a brief biography of Meriwether Lewis written after Lewis' death, Jefferson told of Lewis' hunting in his barefeet with the winter snow still on the ground. It's little wonder then that Jefferson, a neighbor of Lewis' family, turned to Lewis for the great expedition west. The mental and physical endurance that Jefferson had seen up close in Lewis would be put to the test of his lifetime as he explored the uncharted west in search of the Northwest Passage...

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark weren't the first European-Americans to cross North America to the Pacific. That distinction belongs to Alexander MacKenzie...

Had James Madison continued his studies, the "Father of the Constitution" might have answered a much different calling...