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The Top 100 Historic Places in America

The places that tell the American story — from the harbor where immigrants first saw Liberty to the launch pads that sent people to the Moon. Each one opens onto its full record: the history, the facts, and how to go and stand there yourself.

100 landmarks · 31 states and the District of Columbia · 15 eras

— Nos. 1–10 —

The First Ten

  1. Number 1
    New York (Liberty Island), NY · Gilded Age

    Statue of Liberty

    The Statue of Liberty — formally Liberty Enlightening the World — was a gift from the people of France to the United States, dedicated on October 28, 1886.

  2. Number 2
    Philadelphia, PA · Colonial America

    Independence Hall

    Independence Hall in Philadelphia is where the United States was founded.

  3. Number 3
    Mount Vernon, VA · Colonial America

    Mount Vernon

    Mount Vernon was the home of George Washington — commander of the Continental Army and the first President of the United States.

  4. Number 4
    Gettysburg, PA · Civil War

    Gettysburg Battlefield

    The Battle of Gettysburg, fought July 1–3, 1863, was the largest and bloodiest battle of the American Civil War.

  5. Number 5
    New York, NY · Gilded Age

    Ellis Island

    For more than six decades, Ellis Island in New York Harbor was the front door to America.

  6. Number 6
    San Antonio, TX · Westward Expansion

    The Alamo

    The Alamo began as a Spanish mission and became, in 1836, the site of a thirteen-day siege that turned into one of the most famous last stands in American history.

  7. Number 7
    San Francisco, CA · The 20th Century

    Alcatraz Island

    Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay held one of the earliest U.S. military fortifications on the West Coast and, from 1934 to 1963, the federal government's most secure and notorious penitentiary.

  8. Number 8
    Keystone, SD · The 20th Century

    Mount Rushmore

    Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota's Black Hills depicts the 60-foot-tall faces of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, carved directly into a granite mountainside.

  9. Number 9
    Charlottesville, VA · Early Republic

    Monticello

    Monticello was the mountaintop home of Thomas Jefferson — author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States — which he designed himself and reworked over some forty years.

  10. Number 10
    Honolulu, HI · World War II

    Pearl Harbor (USS Arizona Memorial)

    On the morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese aircraft launched a surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Nos. 11–20

  1. Number 11

    Colonial Williamsburg

    Williamsburg, VA · Colonial America

    Colonial Williamsburg is the restored 18th-century capital of the Virginia colony and the largest living-history museum in the United States.

  2. Number 12

    The White House

    Washington, DC · Early Republic

    The White House has been the official residence and workplace of the President of the United States since 1800, making it one of the most recognizable symbols of the American presidency and of the nation itself.

  3. Number 13

    Liberty Bell

    Philadelphia, PA · Revolutionary War

    The Liberty Bell is one of the most enduring symbols of American independence and freedom.

  4. Number 14

    Lincoln Memorial

    Washington, DC · The 20th Century

    The Lincoln Memorial honors Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president, who led the United States through the Civil War and the end of slavery.

  5. Number 15

    Fort Sumter

    Charleston, SC · Civil War

    Fort Sumter is where the American Civil War began.

  6. Number 16

    Hearst Castle

    San Simeon, CA · The 20th Century

    Hearst Castle is the grandest expression of Gilded Age ambition in the American West — a hilltop palace that newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst built to house one of the largest private art collections in the country.

  7. Number 17

    Biltmore Estate

    Asheville, NC · Gilded Age

    Biltmore is the largest privately owned house in the United States — a 250-room French Renaissance château that George Washington Vanderbilt II raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina at the height of the Gilded Age.

  8. Number 18

    Washington Monument

    Washington, DC · The 19th Century

    The Washington Monument is the towering marble obelisk at the heart of the National Mall, built to honor George Washington — commander of the Continental Army and first President of the United States.

  9. Number 19

    United States Capitol

    Washington, DC · Early Republic

    The United States Capitol is the seat of the U.S. Congress and one of the most recognizable symbols of American democracy.

  10. Number 20

    Golden Gate Bridge

    San Francisco, CA · The 20th Century

    The Golden Gate Bridge is one of the most celebrated feats of engineering in the world and the defining symbol of San Francisco.

Nos. 21–30

  1. Number 21

    Little Bighorn Battlefield

    Crow Agency, MT · Westward Expansion

    Little Bighorn Battlefield marks the site of the most famous Native American victory of the Plains Indian Wars.

  2. Number 22

    Ford's Theatre

    Washington, DC · Civil War

    Ford's Theatre is where the course of American history turned on the night of April 14, 1865.

  3. Number 23

    Faneuil Hall

    Boston, MA · Revolutionary War

    Faneuil Hall has been called the 'Cradle of Liberty' for the fiery meetings that helped spark the American Revolution.

  4. Number 24

    Old North Church

    Boston, MA · Revolutionary War

    Old North Church is where the American Revolution received its most famous signal.

  5. Number 25

    Paul Revere House

    Boston, MA · Colonial America

    The Paul Revere House is the colonial home from which the silversmith and patriot Paul Revere set out on his famous midnight ride in April 1775.

  6. Number 26

    USS Constitution

    Boston, MA · Early Republic

    The USS Constitution — 'Old Ironsides' — is the oldest commissioned warship in the world still afloat.

  7. Number 27

    Castillo de San Marcos

    St. Augustine, FL · Spanish Colonial

    Castillo de San Marcos is the oldest masonry fort in the continental United States, a Spanish stronghold that has guarded St. Augustine, Florida, since the 17th century.

  8. Number 28

    French Quarter

    New Orleans, LA · Antebellum

    The French Quarter — the Vieux Carré, or 'Old Square' — is the historic heart of New Orleans and one of the most distinctive neighborhoods in America.

  9. Number 29

    Gateway Arch

    St. Louis, MO · The 20th Century

    The Gateway Arch is the tallest man-made monument in the Western Hemisphere and the defining symbol of St. Louis.

  10. Number 30

    Mesa Verde

    Mesa Verde National Park, CO · Indigenous America

    Mesa Verde preserves the most remarkable cliff dwellings in North America — stone villages built into the canyon alcoves of southwestern Colorado by the Ancestral Puebloans more than seven centuries ago.

Nos. 31–40

  1. Number 31

    Taos Pueblo

    Taos, NM · Indigenous America

    Taos Pueblo is one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States — a striking complex of multi-story adobe houses that the Taos people have lived in for more than a thousand years.

  2. Number 32

    Brooklyn Bridge

    New York, NY · Gilded Age

    When it opened in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the world and an engineering marvel that stitched together Manhattan and Brooklyn across the East River.

  3. Number 33

    Empire State Building

    New York, NY · The 20th Century

    The Empire State Building is the most famous skyscraper in the world and an enduring symbol of New York City and the American 20th century.

  4. Number 34

    Fort McHenry

    Baltimore, MD · Early Republic

    Fort McHenry is the birthplace of 'The Star-Spangled Banner.'

  5. Number 35

    Historic Jamestowne

    Jamestown, VA · Colonial America

    Historic Jamestowne is where permanent English America began.

  6. Number 36

    Hoover Dam

    Boulder City, NV · The 20th Century

    Hoover Dam is one of the greatest engineering achievements in American history — a colossal wall of concrete that tamed the Colorado River in the depths of the Great Depression.

  7. Number 37

    Graceland

    Memphis, TN · The 20th Century

    Graceland was the home of Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll, and is a shrine to one of the most influential entertainers of the 20th century.

  8. Number 38

    Fallingwater

    Mill Run, PA · The 20th Century

    Fallingwater is Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece and perhaps the most famous house in American architecture.

  9. Number 39

    Wright Brothers National Memorial

    Kill Devil Hills, NC · The 20th Century

    The Wright Brothers National Memorial marks the spot where human flight began.

  10. Number 40

    Appomattox Court House

    Appomattox, VA · Civil War

    Appomattox Court House is where the American Civil War effectively ended.

Nos. 41–50

  1. Number 41

    Antietam Battlefield

    Sharpsburg, MD · Civil War

    Antietam was the bloodiest single day in American history.

  2. Number 42

    The Breakers

    Newport, RI · Gilded Age

    The Breakers is the grandest of Newport's Gilded Age 'summer cottages' — a 70-room Italian Renaissance palazzo built for Cornelius Vanderbilt II, whose family's railroad fortune made them the richest in America.

  3. Number 43

    Grand Central Terminal

    New York, NY · The 20th Century

    Grand Central Terminal is one of the world's great railroad stations and a Beaux-Arts masterpiece at the heart of Manhattan.

  4. Number 44

    Savannah Historic District

    Savannah, GA · Antebellum

    The Savannah Historic District is one of America's largest and most beautiful historic districts — the graceful heart of the oldest city in Georgia.

  5. Number 45

    Charleston Historic District

    Charleston, SC · Antebellum

    Charleston's Historic District is one of the largest and most intact historic neighborhoods in America — a living museum of colonial and antebellum architecture in one of the nation's oldest cities.

  6. Number 46

    San Antonio Missions

    San Antonio, TX · Spanish Colonial

    The San Antonio Missions are the largest concentration of Spanish colonial missions in North America — four 18th-century mission communities strung along the San Antonio River.

  7. Number 47

    Cahokia Mounds

    Collinsville, IL · Indigenous America

    Cahokia Mounds preserves the remains of the largest and most sophisticated ancient city north of Mexico — a Mississippian metropolis that flourished a thousand years ago on the Mississippi floodplain.

  8. Number 48

    Chaco Culture

    Nageezi, NM · Indigenous America

    Chaco Culture preserves the heart of one of North America's most advanced ancient civilizations.

  9. Number 49

    The Hermitage

    Nashville, TN · Antebellum

    The Hermitage was the home of Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States and one of the most consequential and controversial figures in American history.

  10. Number 50

    Lincoln Home

    Springfield, IL · Civil War

    The Lincoln Home in Springfield, Illinois, is the only home Abraham Lincoln ever owned — the house where he lived for seventeen years as a lawyer, state politician, and family man before the presidency transformed his life and the nation's.

Nos. 51–60

  1. Number 51

    Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt

    Hyde Park, NY · The 20th Century

    Springwood is the only place in America where a president was born, kept a lifelong home, and was laid to rest.

  2. Number 52

    Sagamore Hill

    Oyster Bay, NY · The 20th Century

    Sagamore Hill was the home of Theodore Roosevelt's heart.

  3. Number 53

    Montpelier

    Orange, VA · Early Republic

    Montpelier is where the Constitution was, in a sense, conceived.

  4. Number 54

    Valley Forge

    King of Prussia, PA · Revolutionary War

    No shots were fired in anger at Valley Forge, yet it may be the most important place in the story of the Continental Army.

  5. Number 55

    Yorktown Battlefield

    Yorktown, VA · Revolutionary War

    On the fields around Yorktown in October 1781, the American Revolution was effectively won.

  6. Number 56

    Harpers Ferry

    Harpers Ferry, WV · Civil War

    Perched where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers meet, Harpers Ferry sits at a crossroads of American history.

  7. Number 57

    Vicksburg National Military Park

    Vicksburg, MS · Civil War

    Vicksburg was the key that unlocked the Confederacy.

  8. Number 58

    Edmund Pettus Bridge

    Selma, AL · Civil Rights

    A plain steel bridge over the Alabama River became one of the most sacred grounds of the civil rights movement.

  9. Number 59

    Little Rock Central High School

    Little Rock, AR · Civil Rights

    In the fall of 1957, a grand Arkansas high school became the front line of the struggle to enforce the Supreme Court's promise of school desegregation.

  10. Number 60

    Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park

    Atlanta, GA · Civil Rights

    Along a few blocks of Auburn Avenue in Atlanta stand the places that made Martin Luther King Jr. and the places that now hold his memory: the house where he was born, the church where he and his father preached, and the reflecting pool where he and Coretta Scott King are entombed.

Nos. 61–70

  1. Number 61

    Stonewall Inn

    New York, NY · The 20th Century

    In the early hours of June 28, 1969, patrons of a small Greenwich Village bar fought back against a police raid, and the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement was born.

  2. Number 62

    Manzanar

    Independence, CA · World War II

    In the desert of California's Owens Valley, more than 10,000 Japanese Americans — the majority of them U.S. citizens — were imprisoned behind barbed wire and guard towers for no crime but their ancestry.

  3. Number 63

    Women's Rights National Historical Park

    Seneca Falls, NY · The 19th Century

    In a small chapel in upstate New York in July 1848, a gathering of women and men issued a declaration that would take more than seventy years to fully redeem: that women deserved the same rights as men, including the vote.

  4. Number 64

    Promontory Summit

    Promontory, UT · The 19th Century

    On a remote stretch of Utah desert, a single ceremonial spike closed the gap between the Atlantic and Pacific and remade the nation.

  5. Number 65

    Tombstone Historic District

    Tombstone, AZ · Westward Expansion

    Tombstone crammed a legend into a single generation: a silver-boom town that exploded from nothing in the Arizona desert, became one of the wildest settlements in the West, and produced the thirty-second gunfight that would define the American mythology of the frontier.

  6. Number 66

    Fort Laramie

    Fort Laramie, WY · Westward Expansion

    For half a century, nearly every wagon bound for Oregon, California, or Utah passed through Fort Laramie.

  7. Number 67

    Mission San Juan Capistrano

    San Juan Capistrano, CA · Spanish Colonial

    Called the 'Jewel of the Missions,' Mission San Juan Capistrano is the most complete surviving example of California's Spanish mission chain, founded the same year as American independence.

  8. Number 68

    Palace of the Governors

    Santa Fe, NM · Spanish Colonial

    No public building in the United States has been in continuous use longer than the Palace of the Governors.

  9. Number 69

    Mission San Xavier del Bac

    Tucson, AZ · Spanish Colonial

    Rising white against the Sonoran Desert south of Tucson, Mission San Xavier del Bac is widely considered the finest example of Spanish Colonial architecture in the United States.

  10. Number 70

    Lowell National Historical Park

    Lowell, MA · Gilded Age

    Lowell was where America built its first factory city from scratch, and where the Industrial Revolution first put thousands of young women to work under one roof.

Nos. 71–80

  1. Number 71

    Eastern State Penitentiary

    Philadelphia, PA · The 19th Century

    Eastern State Penitentiary was built on a radical idea: that solitude and reflection, not punishment and crowding, would reform criminals.

  2. Number 72

    Fort Ticonderoga

    Ticonderoga, NY · Revolutionary War

    Perched where Lake Champlain narrows toward Lake George, Fort Ticonderoga commanded the water highway between Canada and the Hudson Valley — making it one of the most fought-over pieces of ground in colonial North America.

  3. Number 73

    United States Military Academy

    West Point, NY · Early Republic

    West Point occupies a bend of the Hudson so strategically vital that George Washington called it 'the key to America' and fortified it against the British during the Revolution.

  4. Number 74

    United States Naval Academy

    Annapolis, MD · Early Republic

    On a spit of land where the Severn River meets the Chesapeake Bay, the U.S. Naval Academy has shaped the officers who led the American Navy through the age of steam, two world wars, and the nuclear era.

  5. Number 75

    Old State House

    Boston, MA · Revolutionary War

    Surrounded today by Boston's glass skyscrapers, the Old State House was the seat of British colonial government in Massachusetts and a flashpoint of the Revolution itself.

  6. Number 76

    Federal Hall

    New York, NY · Early Republic

    On this spot on Wall Street, the American experiment in self-government began in earnest.

  7. Number 77

    Plymouth Rock

    Plymouth, MA · Colonial America

    Few American landmarks carry more symbolic weight on so little historical evidence than Plymouth Rock.

  8. Number 78

    Salem Maritime

    Salem, MA · Colonial America

    In the decades after the Revolution, Salem, Massachusetts became one of the richest ports in America by trading directly with the far side of the world.

  9. Number 79

    Cape Hatteras Lighthouse

    Buxton, NC · The 19th Century

    Off North Carolina's Outer Banks, the shifting sandbars of Diamond Shoals have wrecked so many ships that the waters earned the name 'Graveyard of the Atlantic.'

  10. Number 80

    Robie House

    Chicago, IL · The 20th Century

    With its dramatic cantilevered roofs sweeping low over ribbons of art glass windows, Robie House announced a fully American architecture, breaking decisively from European tradition to celebrate the flat horizontal lines of the Midwestern prairie.

Nos. 81–90

  1. Number 81

    Taliesin

    Spring Green, WI · The 20th Century

    Taliesin was where Frank Lloyd Wright retreated to remake both his personal life and his architecture, building a home into the very hillside of his family's ancestral Wisconsin valley.

  2. Number 82

    Taliesin West

    Scottsdale, AZ · The 20th Century

    Rising from the rock and sand of the Sonoran Desert north of Scottsdale, Taliesin West shows Frank Lloyd Wright reinventing his architecture for an entirely different landscape than his native Midwest.

  3. Number 83

    Dealey Plaza

    Dallas, TX · The 20th Century

    On a bright November afternoon in 1963, a presidential motorcade turned onto Elm Street in this small park and drove into one of the defining traumas of modern American history.

  4. Number 84

    Pullman National Historical Park

    Chicago, IL · Gilded Age

    George Pullman set out to build a workers' utopia on Chicago's South Side, a meticulously planned company town that would eliminate the vice and squalor of industrial slums.

  5. Number 85

    Carnegie Hall

    New York, NY · The 20th Century

    "How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice" — the old joke captures the venue's outsized place in American musical life.

  6. Number 86

    Apollo Theater

    New York, NY · The 20th Century

    No stage did more to launch the careers that shaped 20th-century American popular music than the Apollo Theater in Harlem.

  7. Number 87

    TCL Chinese Theatre

    Los Angeles, CA · The 20th Century

    Few sidewalks anywhere carry more star power than the forecourt of the TCL Chinese Theatre, where handprints, footprints, and signatures of hundreds of Hollywood legends are pressed into concrete going back nearly a century.

  8. Number 88

    Shiloh National Military Park

    Shiloh, TN · Civil War

    Shiloh was the battle that ended any illusion that the Civil War would be short or bloodless.

  9. Number 89

    Wounded Knee

    Pine Ridge, SD · Westward Expansion

    Wounded Knee is the site of one of the darkest events in American history: the killing of several hundred Lakota men, women, and children by U.S. Army soldiers on December 29, 1890.

  10. Number 90

    Launch Complex 39 (Kennedy Space Center)

    Cape Canaveral, FL · The 20th Century

    From two pads on a low spit of Florida marshland, humanity left Earth for another world.

Nos. 91–100

  1. Number 91

    Mammoth Cave

    Mammoth Cave, KY · Geological & Natural

    Beneath the rolling hills of central Kentucky lies the longest cave system ever discovered on Earth — more than 420 mapped miles of passages, and still growing as explorers connect new sections.

  2. Number 92

    Freedom Trail

    Boston, MA · Revolutionary War

    The Freedom Trail solved a simple problem with a brilliant idea: paint a line on the sidewalk connecting Boston's scattered Revolutionary sites, and let visitors walk the story of American independence in order.

  3. Number 93

    Arlington House

    Arlington, VA · Antebellum

    Arlington House occupies one of the most contested hills in American memory: built as a monument to George Washington, home to the Confederacy's most famous general, and the literal ground from which Arlington National Cemetery grew out of the wounds of the Civil War.

  4. Number 94

    Smithsonian Institution Building

    Washington, DC · The 19th Century

    The Smithsonian Institution Building, universally known as 'the Castle,' is the founding home of the world's largest museum, education, and research complex — built on the gift of a British scientist who never once set foot in the country he endowed.

  5. Number 95

    Library of Congress

    Washington, DC · Gilded Age

    Born from a wartime loss and rebuilt on Thomas Jefferson's own library, the Library of Congress grew into the largest library in the world — a monument to the Enlightenment conviction that a democracy depends on an informed citizenry.

  6. Number 96

    Jefferson Memorial

    Washington, DC · The 20th Century

    The Jefferson Memorial is the only presidential memorial modeled on a building its subject actually designed himself — a fitting tribute to the architect-president whose own words on liberty and religious freedom are carved into its walls.

  7. Number 97

    Vietnam Veterans Memorial

    Washington, DC · The 20th Century

    A stark, unornamented wall of names that broke every rule of heroic war memorial design — and, in doing so, became one of the most visited and emotionally powerful memorials in the world.

  8. Number 98

    Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial

    Washington, DC · The 21st Century

    The first National Mall memorial to honor a Black American and someone who never held the presidency, standing on a direct sightline between the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials as a deliberate claim on the nation's founding promises.

  9. Number 99

    Shenandoah Valley Battlefields

    VA · Civil War

    Not one battlefield but an entire valley shaped by war — its fertile farms fed the Confederacy, its terrain gave Stonewall Jackson a legendary campaign, and its systematic burning by Sheridan's cavalry became one of the Civil War's starkest examples of total war against a civilian economy.

  10. Number 100

    Crazy Horse Memorial

    Crazy Horse, SD · The 20th Century

    Conceived as an answer to Mount Rushmore's monument to American presidents, Crazy Horse Memorial is a still-unfinished, entirely privately funded mountain carving meant to honor Native American history and dignity on the same scale the nation gave its presidents.