0:00 You can hear that creek down yonder, just fussing over the rocks.0:05 Same as it did yesterday, same as it'll do tomorrow.0:09 Some things just keep a rhythm.0:11 But a day on the calendar… a day isn't like that.0:15 A day can be a quiet Tuesday, or it can be the day the whole world decides to change its shirt.0:23 We were talkin' just the other day about how history sometimes dances, how it can twist and turn on a dime.0:31 Well, October twentieth is one of those days that proves the point.0:37 It’s a day of endings, and beginnings, and deals so big they beggar belief.0:43 And the biggest deal of all… well, it happened on this day in 1803, when the United States Senate picked up a pen and, with one vote, doubled the size of the country.0:56 Now, I know how that sounds.0:58 Like something out of a tall tale.1:01 But they did it.1:02 They bought a whole empire from Napoleon Bonaparte for pennies on the dollar, and most of 'em had never even seen the land they were buying.1:13 Looking back, we see it as the moment America became a continent-sized nation.1:19 But at the time… oh, at the time, it was a wild, desperate gamble that broke all the rules and could have gone wrong a hundred different ways.1:31 It’s a story about a port, a revolution on a sugar island, and a decision made in a Paris drawing room that changed the world forever.1:41 Let’s set the scene.1:43 It’s the turn of the nineteenth century.1:46 The United States is this young, gangly country, mostly stuck east of the Appalachian Mountains.1:54 The big superhighway for all the farmers and trappers out west wasn't a road, friend, it was the Mississippi River.2:03 Everything they grew, everything they traded, had to float down that river to the port of New Orleans to get shipped out to the world.2:14 And whoever controlled New Orleans held a knife to the throat of the American economy.2:21 For a while, Spain had it.2:23 And that was… okay.2:24 They were a known quantity, a little sleepy.2:28 But then, in a secret deal, Spain gives the whole territory of Louisiana back to France.2:35 And France is run by Napoleon.2:37 Whoo, boy.2:38 Napoleon wasn't sleepy.2:40 He was ambitious, and he had ideas.2:42 Big ideas.2:43 President Thomas Jefferson, sitting in Washington, saw the danger right away.2:49 A French empire on his western border, controlling his country's main artery?2:56 Unacceptable.2:57 So Jefferson does what a president does.3:00 He sends a team to negotiate.3:02 He dispatches James Monroe to join Robert Livingston in Paris.3:07 Their instructions were plain.3:09 They had a budget of ten million dollars.3:13 Their job was to try and buy the city of New Orleans, and maybe a little slice of Florida if they could swing it.3:22 Just the port.3:23 That was the whole mission.3:25 Get control of the mouth of the Mississippi and secure America's future.3:31 They weren't shopping for an empire.3:34 They were just trying to buy a loading dock.3:37 But while they were sailing across the Atlantic, the whole world was changing under their feet.3:45 Napoleon’s grand plan was to re-establish a French empire in the Americas.3:50 Louisiana was supposed to be the breadbasket, the food source, for his prize jewel: the sugar-producing colony of Saint-Domingue, what we now call Haiti.4:03 But the enslaved people of Haiti had other ideas.4:07 Under the brilliant leadership of Toussaint Louverture, they rose up.4:12 They fought a brutal, bloody war for their freedom.4:16 And they won.4:17 They beat Napoleon’s armies.4:19 It was a staggering defeat for France.4:22 It cost thousands of soldiers and a mountain of money.4:27 So by the time our boys, Monroe and Livingston, show up in Paris, Napoleon is in a tight spot.4:34 His Caribbean dream is dead.4:36 He's fixing to start another war with Great Britain, and he needs cash, fast.4:43 And that vast territory of Louisiana, which he can't defend from the British Navy anyway… it’s suddenly not an asset.4:52 It's a liability.4:53 So the French foreign minister, a slick fella named Talleyrand, sits down with the Americans.5:01 Livingston starts in on the negotiation for New Orleans.5:05 And Talleyrand, cool as you please, interrupts him.5:09 He asks a question that must have made their heads spin.5:14 He says, essentially, "Forget the city.5:17 What would you give me for the whole thing?" The whole thing.5:22 All 828,000 square miles of it.5:24 From the Mississippi River all the way to the Rocky Mountains.5:29 Livingston and Monroe were floored.5:32 They had no instructions for this.5:35 No authority.5:36 There's no telephone, no telegraph.5:38 They can't just send a quick message back to Jefferson and ask, "Hey, is it cool if we spend fifteen million dollars to buy a third of the continent?" They were on their own.5:52 They had to make a choice, right then and there.5:56 They huddled up.5:57 They knew this was a once-in-a-history opportunity.6:01 So they did what any good horse trader would do.6:05 They haggled a bit, settled on a price of fifteen million dollars—about three cents an acre—and they said yes.6:14 They signed the treaty in April of 1803.6:17 They had just made the biggest real estate deal in the history of the world, and they did it without permission.6:26 Then the treaty gets back to Washington.6:29 And now it’s Jefferson’s problem.6:32 He’s thrilled, of course.6:34 But he's also a man who believed in a strict, literal reading of the Constitution.6:40 And the Constitution says absolutely NOTHING about the President or Congress having the power to buy foreign land and make it part of the United States.6:53 His political enemies, the Federalists, are screaming bloody murder.6:58 They say it's illegal, it's unconstitutional, it's an overreach of executive power.7:05 They're worried about all that new territory shifting the balance of power in the country.7:12 Jefferson has to wrestle with his own principles.7:16 But in the end, the prize is just too great to pass up.7:20 He sends the treaty to the Senate for ratification.7:24 The debate is fierce.7:26 But on October 20, 1803, the vote is held.7:29 And it passes, 24 to 7.7:31 With that, the deal was done.7:33 The United States had doubled in size.7:36 The path for westward expansion was blown wide open.7:40 All because of a slave rebellion in the Caribbean and a snap decision by two diplomats in Paris.7:48 I tell you what, you can't make this stuff up.7:52 Now, you stay with me here.7:54 Because the pivot, the moment it all could have gone another way, is what makes this story so powerful.8:02 What if Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian revolutionaries had failed?8:08 What if Napoleon had successfully crushed the rebellion and secured his sugar island?8:15 He would have needed Louisiana as his granary.8:18 He never would have sold it.8:21 The United States would have remained hemmed in, a coastal nation with a French empire looming on its border.8:29 The history of North America would be completely different.8:34 There might not have been a Lewis and Clark expedition as we know it, no Manifest Destiny, no California Gold Rush.8:43 The whole shape of the country would be something we wouldn't even recognize.8:49 And what looks so obvious now—that this was a genius move—was a huge risk then.8:56 Jefferson had to stretch the Constitution to its breaking point to make it happen.9:02 He justified it by saying the power to make treaties included the power to acquire territory.9:09 It was a gamble that paid off, but it set a precedent for presidential power that people argue about to this day.9:18 And we have to be honest about the other side of the coin.9:23 The purchase wasn't just a simple, happy land deal.9:27 That land wasn't empty.9:29 It was home to dozens of Native American nations.9:33 The purchase treaty transferred the "sovereignty" from France to the U.S., but it ignored the people who actually lived there.9:43 For them, this wasn't a beginning; it was the beginning of the end.9:48 It kicked off a century of broken treaties, forced removals, and war.9:54 And the purchase also poured gasoline on the fire of slavery.9:59 Every time a new piece of that territory was ready to become a state, the fight erupted all over again: would it be free, or would it be slave?10:10 That question, born from the Louisiana Purchase, led directly down the line to the Civil War.10:17 So that fifteen-million-dollar bargain came with a cost that we were paying for generations.10:25 October twentieth is a day for redrawing maps, that’s for sure.10:30 On that same day in 1883, way down in South America, Peru and Chile signed the Treaty of Ancón.10:37 It ended Peru's part in the War of the Pacific.10:41 And just like the Louisiana Purchase, it involved a huge transfer of land.10:47 Peru had to give up its Tarapacá province to Chile.10:51 A border changed not with a checkbook, but with blood.10:55 And sometimes the change is not on a map, but in the heart.11:00 On October 20, 2011, the Basque separatist group ETA, in Spain, made an announcement.11:07 After 43 years of fighting for an independent state, a campaign that involved some three thousand attacks and cost nearly nine hundred lives… they declared a permanent end to their armed activity.11:22 Just like that, one of Europe's longest-running conflicts went quiet.11:28 An entire generation had grown up under that shadow, and then, on this day, it was lifted.11:35 Now, it didn't solve all the political problems, but it ended the violence.11:41 That’s an ending worth marking.11:44 And history keeps happening.11:46 More recently, on this day in 2020, Azerbaijan announced it had retaken the city of Zangilan during the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh.11:56 For them, it was the liberation of a city that had been under Armenian control for 27 years.12:04 They even declared October twentieth "Zangilan City Day." Of course, for the Armenians who had been living there, it was a day of loss and displacement.12:16 It just goes to show you, one day on the calendar can mean victory for one person and tragedy for another.12:24 History is rarely simple.12:26 But it’s not all treaties and territory.12:29 October twentieth is also a day for recognizing the folks who change the world not with armies, but with ideas.12:38 On this day in 1971, the Nobel Peace Prize went to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt.12:45 He won it for his Ostpolitik, his policy of reaching out and trying to normalize relations with East Germany and the rest of the Soviet bloc.12:56 During the iciest days of the Cold War, he was trying to build bridges.13:02 A lesson in courage.13:04 And then there's John Bardeen.13:06 Now there's a fella.13:08 On October 20, he became the first person—and still the only person—to win the Nobel Prize in Physics TWICE.13:16 The first time was for helping invent the transistor, the little switch that is the bedrock of every single piece of modern electronics.13:27 Your phone, your computer, the whole digital world.13:31 The second time was for a theory of superconductivity.13:35 The man fundamentally changed our world two different times.13:40 Swear on my tackle box, that is the honest truth.13:44 It's a day for personal histories, too.13:47 On October 20, 1968, Jacqueline Kennedy, a woman the world knew as the wife of a beloved slain president, married a Greek shipping tycoon named Aristotle Onassis.14:00 It was a move that surprised everybody, a new chapter in a life lived under an intense public spotlight.14:08 And it's a day for remembering tragedy and the lessons that come from it.14:14 On this day in 1991, a small grass fire in the hills above Oakland, California, whipped by fierce winds, exploded into a firestorm.14:25 It burned with such intensity it created its own weather.14:29 In the end, 25 people were gone, and nearly three-and-a-half thousand homes were turned to ash.14:37 It was a terrible wake-up call about the danger of building our towns right up against the wildlands, a lesson we are still trying to learn as the climate gets hotter and drier.14:51 But I want to end on a story about hope.14:54 Because October twentieth has that, too.14:57 It’s 2004.14:58 The American League Championship Series in baseball.15:02 The Boston Red Sox are playing their bitter rivals, the New York Yankees.15:08 It’s a best-of-seven series.15:10 The Yankees win the first game.15:13 Then the second.15:14 Then the third.15:15 They're up three games to none.15:18 No team in the entire history of baseball had EVER come back from that.15:23 It was over.15:24 Done.15:25 But then the Red Sox won game four.15:28 Then game five.15:29 Then game six.15:30 And on October 20, 2004, they played game seven.15:34 And they won.15:35 They did the impossible.15:37 It’s a story sports fans tell their kids, a reminder that no matter how bad it looks, it ain't over 'til it's over.15:46 Well.15:46 That is about the size of it.15:48 A single date on the calendar.15:51 A day that holds a real estate deal that made a nation, the end of a 43-year war, a Nobel prize for peace, another for changing physics twice, and a baseball game that taught us to never, ever give up.16:07 It tells you that history isn't just something in a book.16:11 It’s happening all the time, in big ways and small, and every day has a story to tell if you're willing to listen.
