0:00 We often think of a day in history as a single, solid thing — a date pinned to an event.0:07 But today, October twelfth, shows us how a date is really a collection of moments, a place where profoundly different stories happen to land on the same square of the calendar.0:21 And what they knew then, in each of those moments, is so vastly different from what we can see now, looking back at them all at once.0:32 Just yesterday, in our last episode, we were talking about beginnings — the birth of Governor Arthur Phillip, who would found a new colony, and the premiere of a classic film.0:46 Well, today holds what might be one of the most consequential, most debated, most earth-shattering beginnings in all of human history.0:57 It’s fourteen ninety-two.0:59 Imagine you’re on a small wooden ship, the Santa Maria.1:03 You’ve been at sea for thirty-three days.1:06 Not a week, not two weeks.1:08 Over a month.1:09 The horizon has been nothing but an endless, terrifyingly empty line of blue.1:16 Your world has shrunk to the creak of timber and the snap of canvas.1:21 The crew is restless, maybe even mutinous.1:25 The man in charge, Christopher Columbus, promised you’d reach Asia.1:30 He promised riches.1:32 So far, all he’s delivered is saltwater and doubt.1:36 And then, on the morning of October twelfth, a lookout screams.1:41 Land.1:41 Not a mirage.1:42 Real, solid land.1:44 It’s an island in what we now call the Bahamas.1:47 The relief must have been overwhelming.1:50 The sheer, dizzying joy of it.1:53 Columbus, of course, was convinced he’d done it.1:57 He’d reached the East Indies.1:59 He claimed the island for Spain, and in his mind, he had just opened a new, faster route to the spices and silks of Asia.2:09 For him, and for everyone in Europe who would hear the news, this was a moment of pure, unadulterated triumph.2:18 A victory of navigation, of faith, of ambition.2:22 That was the story of that day.2:24 That was all they knew.2:26 Fast forward a few centuries.2:28 The year is eighteen ten.2:30 We’re in Munich, Bavaria.2:32 There’s a different kind of celebration in the air.2:36 No month-long oceanic terror here.2:39 Instead, it’s a party.2:41 A huge one.2:42 Crown Prince Ludwig, who would later become King Ludwig the First, is getting married to Princess Therese von Sachsen-Hildburghausen.2:53 And to mark the occasion, the citizens of Munich are invited to a massive festival on the fields in front of the city gates.3:03 There are horse races, food, and, of course, beer.3:07 It’s a joyous, public spectacle meant to celebrate a royal union.3:12 It was supposed to be a one-time thing.3:15 A happy memory for the new couple and their people.3:19 But it was so much fun, they decided to do it again the next year.3:25 And the year after that.3:26 And the year after that.3:28 Those fields were named "Theresienwiese" — "Therese's Meadow" — in honor of the Crown Princess.3:36 And that party?3:37 We call it Oktoberfest.3:39 A tradition born from a single wedding celebration on October twelfth, which has since become a global symbol of Bavarian culture, joy, and camaraderie.3:51 At the time, it was just a great party.3:55 They had no idea they were starting something that would be celebrated with steins and lederhosen two hundred years later, all around the world.4:06 From a royal wedding, we jump to a royal birth.4:10 October twelfth, fifteen thirty-seven.4:13 Edward the Sixth of England is born.4:16 The long-awaited male heir to Henry the Eighth.4:20 His birth was a moment of immense political importance, securing the Tudor dynasty.4:26 But more than that, he would become the first English monarch to be raised as a Protestant, fundamentally shifting the religious and political landscape of the nation.4:40 A beginning of a completely different sort.4:43 Now, let's leap into the twentieth century, where October twelfth becomes a stage for some of the era's most defining dramas.4:54 It's nineteen sixty.4:55 The Cold War is simmering at a constant, nerve-wracking boil.5:00 We’re inside the United Nations General Assembly in New York.5:05 The atmosphere is electric with tension.5:08 A delegate from the Philippines is criticizing Soviet policy in Eastern Europe, accusing Moscow of swallowing up entire countries and depriving them of their freedom.5:22 And the Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev, is getting visibly agitated.5:27 He’s shouting interruptions.5:30 And then, he does something that becomes one of the most indelible, almost surreal images of the entire Cold War.5:39 He takes off his shoe… and starts pounding it on his desk.5:44 Pounding it.5:44 On the desk.5:45 At the United Nations.5:47 It was a raw, theatrical, and utterly shocking display of fury.5:52 It wasn’t a reasoned argument; it was a gesture of pure, unvarnished protest against what he saw as Western hypocrisy.6:02 For the people in that room, and for the world watching, it was a moment that perfectly captured the ideological chasm, the sheer anger and mistrust between the superpowers.6:16 It wasn't a debate anymore; it was a tantrum on the world stage.6:21 Just four years later, on this very same date, October twelfth, nineteen sixty-four, that same Cold War rivalry fuels a different kind of drama.6:33 Not one of anger, but of incredible audacity.6:36 The Soviet Union launches Voskhod 1.6:39 Now, space travel was still breathtakingly new and dangerous.6:44 But this mission was something else.6:47 It was the first spacecraft to carry more than one person.6:52 It had a crew of three cosmonauts.6:54 And here’s the part that still makes my breath catch.6:59 They flew without spacesuits.7:01 They were crammed into a tiny capsule, a modified version of the Vostok craft Yuri Gagarin had used, and sent into orbit.7:11 It was an enormous risk, a calculated gamble to score another "first" against the Americans in the space race.7:20 It worked.7:21 They orbited the Earth sixteen times and landed safely.7:25 For the Soviets, it was a massive propaganda victory, proof of their technological superiority.7:33 For the world, it was another step into the unknown, a testament to human courage — or perhaps recklessness — in the quest to conquer the final frontier.7:45 But the twentieth century had other stories of courage to tell on this day.7:51 Let's go back to nineteen forty-five.7:54 World War Two has just ended.7:56 And on October twelfth, a man named Desmond T.8:00 Doss is standing before President Truman.8:03 He’s about to receive the Medal of Honor, America's highest award for valor.8:10 But Doss was different.8:11 He was a conscientious objector.8:14 A Seventh-day Adventist who refused to carry a weapon or harm another human being.8:21 He served as a combat medic.8:23 During the brutal Battle of Okinawa, on a treacherous cliff face nicknamed Hacksaw Ridge, his unit was cut to pieces.8:32 As the American forces retreated, Doss refused to leave.8:37 Unarmed, under constant enemy fire, he single-handedly rescued an estimated seventy-five wounded soldiers, lowering them one by one down the cliff to safety.8:50 For him, his conviction was not a reason to stay away from the fight, but the very reason he had to be there — to save lives, not take them.9:01 On that day in 1945, he became the first conscientious objector ever to receive the Medal of Honor.9:09 His was a courage not of conflict, but of conscience.9:13 And this day also gave us so much art, so much talent.9:18 October twelfth, nineteen thirty-five, Luciano Pavarotti is born.9:23 The Italian tenor whose voice would become arguably the most famous in the world, a man who could fill opera houses and stadiums with a sound that felt both superhuman and deeply human.9:38 On this day in eighteen ninety-six, the Nobel Prize-winning poet Eugenio Montale was born.9:45 In eighteen sixty-five, Arthur Harden, who would win the Nobel in Chemistry for his work on fermentation.9:54 And in more recent times, actors who have shaped our modern pop culture.9:59 Hugh Jackman, born in nineteen sixty-eight, the man who IS Wolverine, but also an acclaimed stage actor.10:08 Josh Hutcherson, from The Hunger Games, born in nineteen ninety-two.10:13 The incredible Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada, born in nineteen sixty.10:19 A day of so many beginnings.10:21 But now we have to turn the prism.10:24 We have to look at these moments with the clarity — and the burden — of hindsight.10:31 Let's go back to that ship in fourteen ninety-two.10:35 That moment of triumphant "discovery." We now know Columbus hadn't reached Asia.10:41 We know he had landed in a world teeming with people, cultures, and civilizations that had existed for thousands of years.10:51 And we know that his arrival, which he saw as a glorious beginning, was also the beginning of something else entirely.11:00 It was the start of European colonization of the Americas.11:05 The beginning of conquest, of disease that would wipe out millions, of the displacement and brutalization of Indigenous peoples across two continents.11:17 To look back at October twelfth, fourteen ninety-two, is to hold two irreconcilable truths in your hands.11:26 The courage and ambition of the voyage, and the catastrophic suffering that followed in its wake.11:34 We can't judge Columbus by our standards, he couldn't possibly have understood the long-term consequences of his actions.11:43 But we can't ignore those consequences either.11:47 And that is the great challenge and responsibility of looking at history.11:53 We know what they didn't.11:55 The story is so much bigger, and so much more painful, than they could ever have imagined.12:02 And tragedy on this date isn't confined to centuries past.12:07 On October twelfth, two thousand two, a terrorist attack in Bali, Indonesia.12:13 A car bomb, and another suicide bomber, ripped through nightclubs packed with tourists and locals.12:21 Over two hundred people were killed.12:24 It was a horrific act of violence that sent shockwaves around the globe, a stark reminder of the brutal realities of our own time.12:34 For the families of those lost, October twelfth isn't a day of discovery or celebration.12:42 It is a scar.12:43 And it reminds us that history is not a comfortable, distant thing.12:48 It is happening now.12:50 It is raw, and it hurts.12:52 It also shows the strange and unsettling randomness of a date.12:57 The same day that gave the world the voice of Pavarotti and the heroism of Desmond Doss also became a day of profound grief.13:07 And the same day that gave us Hugh Jackman also, in nineteen forty-nine, gave us the birth of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, one of the most infamous international terrorists of his time.13:24 The light and the shadow, all sharing the same twenty-four hours.13:29 So where does that leave us, now?13:32 How do we live with the ghosts of October twelfth?13:36 Well, we see it all around us.13:38 The legacy of that Munich wedding party is in every Oktoberfest celebration held from Brazil to Japan.13:46 It’s a legacy of pure joy.13:49 The legacy of Columbus's landing is in the fierce, necessary debates we have today about what it means to celebrate Columbus Day versus Indigenous Peoples' Day.14:02 It’s a living argument about how we tell our own history.14:06 The legacy of Desmond Doss's courage lives on in the film Hacksaw Ridge, which brought his incredible story of faith and valor to a new generation.14:18 And the birthdays… well, they’re the most present tense of all.14:23 Luciano Pavarotti’s voice is immortal, a click away on any device.14:28 But Hugh Jackman is still making movies.14:32 Hiroyuki Sanada is a global star, appearing in some of the biggest productions of our time.14:39 Darci Lynne Farmer, the young ventriloquist born in two thousand four, is building her career right now.14:47 Their stories aren't over.14:50 They are unfolding as we speak.14:52 Looking back at a day like October twelfth, it’s tempting to try and find a single theme.14:59 A neat little bow to tie it all together.15:03 But you can't.15:04 It’s a day of discovery that was also a day of conquest.15:08 It’s a day of royal celebration and a day of Cold War fury.15:13 It’s a day of astonishing bravery, both in space and on the battlefield.15:19 It’s a day of art, of science, of terror, and of joy.15:23 And maybe that is the real lesson.15:26 History isn't a straight line.15:28 It’s a tangled, messy, glorious, and heartbreaking knot.15:33 And our perspective, from this quiet room so many years later, allows us to see all the threads at once.15:41 And that, I think, is a gift.
