0:00 On August fourth, fifteen ninety-eight, Queen Elizabeth the First gave an order.0:05 She instructed the Lord Mayor of London to go to a place called the Steelyard—a walled trading post run by powerful German merchants for centuries—and take it back.0:17 Just like that.0:18 Yesterday, we talked about the voyages and visionaries of August third, how history is this incredible tapestry of echoes.0:26 Well, the thread that starts with Elizabeth telling a foreign trade cartel their time is up… that’s a thread of pure, unadulterated power.0:36 And it’s just one of the extraordinary things that happened on this day.0:41 August fourth is a day of declarations, of discoveries, and of drawing lines in the sand.0:47 And oh, what a delight it is to trace them.0:50 So let’s start with a pop, shall we?0:53 Because on August fourth, sixteen ninety-three, a Benedictine monk named Dom Pérignon is said to have tasted his new creation and exclaimed, "Come quickly, I am tasting the stars!" Yes, this is the traditional birthday of champagne.1:09 Now, is the story one hundred percent historically verifiable?1:14 Perhaps not.1:14 But who cares!1:15 It’s a perfect story, and the legend itself has shaped the history of wine.1:21 It tells us we want our great inventions to have a moment of pure, cinematic discovery.1:27 From sparkling wine to the printed word.1:30 On this day in eighteen twenty-one, the very first issue of the Saturday Evening Post was published.1:37 For over a century, it would be THE place America saw itself reflected—in stories, in illustrations by people like Norman Rockwell.1:46 It was a cultural institution, born on this day.1:49 And speaking of culture-defining charts, on August fourth, nineteen fifty-eight, Billboard published its very first Hot 100 chart.1:58 The number one song?2:00 Ricky Nelson's "Poor Little Fool." It was the beginning of a new way to measure a hit, a new way for a song to conquer the world.2:09 From a single sheet of paper to the algorithm that runs our lives.2:13 But August fourth also carries a much heavier weight.2:17 It’s a day of profound and terrible turning points.2:21 On this day in nineteen forty-four, after seven hundred and sixty-one days in hiding, a fifteen-year-old girl named Anne Frank and her family were discovered in their secret annex in Amsterdam.2:34 Their hiding place, betrayed.2:36 It’s a moment that rips a hole in your heart, because we know what comes next.2:42 But we also know that her voice, her diary, survived.2:46 And that voice has done more to humanize the victims of the Holocaust than a thousand history books.2:53 Just two years earlier, on this day in nineteen forty-two, the British government accused Mohandas Gandhi of being willing to negotiate with Japan.3:03 It was a wartime smear, a political jab.3:06 But it reveals the tension, the sheer pressure of a world at war.3:10 And of course, the great, catastrophic war of the twentieth century—World War One—saw Britain enter the fray on this day in nineteen fourteen.3:20 Germany had invaded Belgium, violating its neutrality.3:24 And with that, Britain declared war.3:27 An ultimatum had expired.3:28 A line was crossed.3:30 And the world would never, ever be the same.3:33 The "lamps are going out all over Europe," as the British Foreign Secretary said.3:39 He wasn't wrong.3:40 Amidst all this, there are these flashes of incredible, defiant light.3:45 On August fourth, nineteen thirty-six, at the Olympic Games in Berlin—Hitler's Olympics, designed to showcase Aryan supremacy—a Black man from Alabama named Jesse Owens won the gold medal in the long jump.3:59 It was one of four gold medals he would win, and each one was a direct, powerful, personal rebuke to the hateful ideology of his hosts.4:08 A victory for humanity, right in the heart of the darkness.4:13 And on this day in nineteen sixty-one, in Honolulu, Hawaii, a child was born who would one day redraw the map of American possibility: Barack Obama, the future forty-fourth President of the United States.4:27 But there is one event from this day that I keep coming back to.4:31 A moment that, from the future, we can see for what it truly was: a seed of change, watered with blood.4:39 We have to go to Mississippi.4:41 The year is nineteen sixty-four.4:43 It’s Freedom Summer.4:44 Hundreds of young people, Black and white, have come to the state to register African American voters, to challenge the brutal system of segregation.4:55 It is dangerous, terrifying work.4:57 Three of them—James Chaney, who was a local Black man, and two white New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner—disappeared in June.5:07 For forty-four days, the nation held its breath.5:10 The FBI, ordered in by President Johnson, swarmed the state.5:15 They dragged rivers.5:16 They searched swamps.5:17 The case became a national obsession.5:20 Where were the boys?5:21 The local authorities were… unhelpful.5:24 The local Klan, openly hostile.5:26 You can feel the pressure building.5:29 And then, on August fourth, nineteen sixty-four, acting on a tip, agents uncovered a freshly built earthen dam.5:37 And inside it, they found the three men.5:39 Murdered.5:40 James Chaney had been beaten and shot three times.5:44 Goodman and Schwerner, each shot once through the heart.5:47 Now, in that moment, in nineteen sixty-four, this was a tragedy.5:52 A crime.5:53 A horror.5:53 It was proof of the sickening violence underpinning Jim Crow.5:57 But looking back now, we can see it was something more.6:01 It was a strategic miscalculation by the forces of hate.6:05 A catastrophic one.6:07 They thought that by murdering these young men, they could terrorize the movement into submission.6:13 They thought they could make an example of them, to show what happens when you challenge the established order.6:21 And in the short term… the terror was real.6:24 Of course it was.6:25 But they fundamentally misunderstood the story they were in.6:30 Because the discovery of those bodies on August fourth didn't end the movement.6:35 It IGNITED it.6:36 The murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner shocked the conscience of the nation in a way that few things had.6:44 It wasn't an abstract problem of voting rights anymore.6:48 It was three young men, buried in an earthen dam.6:51 It made the fight for civil rights visceral, undeniable.6:55 It put a human face on the cost of bigotry for millions of Americans who had previously looked away.7:02 The outrage from this discovery helped push a reluctant Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, a year later, the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.7:14 The very thing the murderers were trying to prevent, their actions helped bring into being.7:20 This is what I mean when I say history has a kind of brutal poetry.7:25 The killers thought they were burying a secret.7:28 Instead, they were planting a tree.7:31 A tree of righteous anger that would grow and grow, and its roots would crack the very foundation of the world they were trying to protect.7:40 When we look back from today, we don't just see a crime scene.7:45 We see a fulcrum.7:46 A point on which history turned.7:48 The moment when the cost of inaction became clear to an entire country.7:53 The men who committed this atrocity were trying to end a story.7:58 But all they did was ensure that the story of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner would be told forever.8:04 Their sacrifice would not be in vain.8:07 It would mean something.8:09 It would change everything.8:11 So what do we make of a day like August fourth?8:14 A day that gives us champagne and the Billboard charts, but also the entry into a world war and the discovery of unspeakable crimes.8:23 It feels… chaotic.8:25 Random, even.8:25 But I don’t think it is.8:27 I think August fourth is a day about drawing lines.8:31 Queen Elizabeth draws a line against foreign economic control.8:35 Great Britain draws a line, declaring that the invasion of a neutral country is unacceptable.8:42 Jesse Owens crosses a finish line, and in doing so, draws a line against racism on the world’s biggest stage.8:49 The Billboard chart draws a line between a hit and everything else.8:54 And in Mississippi, in nineteen sixty-four, two opposing lines were drawn.8:59 One was a line of hate, drawn in the dark, ending in a shallow grave.9:04 The other was a line of courage, drawn by three young men who believed in an America that did not yet exist.9:12 They crossed a line into a dangerous place because they believed the line itself was wrong.9:18 History is the story of which lines hold, and which ones get erased and redrawn.9:24 August fourth reminds us that these lines are drawn every day, in acts of state and acts of art, in defiant victories and in unbearable sacrifices.9:34 The past isn't past.9:35 It’s a constant, urgent conversation about where we draw the lines today.
