0:00 Looking back, it’s clear that September twenty-fifth has always been a day for drawing a line—a day for crowning an emperor, or closing a door on a dark past.0:11 But for the people living through it, the line was never that clear; it was just another Tuesday, or Saturday, where something new was being built, or something old was finally coming apart.0:25 Yesterday we talked about the dreamers and builders of September twenty-fourth, the day of grand beginnings.0:32 Well, today we see what happens next.0:35 We see the follow-through, the consequence, and sometimes, the cost of those dreams.0:41 Because if yesterday was about the blueprint, today is about the construction site.0:47 It’s about the sweat and the steel, the breakthroughs and the brute force.0:52 It’s the day we see what it truly takes to make something last, whether it’s a skyscraper, a scientific theory, or a social revolution.1:02 And looking back, we can see the threads connecting them all—a hidden architecture of progress and regret that was invisible at the time.1:12 We can see that building something new often requires a certain kind of beautiful, stubborn refusal to accept the world as it is.1:21 It’s a day for the people who looked at the sky and thought, "we can go higher," or looked at the stars and thought, "we can measure that." And oh, what a delight it is to see how they did it.1:35 Let’s start with the builders of the physical world, the ones who literally changed our skyline and our sense of place.1:44 On this day in eighteen twenty-seven, William Le Baron Jenney was born.1:49 Now, that name might not ring a bell for everyone, but if you have ever stood in a city and craned your neck to see the top of a building, you owe him a debt of gratitude.2:01 Jenney is considered the "father of the skyscraper." He was the architect and engineer who first used a metal skeleton—steel, in this case—to support a tall building, the Home Insurance Building in Chicago.2:16 Before Jenney, buildings held themselves up.2:19 Their walls were thick, load-bearing structures.2:23 The higher you went, the thicker the base had to be, which put a very real, very heavy limit on ambition.2:30 But Jenney had this audacious idea: what if the walls were just curtains?2:36 What if they were just a skin hanging on a strong, internal frame?2:40 It changed EVERYTHING.2:42 Suddenly, buildings could be light.2:45 They could be tall.2:46 They could scrape the clouds.2:48 He built a new possibility, a new vertical dimension for human life.2:53 It’s one of those ideas that seems so obvious in hindsight, but at the time, it was a revolution written in steel and glass against the sky.3:03 And then you have the builders of our understanding.3:07 On this same day, centuries apart, two other remarkable minds were born.3:12 In sixteen forty-four, the Danish astronomer Ole Rømer.3:16 His gift to us was proving that light has a finite speed.3:20 Can you imagine trying to solve that puzzle in the seventeenth century?3:25 There’s no stopwatch, no laser beam.3:28 Rømer did it by watching the moons of Jupiter.3:31 He noticed that the eclipses of Jupiter’s moon Io seemed to happen later when Earth was moving away from Jupiter, and earlier when it was moving towards it.3:42 And he realized—the only explanation was that the light from Io had a longer or shorter distance to travel!3:50 It took time to get here.3:52 He built a new clock for the cosmos, measuring the unmeasurable.3:56 It’s just… gorgeous.3:58 And then, in eighteen sixty-six, Thomas Hunt Morgan was born.4:02 He was an American geneticist who used fruit flies—yes, tiny, humble fruit flies—to build the foundational map of modern genetics.4:12 He demonstrated that genes are carried on chromosomes, the very architecture of heredity.4:18 From the grand scale of the cosmos with Rømer to the microscopic scale of our own cells with Morgan, September twenty-fifth gave us people who were obsessed with building a more accurate model of reality.4:33 They weren’t content with just looking; they had to understand the mechanics of it all.4:39 They were the ultimate tinkerers, taking apart the universe to see how it worked.4:45 But building isn't just about steel and science.4:48 It’s also about emotion, and perspective.4:51 This day also gave us Mark Rothko, born in nineteen-oh-three.4:56 A painter who built cathedrals of color.4:59 His giant canvases, with their shimmering, floating rectangles, aren't just paintings.5:05 They are experiences.5:06 They are places you can go to feel something profound.5:10 Rothko wanted his art to be an intimate conversation between the canvas and the viewer.5:17 He built spaces for contemplation out of pure pigment.5:20 And in the same spirit, you have the French filmmaker Robert Bresson, born in nineteen-oh-one.5:27 Bresson built a new kind of cinema.5:30 He stripped away all the usual artifice—the dramatic acting, the soaring music.5:35 He used non-professional actors, whom he called "models," and focused on the quiet details, the sound of a footstep, the turn of a key in a lock.5:46 He believed that by showing less, he could make you feel more.5:50 He was building a cinema of the soul, one that trusted the audience to find the meaning for themselves.5:58 And in nineteen twenty-nine, another builder of modern communication was born: Barbara Walters.6:05 She fundamentally built a new kind of television interview.6:09 She wasn't just a reporter; she was a confessor, a psychologist, a master at creating a space where the most powerful and guarded people in the world would reveal something true about themselves.6:23 She built a new bridge between the public and the powerful.6:27 So you have all this creation.6:29 All this building.6:31 New structures, new ideas, new art.6:33 But history is never that clean, is it?6:36 Building something often comes at a cost.6:39 Sometimes, a brutal one.6:41 On September twenty-fifth, in the year eight sixty-seven, a man named Basil the First was crowned Emperor of the Byzantine Empire in the magnificent Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.6:54 He was crowned just hours after assassinating the man who came before him, his co-emperor Michael the Third.7:02 Think about that scene.7:03 The grandeur of the cathedral, the chanting, the incense, the golden mosaics glittering in the candlelight… and everyone there knowing that the new emperor’s robes were metaphorically—and perhaps almost literally—stained with the blood of his predecessor.7:22 Basil was building a dynasty, one that would last for nearly two centuries.7:27 But its foundation was murder.7:29 It’s a stark reminder that power is often not given.7:33 It is taken.7:34 It is built on the ruins of what—or who—came before.7:38 Centuries later, on this day in eighteen ninety, another kind of battle was won.7:43 George Dixon, a boxer from Nova Scotia, stepped into a ring in London and defeated Nunc Wallace.7:50 With that victory, Dixon became the first Black man to win a world boxing championship.7:57 He wasn't just fighting another man; he was fighting a global system of prejudice.8:02 He was building a path for countless others to follow.8:06 Every punch he threw was a blow against a racist status quo.8:11 His victory was a monumental act of construction, building a new reality where Black athletes could compete at the highest level.8:20 But imagine the pressure, the weight of that responsibility.8:24 He was building a legacy, one that came at an immense personal cost.8:29 And the double-edged nature of "building" just keeps showing up on this day.8:35 September twenty-fifth, nineteen twenty-three: the first successful aerial refueling is completed.8:42 Two biplanes, a DH-4B, flying over San Diego.8:45 Captain Lowell Smith and Lieutenant John Richter managed to pass a hose from one plane to another and transfer fuel.8:53 An incredible technical achievement!8:56 It was the birth of infinite flight, the key to global air travel and transport.9:02 But what was its primary driver?9:04 Military application.9:06 The ability to keep bombers in the air longer.9:09 It was a tool for connection, and a tool for destruction, built in the very same moment.9:15 Then, thirty-one years later, in nineteen fifty-four, the world’s first nuclear power station opens in Obninsk, near Moscow.9:24 The "Atom for Peace." It was the dawn of a new era of energy, a promise of clean, almost limitless power.9:32 A monumental feat of engineering.9:34 We were building a future free from the smoke and grime of coal.9:39 But it was built with the same knowledge that had created the atomic bomb.9:44 The promise and the peril were two sides of the same coin.9:48 Every one of these events is about building something new, but each one carries a shadow, a cost, a complication.9:56 It’s never simple.9:58 And that brings us to the moment where the story of this day pivots.10:03 Because for all the talk of building—empires, skyscrapers, theories, legacies—the most significant event on September twenty-fifth, from our modern perspective, might be about the opposite.10:16 It might be about dismantling something.10:19 On this day in nineteen ninety-six, the very last Magdalene asylum in Ireland closed its doors.10:26 The laundry at Our Lady of Charity on Sean McDermott Street in Dublin shut down for good.10:32 For over a century, these institutions, run by Catholic religious orders but propped up by the state, had served as workhouses for so-called "fallen women." This was a euphemism that could mean anything from unmarried mothers to girls who were considered too flirtatious, too rebellious, or simply too poor.10:55 They were, in effect, prisons.10:57 Women were stripped of their names, their freedom, and their children.11:02 They were forced into unpaid, back-breaking labor, primarily in laundries.11:07 For decades, this system operated in plain sight.11:11 It was a part of the social architecture of the country.11:15 And then, it ended.11:16 The closure on September twenty-fifth, nineteen ninety-six wasn't a celebration with parades.11:23 It was a quiet, almost shame-faced conclusion to a chapter of profound cruelty.11:29 Looking back now, it seems monstrous.11:31 Obvious.11:32 We ask, how could a society allow that to happen?11:35 How could they not see the injustice?11:38 But that’s the power of hindsight.11:40 The asylum system wasn't built in a day.11:43 It was built piece by piece, decision by decision, with the silent consent of a society that preferred to look away.11:52 Tearing it down was also a process.11:54 It required a slow, painful awakening.11:57 It required people to finally look at this institution they had built and see it for what it was.12:04 This is the pivot.12:05 History isn't just the story of what we create.12:09 It is also the story of what we find the courage to un-create.12:13 It's the story of realizing that a structure we have built—whether it's a physical prison, a social prejudice, or a harmful idea—is causing more harm than good.12:25 And then having the will to take it apart, brick by painful brick.12:29 The closure of that last laundry is as profound an act of "building" as any skyscraper, because it was about building a more just society.12:39 It was an act of demolition as an act of creation.12:43 And that brings us to now.12:45 It brings us to the questions that history always, eventually, asks of us.12:50 What are we building?12:52 And what are we preserving?12:54 I was reading about efforts in New York State to preserve sites of African American heritage.13:00 Governor Kathy Hochul spoke about how crucial it is for communities to "learn about the significant people and movements that formed the society we live in today." She’s right.13:13 Senator Zellnor Myrie, talking about a place called the Weeksville Heritage Center, said, "At a moment when Black history is under threat, we need to preserve its legacy more than ever." This is the work of history in the present tense.13:30 It’s not passive.13:31 It is an active choice.13:33 We are deciding which stories to build up, to reinforce, to pour a foundation for so that they will stand for future generations.13:42 Preserving a place like Weeksville, one of the nation's largest free Black communities before the Civil War, is an act of construction.13:52 It’s like building a skyscraper of memory, ensuring that a vital story isn't erased from our skyline.13:59 When we look back at September twenty-fifth, we see this pattern.14:04 We see the audacious building of Basil’s empire on a bed of violence, and the quiet dismantling of the Magdalene asylums on a principle of justice.14:15 We see George Dixon building a new future in a boxing ring, and William Le Baron Jenney building a new future with a skeleton of steel.14:24 Each act tells us something about the values of the people who undertook it.14:30 So the question for us is simple, but it is not easy.14:34 When future historians look back at our time, what will they see as our great construction projects?14:41 What monuments of justice, or art, or understanding will they say we built?14:46 And just as important… what will they celebrate us for having the courage to finally tear down?14:53 What accepted cruelties of our time will they look back on and wonder, with the clear, sharp vision of hindsight, why it took us so long to see them for what they were?15:05 That’s the lesson of this day.15:07 The work of history is never finished.15:10 We are all, right now, builders.
