0:00 There are days on the calendar that feel like they were drawn with a ruler, and then there are days like September twenty-third.0:09 On this day in 1846, an astronomer in Berlin pointed his telescope at a specific patch of night sky, and found a planet that, until that very moment, had only existed on paper.0:22 We now know what they didn’t, of course—we have photographs of Neptune, we know its storms and its moons.0:30 But they were standing at the edge of the known solar system, with nothing but mathematics as their guide.0:38 Just yesterday, we were talking about the day after empires fall, about the first steps taken into a new and uncertain world.0:47 Well, September twenty-third is a day of drawing new maps—for the heavens, for continents, and for the perilous new landscape of global power.0:58 Let’s stay with that planet for a moment.1:01 Because the discovery of Neptune is just… it’s one of the most beautiful stories in all of science.1:08 It’s a detective story, played out in the silent, clockwork motion of the cosmos.1:14 For years, astronomers had been puzzled by Uranus.1:18 Its orbit wasn’t quite right.1:20 It wobbled.1:21 It strayed from the path that Newton’s laws of gravity said it should follow.1:27 Something was pulling on it.1:29 Some unseen, massive object, lurking out there in the dark.1:33 Now, you have two ways of looking at a problem like that.1:38 You could decide that Newton’s laws are wrong, that on the grand scale of the solar system, gravity works differently.1:46 Or… you could decide that the laws are RIGHT, and that there must be something else out there, something you haven’t found yet, that accounts for the discrepancy.1:58 A French astronomer named Urbain Le Verrier chose the second path.2:03 He chose faith in the physics.2:06 And he sat down with a pen and paper and began one of the most extraordinary calculations in history.2:13 He worked backwards.2:15 If there is an eighth planet, and it’s causing Uranus to behave this way, then based on the size of the wobble, that unseen planet must have a certain mass.2:26 And if it has that mass, it must be orbiting at a certain distance and a certain speed.2:33 And if all of that is true… then right now… tonight… it should be… right… there.2:39 He finished his calculations and sent a letter to the Berlin Observatory, to an astronomer named Johann Gottfried Galle.2:48 He basically said, "Dear Sir, would you be so kind as to point your telescope at this specific spot?2:55 I believe you may find a planet." The sheer confidence is breathtaking.3:00 Galle got the letter on September twenty-third, 1846.3:04 That very night, he and his assistant aimed their telescope where Le Verrier told them to look.3:11 And within a single degree of the predicted position, they saw a tiny, faint disc that wasn’t on any of their star charts.3:21 It was Neptune.3:22 They found a world with math.3:24 They knew it was there before they saw it.3:27 Isn’t that just delightful?3:29 It’s the universe revealing one of its secrets, simply because someone asked the right question and trusted the numbers.3:38 Forty years before that, on this same day in 1806, another kind of map was being completed, not of the stars, but of the earth beneath our feet.3:49 Meriwether Lewis and William Clark paddled into St.3:52 Louis, Missouri, and brought their legendary expedition to a close.3:57 Can you imagine the scene?3:59 For over two years, they had been gone.4:02 Vanished into the vast, unmapped territory of the Louisiana Purchase.4:07 Many people assumed they were dead—lost to disease, to accident, to the sheer, overwhelming scale of the continent.4:16 And then, on September twenty-third, they just… reappear.4:20 Coming down the river.4:22 Alive.4:22 They had done it.4:24 They had gone all the way to the Pacific Ocean and back again.4:28 The city erupted in what was described as "much public excitement." Which feels like a wonderfully understated way of saying that everyone completely lost their minds.4:41 Think about what they represented, pulling up to the shore that day.4:46 They were living ghosts, returning with stories that would redefine America's idea of itself.4:53 They brought back journals filled with sketches of plants and animals no one in the East had ever seen.5:00 They brought back maps, hand-drawn, charting the great rivers and mountains that stood between the settled states and the western sea.5:10 Before them, that land was a question mark, a myth.5:14 After them, it was a place.5:16 A real, tangible, and—for better or for worse—achievable destination.5:21 They had walked into the blank spaces on the map and filled them in, step by grueling step.5:28 While Le Verrier would later map a world with his mind, Lewis and Clark mapped one with their feet.5:36 Both, in their own way, expanded the world for everyone who came after.5:41 And even before that, we have another kind of journey, another kind of defiant exploration.5:48 On September twenty-third, 1779, off the coast of England, the Scottish-born American naval commander John Paul Jones, found himself in a truly desperate fight.6:00 He was commanding a repurposed French merchant ship, renamed the Bonhomme Richard, and he was up against two British warships, the Serapis and the Countess of Scarborough.6:12 This was not a fair fight.6:14 The Serapis was a newer, faster, more heavily armed vessel.6:19 The battle was, as the records say, "hard-fought." A brutal, close-quarters slugging match that lasted for hours, into the night.6:28 Jones's ship was shattered.6:30 It was on fire, sinking, with casualties mounting.6:34 The British commander, seeing the absolute carnage, called over to ask if Jones was ready to surrender.6:42 And from the deck of his burning, sinking ship, Jones is said to have given the immortal reply: "I have not yet begun to fight!" And he hadn't.6:52 He managed to lash his ship to the Serapis, and his marines and sailors boarded the British vessel and captured it.7:01 Jones won the battle by losing his own ship and taking the enemy's.7:06 He sailed away in the Serapis.7:08 It’s the perfect symbol of the American Revolution, isn't it?7:13 A scrappy, outmatched force, refusing to quit, and winning through sheer, stubborn audacity.7:20 It was a victory that had little strategic impact on the war itself, but its psychological impact was immense.7:28 It announced that the new American navy, small as it was, was a force to be reckoned with, right in Britain's own waters.7:37 This day also gave us a spectacular collection of people who, in their own ways, also refused to surrender.7:45 September twenty-third is a day of remarkable births.7:49 Bruce Springsteen was born on this day in 1949.7:52 "The Boss." A man who has spent fifty years writing the story of American life—the hopes and the failures, the highways and the dead-end towns.8:03 His empire is one of music and storytelling.8:06 And on this day in 1869, the anarchist and activist Emma Goldman was born.8:12 A woman who fought her entire life against the empires of state power, of capitalism, of any institution that she felt crushed the human spirit.8:22 She was considered one of the most dangerous women in America for a time.8:28 Then you have Helen Keller, born in 1880.8:31 A woman who overcame the profound isolation of being deaf and blind to become a world-famous author and activist for disability rights and women's suffrage.8:43 She built a bridge from her silent, dark world to the rest of us, and then used that bridge to fight for others.8:51 And you have Paul Laurence Dunbar, born in 1872, one of the very first African American writers to achieve national prominence.9:00 He used poetry, novels, and short stories to give voice to the experiences of Black America in the decades after the Civil War, navigating a world that was still so profoundly hostile.9:14 Even Hasan Minhaj, the comedian, born in 1985.9:18 He uses humor to dissect and explore the complexities of being Indian-American, of being Muslim in a post-9/11 world, taking on biases and stereotypes with a microphone and a smile.9:31 Each of them, in their own field, looked at the world they were given and said, "No, it can be different." They drew new maps of what was possible.9:42 But back to the world of presidents and global politics.9:46 September twenty-third gives us two moments, just five years apart, that show the profound shift in the mid-twentieth century.9:56 The first is almost comical.9:58 It’s 1944.9:58 Franklin D.9:59 Roosevelt is running for his fourth term as president, in the midst of World War Two.10:06 And his political opponents, looking for any angle of attack, started a rumor.10:11 The rumor was that on a recent trip to the Aleutian Islands, Roosevelt had accidentally left behind his beloved Scottish Terrier, Fala.10:21 And that he had then, scandalously, sent a Navy destroyer all the way back to retrieve the dog, at immense taxpayer expense.10:31 It was a silly, baseless attack.10:33 But instead of ignoring it, FDR met it head-on in a campaign speech.10:38 He said, you know, the Republican leaders have attacked him, and his wife, and his sons, and that’s fine.10:46 But then he gets this wonderful, knowing smile in his voice.10:50 He says, "But now, they’ve gone too far.10:53 They have attacked my little dog, Fala." He goes on to say that Fala’s "Scotch soul was furious" at the slander.11:02 The audience roared with laughter.11:04 It was a masterful piece of political theater.11:08 He used this absurd personal story to paint his opponents as petty and ridiculous, all while reminding everyone of his own humanity and humor during a dark, difficult war.11:21 Now, fast forward just five years.11:23 September twenty-third, 1949.11:25 The war is over.11:26 FDR is gone.11:27 And his successor, Harry S.11:29 Truman, has an announcement to make.11:32 There is no folksy humor this time.11:35 His statement is described as "surprisingly low-key and carefully worded." He announces to the American people, and to the world, that the Soviet Union has successfully tested its own atomic bomb.11:49 Just like that, the American nuclear monopoly was over.11:53 The Cold War, which had been a conflict of ideology and influence, now had the clear and present danger of mutual annihilation at its core.12:04 In 1944, the president’s biggest public worry was a political jab about his dog.12:10 In 1949, it was the reality that another global superpower now wielded the power to destroy the world.12:17 You can feel the temperature of the planet drop in that five-year gap.12:23 The age of anxiety had truly begun.12:25 One announcement, delivered quietly, redrew the map of global terror forever.12:31 And then, because history is never just one thing—it’s never just grand or just terrifying—it’s also profoundly, deeply strange.12:40 On September twenty-third, 2016, a small, carved wooden box went up for auction in California.12:47 Inside the box were a portion of the cremated remains of the author Truman Capote.12:54 Yes, his ashes.12:55 They had been kept by his friend Joanne Carson, Johnny Carson's ex-wife, and after she passed away, her estate decided to sell them.13:05 After twelve bids, the box containing a piece of the author of "In Cold Blood" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's" sold for forty-three thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars.13:17 What do you even do with that?13:20 It’s a bizarre, almost unbelievable little footnote.13:23 But it’s also a very modern kind of story, isn't it?13:27 A reflection on celebrity, on legacy, and on our strange desire to own a physical piece of the stories we love.13:36 Someone, somewhere, decided that a tangible connection to Truman Capote’s genius—or at least, his person—was worth the price of a decent car.13:46 It’s a strange way to draw a map, not of a continent or the stars, but of our own culture’s obsessions.13:54 So when we look back at this one day, September twenty-third, we see the horizon of our world expanding in every direction.14:03 It’s pushed outward by a telescope, revealing a new planet.14:07 It’s stretched across a continent by explorers returning home with maps and stories.14:14 It’s defended with impossible defiance in a sea battle.14:18 And it’s also darkened, pulled inward, by the terrifying knowledge that we are no longer alone in our most destructive capabilities.14:28 History’s value is always right now.14:30 It’s in seeing that the world has been redrawn countless times.14:35 And that amidst the grand, sweeping changes, the things that often resonate the most are the small, human details.14:43 A president defending his dog.14:46 A captain refusing to surrender.14:48 The sheer delight of finding something new, right where you calculated it would be.14:54 Those are the moments that remind us that history was lived by people.14:59 People who were standing on their own shore, looking out at an unknown sea, and deciding to set sail anyway.
