0:00 On September sixth, 1916, a store called Piggly Wiggly opened its doors in Memphis, Tennessee, and in doing so, it completely, irrevocably changed the way you buy food.0:11 Yesterday we talked about the shock and trauma of the 1972 Munich hostage crisis, a moment that brutally reshaped global security and our understanding of live, televised tragedy.0:24 It was a day that forced an unwilling world to confront a new reality.0:29 And as we turn the page to September sixth, it’s a date that, in its own way, is just as packed with these moments of reinvention.0:38 Not always as violent, but just as profound.0:41 Moments where the old way of doing things just… stopped.0:45 And something new, something that would define OUR world, began.0:49 So let’s start with that grocery store.0:52 Piggly Wiggly.0:53 You have to love the name.0:55 It sounds whimsical, almost silly.0:57 But what its founder, Clarence Saunders, did was anything but.1:02 Before 1916, when you went to a grocery store, you didn't...1:06 go into the grocery store.1:08 Not really.1:08 You stood at a counter, you handed a list to a clerk, and that clerk would go back into the aisles and the storerooms, gathering your items for you.1:19 It was inefficient.1:20 It was slow.1:21 It was expensive, because you were paying for all of that labor.1:25 And you, the customer, had no freedom.1:28 You bought what they had, what the clerk brought you.1:32 You couldn't browse, you couldn't compare prices on the shelf, you couldn't discover a new product you’d never heard of.1:40 The very idea of impulse buying didn't really exist in the same way.1:45 Clarence Saunders looked at this and saw a system ripe for revolution.1:50 His Piggly Wiggly store was the first true self-service grocery.1:54 He turned the aisles around, facing them toward the customer.1:58 He put the products out where people could see them, touch them, pick them up themselves.2:05 He invented the shopping basket.2:07 He put prices on every single item.2:09 Can you imagine?2:11 It seems so obvious to us now, it's literally the wallpaper of our lives.2:16 But at the time, this was a radical act of trust.2:19 It was also a radical act of retail genius.2:22 By letting customers do the work the clerks used to do, he slashed his labor costs.2:28 He could sell goods for cheaper than his competitors, which, of course, brought in more customers.2:35 It was a virtuous cycle.2:36 Now, it wasn't an overnight success everywhere.2:40 The research shows that some places resisted.2:43 There were worries about theft—and to be fair, there was theft.2:47 There was customer confusion.2:49 The whole model was so new that early Piggly Wiggly stores had a defined, one-way path, a maze almost, to guide people through the store and make sure they saw everything before they reached the checkout at the end.3:04 But the efficiency, the lower prices, the sheer empowerment of choice… it was an unstoppable idea.3:11 Every supermarket, every big-box store, every single time you wander down an aisle and grab something off a shelf, you are living in the world that Piggly Wiggly created on this day in 1916.3:25 It wasn't just a new store.3:26 It was the invention of the modern shopper.3:29 Now let’s rewind the clock four hundred years.3:33 Further.3:33 To September sixth, 1522.3:35 On this day, a single, battered ship named the Victoria limped into the harbor at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, in Spain.3:43 It was a ghost ship, in a way.3:45 Three years earlier, it had left this same port as part of a proud fleet of five ships and about two hundred and seventy men, under the command of Ferdinand Magellan.3:57 Their mission was audacious: to find a westward route to the Spice Islands of Indonesia, a route that didn't involve sailing around Africa.4:06 They were gone for so long that everyone had given them up for dead.4:11 And for most of them, that was true.4:14 By the time the Victoria returned, it was the ONLY ship left.4:18 And of the original crew, only eighteen haggard, starving men were still aboard.4:24 Their captain, Magellan, wasn't one of them.4:27 He had been killed in the Philippines more than a year earlier.4:31 The man who brought the ship home, the man who completed the mission, was a Basque navigator named Juan Sebastian de Elcano.4:40 And what a completion it was.4:42 They had done it.4:43 They had circumnavigated the globe.4:45 For the first time in human history.4:48 Think about the sheer scale of that achievement.4:51 We look at a map now and see a sphere, a known quantity.4:55 For them, they were sailing off the edge of everything they knew, into myth and monster-filled voids.5:02 They faced mutinies, starvation so bad they were eating sawdust and leather, scurvy that rotted their gums, and violent encounters with peoples who had never seen a European before.5:15 The return of the Victoria was more than just a feat of navigation.5:20 It was a profound psychological shift for humanity.5:23 It proved, definitively, physically, that the world was round.5:27 It demonstrated that all the oceans were connected.5:31 It redrew the map of the planet not as a series of disconnected regions, but as a single, unified, traversable sphere.5:39 The eighteen men who stumbled off that ship on September sixth didn't just bring back a paltry cargo of cloves.5:47 They brought back a new world.5:49 A world that was suddenly, shockingly, both much larger and much smaller than anyone had ever imagined.5:56 This date is also a fascinating one for the people it brought into the world.6:02 On September sixth, 1972—the very year of that Munich tragedy we discussed—the actor Idris Elba was born.6:09 It’s hard to think of many actors who command the screen with such effortless presence.6:15 On this same day in 1620, an Italian woman named Isabella Leonarda was born.6:21 Now, her name might not be as famous, but her story is incredible.6:25 She was a composer in the Baroque era, a time when that field was almost exclusively the domain of men.6:32 She was an Ursuline nun who spent most of her life in a convent, and from there, she published over two hundred musical compositions, mostly sacred music.6:43 She was one of the most prolific composers of her era, male or female.6:48 She found a way to have her voice heard, literally, across the centuries.6:53 And we have sculptors, like Pietro Tacca, born in 1577, who became the Grand Duke of Tuscany’s chief sculptor.7:01 And we have royalty.7:02 On this day in 2006, Prince Hisahito of Akishino was born in Japan.7:07 He is currently third in line to the Chrysanthemum Throne, a monarchy that traces its lineage back for well over a thousand years.7:16 So on this one day, you have the birth of a future-facing movie star, a trailblazing woman of the past, a master artist, and a link in one of the world's oldest continuous hereditary lines.7:29 History isn't just events; it's the people who live through them, and create them.7:35 But let’s go to Washington D.C.7:37 The summer of 1881.7:39 It’s hot.7:39 The president is a man named James A.7:42 Garfield.7:42 He’s only been in office for four months.7:45 On July second, he’s at a train station, preparing to leave for a summer vacation, when a man named Charles Guiteau walks up behind him and shoots him twice with a revolver.7:57 Now, here is the turn.7:59 The wounds are not immediately fatal.8:01 One bullet grazes his arm.8:03 The other lodges behind his pancreas.8:06 In 1881, medical science is… not what it is today.8:09 For the next eighty days, the entire nation holds its breath as President Garfield lies in the White House, slowly, agonizingly dying.8:19 And he isn't dying from the bullet.8:21 He's dying from the infection.8:23 Doctors, including Alexander Graham Bell who tries to find the bullet with a primitive metal detector he invented for the occasion, are probing the wound with unsterilized fingers and instruments.8:37 They are, with the best of intentions, killing him.8:41 On September sixth, 1881, President Garfield finally succumbs to blood poisoning and a ruptured splenic artery.8:48 He dies.8:49 And the nation is not just grief-stricken; it is shocked into action.8:54 The assassination becomes a catalyst for two massive changes that define modern America.9:00 First, the reason he was shot.9:02 His assassin, Guiteau, was a disgruntled and mentally unstable man who believed he was owed a government job for supporting Garfield’s campaign.9:12 This was the era of the "spoils system," where political jobs—from postmaster to customs collector—were handed out as rewards for party loyalty.9:22 It was corrupt.9:23 It was chaotic.9:24 Garfield's murder, by someone who felt entitled to a piece of that pie, made the problem impossible to ignore.9:32 It laid bare the rotten foundation of the civil service.9:36 The public outcry was so immense that just over a year later, Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, creating a professional bureaucracy based on merit, not political connections.9:50 It was the beginning of the end for the spoils system.9:53 Second, it highlighted the shocking lack of security for the president and the primitive state of American medicine.10:02 Garfield's death was a brutal lesson.10:04 It forced a reckoning with germs, with sanitation, with the very practice of surgery.10:10 And it began the long, slow process of creating a professional security detail for the head of state.10:17 So when you look at the death of James A.10:20 Garfield on this day, you aren't just seeing a tragedy.10:24 You are seeing the painful, bloody birth of the modern American government and a wake-up call for its medical establishment.10:33 A single bullet, and the infection that followed, forced a nation to grow up.10:38 Let's take one last journey.10:40 To the year 394 CE.10:41 The Roman Empire is teetering.10:43 It’s split between East and West, and it’s wrestling with its own identity.10:49 It’s a Christian empire now, but the old pagan traditions are dying hard.10:54 In the West, a usurper named Eugenius has taken power.10:57 He’s a Christian himself, but he’s tolerant of the old pagan aristocracy who support him.11:04 In the East, the powerful, devoutly Christian Emperor Theodosius I sees this as an existential threat.11:11 On September sixth, 394, their armies meet at the Battle of the Frigidus, near a river in what is now Northern Italy.11:19 For two days, they tear each other apart.11:22 At first, it looks like the usurper Eugenius will win.11:26 His forces are strong.11:27 But then, something happens.11:29 A powerful wind, called the Bora, whips down from the mountains.11:34 It blows directly into the faces of Eugenius’s troops, blinding them with dust and turning their own arrows back against them.11:42 Theodosius’s army sees this as a sign of divine intervention.11:47 They rally, they charge, and they shatter the enemy lines.11:51 Eugenius is captured and executed.11:53 Looking back, we can see this wasn't just another Roman battle.11:58 It was one of the last gasps of the classical pagan world.12:02 Theodosius’s victory reunified the Roman Empire under a single, Christian ruler for the last time in its history.12:10 He would go on to enact policies that suppressed paganism and cemented Christianity as the official, and effectively only, religion of the state.12:20 The Battle of the Frigidus, decided on this day by skill, by desperation, and perhaps by a freak gust of wind, didn't just determine who would rule Rome.12:30 It helped determine the religious and cultural trajectory of the entire Western world for the next thousand years.12:38 So as we look back on September sixth, we see these incredible turning points.12:44 An idea in a Memphis grocery store that rewired our economy of daily life.12:49 A dying president in Washington whose death cleaned up a corrupt political system.12:55 A single ship returning to Spain, proving the world was one.12:59 A battle in a forgotten river valley that set the course for a faith.13:04 Each event, a moment where the invisible structures that govern our lives—how we shop, how we are governed, how we see our world—were suddenly thrown into the light, and remade.13:16 History isn't just a collection of dates.13:19 It's the story of how everything we take for granted came to be.
