When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, millions of tragedies resulted. Today we’re focusing on one person’s story.

Her name was Manya, and she was Jewish, age 13, living with her mother and father and siblings in a small city that the Germans turned into a ghetto. Her family took in other families for the first few years of the brutal occupation.

Eventually, the Nazis arrested her father, and then sent Manya, her mother, and her younger sister and brother to a labor camp called Strzelnica.

Obviously, this was a grim, terrifying experience. However, there was a small ray of light, in that in the midst of this, Manya met a boy named Moshe, and the two teens developed crushes on each other. As someone later said: They were kids, and they still found small ways to flirt and joke in the midst of horrible surroundings.

Over time, the Nazis began sending Jews from Strzelnica to even harsher concentration camps. Manya’s brother was sent away; they had no idea where. Then, Moshe disappeared as well. Then, in July 1944, Manya, her mother, and her sister were crowded into a filthy boxcar and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Manya’s mother is one of the real heroes in this story; with death and destruction all around, she somehow kept what remained of the family together. After six or seven months at Auschwitz, the three were sent to Bergen-Belsen, which is the camp in which Anne Frank and her sister Margot perished.

In telling this story, I worry that I might somehow underemphasize the unfathomable death, destruction and pain. So, let me quote two of the first British soldiers who liberated the camp on April 15, 1945, on what they saw immediately afterward:

• “You just couldn’t believe the numbers involved. ... The whole camp was so quiet and yet there were so many people there. ... Everything was just ghost-like and it was just unbelievable that there were literally people living still there. ... So much death ...”

• “We’d been trained for war wounded, we were used to terrible wounds ... [W]e hadn’t been trained for this ... It was so terrible and so different from anything we’d seen ... We’d seen distressed people about, people walking from town to town, but nothing like this.”

Miraculously, Manya, her mother, and her sister survived, and they lived for a while in a displaced persons camp nearby. Manya’s father had died, but she learned that her brother was alive in a hospital in Munich.

Then, another miracle: Moshe showed up.

He’d been through hell, left for dead, lost his own parents and most of his relatives. But, when he’d seen a list of survivors in another D.P. camp in Munich that included Manya’s name, he walked and hitchhiked more than 300 miles over three weeks to Bergen-Belsen to find her.

Mayna and Moishe were married while still in camp at Belsen, and they moved the next year to Canada, where Moshe’s sister had emigrated before the war.

Over the next year or so, they were able to sponsor Manya’s mother, brother, and sister (and her sister’s new husband, too).

Manya and Moshe anglicized their names to Morris and Mary when they reached Toronto. There, they had three children, including Geddy Lee, the lead singer of the rock group Rush.

Morris (Moshe) died in 1965. Manya took over the family store, and raised her kids. She also told them all about her experiences -- every detail she could remember. It seems she had two missions if I’m reading this right: Never forget, and keep her family together.

Maybe a third: Embrace the life she was blessed enough to survive to live.

As an example, Rush wasn’t exactly Mayna’s kind of music to begin with, and she wasn’t thrilled with her son’s long 1970s rock star hair. But she embraced it all and became the band’s biggest fan.

Geddy has a great story about walking onto the stage in one auditorium in the 1970s, and seeing his sister in the front row -- along with his middle-aged, suburban, Yiddish-speaking mother. She politely declined a marijuana joint from another audience member, but passed it to his sister.

Then, on April 15, 1995, Geddy took his mother and siblings back to Germany, for the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.

“When I stood there, my proudest moment was that I’m here, with my three children, and Hitler didn’t get all of us,” Mayna told an interviewer from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The proudest moment in my life.”

If you’re interested, you can find Mayna’s entire testimony here.

Some of it is very hard to hear given the details and the subject, but the “Part 3” recording talks about life after the war.

Amusingly, even after Mayna mentions “my son the rock star” several times, the interviewer never thinks to ask if he was in a band he might have heard of.

I’m also going to add one more anecdote, which isn’t really chronological, but it’s such a great story. It has to do with Mayna’s son Geddy’s name.

In short, he was originally named “Gary” (middle name, “Lee”). But with her accent, some of his friends thought her “R’s” sounded like “D’s.” So, “Gary” became “Geddy,” which became his nickname. Ultimately “Gary” took it a step further and officially changed it.

Honestly, that’s why I started on this whole story: Is there a better way to say “I love you” to your mom than to legally change your name to the way she mispronounces it, so nobody can ever again say she says it wrong?

There are a lot of fantastic quotes from Geddy Lee about music and artistry and passion. Here’s one to tuck away:

“There will always be pressure on you to compromise, pressure to sell your dreams short, and there will always be people who want you to be something that you’re not. But none of those things can happen without your permission.”

But given the theme today, and the fact that this story is more about Mayna (who died in 2021 at age 95) than Geddy himself, let’s go with something a little more topical:

“I feel that we’re living in an era that seems to have forgotten what can and will happen when fascism rears its head. I think we all need reminding of it in the face of those who either deny the past or never knew about it in the first place.”

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday March 29: “It seemed unthinkable for me to leave the world forever before I had produced all that I felt called upon to produce.” — Ludwig van Beethoven, who on this day in 1795 walked onto a Vienna stage at age 24 and made his debut as a concert pianist.

• Monday March 30: “Henceforth we live in a new world, breathe a new atmosphere, have a new earth beneath and a new sky above us.” — Frederick Douglass, born into slavery, responding on this day in 1870 to the adoption of the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed citizens the right to vote regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

• Tuesday March 31: “I ought to be jealous of the tower. It is more famous than I am.” — Gustave Eiffel, whose iron tower opened on this day in 1889 as the tallest structure on earth.

• Wednesday April 1: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” — Steve Jobs, who on this day in 1976 co-founded Apple Inc. with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, with $1,300 in capital and no real idea what they were building toward.

• Thursday April 2: “I don’t see why [women] couldn’t play ball. I know I always wanted to.” — Jackie Mitchell, Chattanooga Lookouts pitcher, who at age 17 on this day in 1931 retired Babe Ruth on three pitches, and then struck out Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game against the New York Yankees. Baseball voided her contract shortly after, on the grounds that the professional game would be “too strenuous” for women.

• Friday April 3: “The most quickly adopted consumer technology in the history of the world.” — Martin Cooper, the Motorola engineer who on this day in 1973 stood on a midtown Manhattan sidewalk and made the first call ever placed from a handheld cellular phone.

• Saturday April 4: “We are not a war-making alliance. We are a peace-making alliance.” — NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, on the alliance founded on this day in 1949, when twelve nations signed a treaty committing to collective defense.

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Roger Bushell spent most of his adult life doing three things: practicing law, skiing as fast as possible, and trying to escape from the Germans.

Born in South Africa in 1910, Bushell was sent to school in England at 13, went on to Cambridge, and by his late 20s was a London barrister who spoke nine languages and defended people who couldn’t afford to defend themselves.

He’d joined the RAF Auxiliary along the way, in 1932 — the kind of outfit where wealthy young men paid their way to fly on weekends. Assigned to defend RAF personnel in courts-martial, he was eventually banned from the job for winning too many cases.

Then war came, and Bushell was given command of a fighter squadron. They went into combat for the first time on May 23, 1940, flying Spitfires over the French coast to cover the retreat toward Dunkirk. Bushell damaged two Messerschmitts before being shot down and captured by a German motorcycle patrol.

He would spend the next four years behind wire. He didn’t take it quietly.

His first escape got him to within a few hundred yards of the Swiss border before a border guard caught him. His second was more audacious — he and a Czech officer jumped from a moving train, linked up with the Czech underground in Prague, and stayed hidden for eight months before a Nazi manhunt flushed them out. The Gestapo warned him a third attempt would mean execution, and transferred him to Stalag Luft III: their supposedly inescapable new camp deep in a German pine forest.

Bushell arrived at the camp more determined than ever to wage war from within. He took over the job of running the camp’s clandestine escape committee, with the codename Big X.

“Everyone here is living on borrowed time,” he told his fellow prisoners. “By rights we should all be dead. The only reason God allowed us this extra ration of life is so we can make life hell for the Hun.”

His plan: Build “three bloody deep, bloody long tunnels” out of the camp, on the theory that even if the German guards found one, at least one would eventually be complete.

Six hundred prisoners worked under Bushell’s direction, day and night for more than a year, digging three massive tunnels right under the guards’ noses. Starting from nothing, they scrounged and improvised — repurposing over 4,000 bed boards, hundreds of blankets, and 1,400 powdered milk tins into ventilation shafts and dirt containers. They built an underground railway, forged passports, fabricated civilian clothes and fake German uniforms, all hidden in plain sight beneath their captors’ feet.

Oh, and one detail worth noting: Bushell was claustrophobic. He did it anyway.

On the night of March 24, 1944 — 81 years ago this week — 76 allied prisoners of war crawled out through tunnel Harry and slipped into the darkness.

Only three made it to freedom. The rest were recaptured, and Hitler ordered 50 of them executed as a warning to every prisoner of war in Germany.

Roger Bushell was among those murdered. After the war, the RAF launched a criminal investigation — the only major war crime ever investigated by a single branch of any nation’s military, and in 1947, a tribunal found 18 Nazis guilty. Thirteen were executed.

Clearly there is tragedy here. But the men still in camp later said that the entire effort buoyed their spirits, and that even after learning of their fellow prisoners’ deaths, the act of forcing Germany to divert thousands of soldiers into a massive manhunt felt like a victory — a terrible, costly victory, but a victory nonetheless.

They had struck back, and that mattered, because people need more than survival. We need purpose — things to build, to work toward, and a sense that our efforts add up to something larger than ourselves.

For the ones who didn’t make it — including Bushell himself — there is something to be said for having spent those years not in resignation but in an audacious act of defiance.

Nobody lives forever, but knowing that you lived long enough to give other people hope and purpose can be enough.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, March 22: “I think this would be a good time for a beer.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, upon signing the Cullen-Harrison Act on this day in 1933, which legalized the sale of beer with up to 3.2% alcohol content, marking the beginning of the end of Prohibition.

• Monday, March 23: “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” — Patrick Henry, Virginia delegate who on this day in 1775 delivered his legendary speech to the Second Virginia Convention at St. John’s Church in Richmond.

• Tuesday, March 24: “If my efforts have led to greater success than usual, this is due, I believe, to the fact that during my wanderings … I have strayed onto paths where the gold was still lying by the wayside.” — Robert Koch, German scientist who on this day in 1882 announced the discovery of tuberculosis bacillus, the bacterium responsible for TB, which at the time killed one in seven people.

• Wednesday, March 25: “A common market is far more than an economic union. It is the practical manifestation of a common will to build a joint civilization.” — Paul-Henri Spaak, Belgian Prime Minister on the Treaty of Rome signed on this day in 1957.

• Thursday, March 26: “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” — Jonas Salk, American virologist who on this day in 1953 announced that he had successfully tested a vaccine against poliomyelitis, responding to journalist Edward R. Murrow’s question about who owned the patent, choosing to maximize the vaccine’s global distribution rather than seek profit.

• Friday, March 27: “This definitive treaty of peace put an end to the war.” — Opening language from the Treaty of Amiens, signed on this day in 1802 achieving peace in Europe for 14 months during the Napoleonic Wars. This represented the only period between 1793 and 1814 when Britain and France were not at war.

• Saturday, March 28: “Such a power if developed would operate railroads, factories, mines, irrigation pumps, furnish heat and light in such measure that all in all it would be the most unique, the most interesting, and the most remarkable development of both irrigation and power in this age of industrial and scientific miracles.” — Rufus Woods, newspaper publisher who promoted the Grand Coulee Dam, on this day in 1941 when the dam began producing electricity, eventually becoming the largest capacity hydropower station in the United States.

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Hugh Thompson Sr. was a World War II Navy veteran who worked as an electrician in Stone Mountain, Georgia. He raised his two sons—Hugh Jr. and Tommie—with strict discipline. If the boys did something wrong, their mother Wessie would punish them. Then Hugh Sr. would come home from work and punish them again.

Hugh Sr. and Wessie were working-class Episcopalians in 1950s Georgia who actively denounced racism and helped minority families in their community. They taught their boys three simple rules: don’t be a bully, help the underdog, and follow the golden rule.

Hugh Jr. graduated from Stone Mountain High School in 1961, served three years in the Navy with the Seabees, got his discharge, married, and became a funeral director. When his brother Tommie deployed to Vietnam with the Air Force, Hugh Jr. enlisted in the Army in 1966, learned to fly helicopters, and arrived in Vietnam in December 1967.

On the morning of March 16, 1968, Hugh Jr. and his crew—Glenn Andreotta, 20, and Lawrence Colburn, 18—lifted off for an operation in Quảng Ngãi Province.

What Hugh Jr. saw from his helicopter was death. Dozens of bodies in irrigation ditches. The village burning. U.S. Army soldiers moving through the village they called My Lai, killing everyone—old men, women, children, infants. No return fire. No Viet Cong. Just slaughter.

Hugh Jr. landed near an injured woman and radioed for medical evacuation. When he circled back, she’d been shot dead. Captain Ernest Medina was standing nearby. Hugh Jr. confronted him. Medina told him to get back in his helicopter. Hugh Jr. kept reporting what he was seeing. No one stopped it.

Then Hugh Jr. spotted about a dozen civilians running toward an earthen bunker with American soldiers chasing them.

This was the moment Hugh Sr. and Wessie had been preparing their son for without knowing it. Hugh Jr. put his helicopter down between the American soldiers and the bunker and told Andreotta and Colburn to train their M60 machine guns on the Americans. If the soldiers tried to harm the civilians, his crew was to open fire.

Hugh Jr. walked to the bunker. He spoke no Vietnamese. The people inside were terrified. He used hand signals. Finally nine or ten civilians emerged. Hugh Jr. radioed friends flying gunships overhead and they evacuated the civilians to safety.

In an irrigation ditch filled with nearly a hundred bodies, Andreotta spotted movement. He waded into the corpses and pulled out a boy covered in blood, clinging to his dead mother. Hugh Jr. flew him to the hospital.

By day’s end, between 347 and 504 Vietnamese civilians had been slaughtered. Hugh Jr. had saved perhaps a dozen lives. The Army investigated, concluded about 20 civilians had been accidentally killed. The division commander congratulated Charlie Company. Hugh Jr. received a Distinguished Flying Cross. He threw it away.

The next year, journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story. Hugh Jr. testified before Congress. Congressman Mendel Rivers called him a traitor. Twenty-six soldiers were charged. Most were acquitted. Lieutenant William Calley was convicted and sentenced to life. President Nixon commuted it to three years house arrest.

Hugh Jr. struggled with PTSD, alcoholism, divorce, nightmares. For nearly two decades he disappeared.

Thirty years later, the Army awarded Hugh Jr. the Soldier’s Medal. Days later, he and Colburn returned to Vietnam and met two women they’d saved. The women had families now—children and grandchildren who wouldn’t exist without that helicopter.

In 2001, they were reunited with the boy from the ditch. His name was Do Ba. He was 36, just out of prison for theft. Village officials called him “a walking casualty.” He’d been eight years old that day. He remembered everything.

Look, this might make a cleaner story if one of the women’s grandchildren grew up to discover a cure for cancer, or if Do Ba became a beloved teacher.

But you don’t save people because of what you think they’ll do for humanity. You save them because humanity is inherently worth saving.

A boy clinging to his dead mother deserved to live. The women deserved to live. The old man deserved to live.

At the reunion, a Vietnamese woman approached Hugh Jr. She wished the men who killed her neighbors could have come back too. Hugh Jr. looked confused. She finished: “So we could forgive them.”

“I’m not man enough to do that,” Hugh Jr. later told a reporter. “I’m sorry. I wish I was, but I won’t lie to anybody.”

Hugh Jr. died of cancer on January 6, 2006. He was 62. Lawrence Colburn was at his bedside.

I admit. I wondered a few times while writing this: Who would write a newsletter called Big Optimism, and feature the My Lai massacre?

I think it’s because you don’t have to save the world. You just have to save the very small part you can see.

On a terrible morning in March 1968, one man looked down at a nightmare and decided to do something about it.

Examples like that are as optimistic and inspiring as I can imagine.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday March 15: “I feel very honored to own the name.” — Aron Meystedt, current owner of the domain name symbolics.com, which on this day in 1985 was the first “.com” domain registered, by a computer company called Symbolics Inc.

• Monday March 16: "The dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow." — Robert H. Goddard, American physicist who on this day in 1926 launched the world's first liquid-fueled rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts, a 2.5-second flight that rose 41 feet and traveled 184 feet before crash-landing in a cabbage field.

• Tuesday March 17: “By all accounts there never existed a more miserable set of beings than these wretched creatures now are.” — George Washington, describing the evacuating British forces after 11,000 troops and Loyalists fled Boston by ship on this day in 1776, ending an eight-year occupation after American forces fortified Dorchester Heights with cannons dragged 300 miles through winter snow from Fort Ticonderoga.

• Wednesday March 18: "I gently pulled myself out and kicked off from the vessel. An inky black, stars everywhere and the sun so bright I could barely stand it." — Alexei Leonov, Soviet cosmonaut who on this day in 1965 became the first human to walk in space

• Thursday March 19: "It will become apparent that it is one of the most important conservation measures ever enacted by the Congress of the United States." — Senator William M. Calder of New York, sponsor of the Standard Time Act signed into law on this day in 1918

• Friday March 20: "I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak." — Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in book form on this day in 1852, selling 300,000 copies in its first year and becoming so influential that President Lincoln reportedly called her "the little lady who made this big war."

• Saturday March 21: May there only be peaceful and cheerful Earth Days to come for our beautiful Spaceship Earth." — U.N. Secretary-General U Thant, in his Earth Day statement this day in 1971.

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Almon Brown Strowger was born in 1839 in Penfield, New York, and he had a bit of a local pedigree: grandson of the town’s second settler and first miller.

He also had a penchant for invention. As a boy, whenever his mother assigned chores, young Almon and his brothers would spend their time devising machines to do the work for them.

(This is what is known as “foreshadowing.”)

Years went by: the 1840s, the 1850s. He taught school for a while. Then came the war.

In October 1861, Strowger enlisted in Company A of the 8th New York Volunteer Cavalry as a trumpeter, riding with the Union cavalry through some of the war’s bloodiest campaigns: Bull Run. Fredericksburg. Chancellorsville. Gettysburg.

He rose through the ranks to Sergeant, then Second Lieutenant. But by September 1864, his war was over.

Strowger was wounded in action at the Third Battle of Winchester in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. While Union forces routed the Confederates that day, Strowger was discharged.

He came home to a country hurtling into the future. The war had industrialized America. Railroads crisscrossed the continent, then telegraph lines followed, and then came Bell’s telephone.

As for Strowger, he was left behind for a bit. He taught school again, but then drifted west through Kansas before settling in Missouri, where he became an undertaker—the second-oldest profession, I guess.

This is where Strowger’s life experience and the technological revolution converged.

Patent No. 447,918

Bell’s telephone had arrived in Kansas City, but it was rudimentary, and every call had to go through a human operator who manually connected the lines.

You picked up the receiver, told the operator who you wanted to reach, and she plugged you in.

And if the operator happened to be, for example, the wife of a competing funeral home in your town—and if every time someone called needing an undertaker, even if they mentioned you by name, she routed them to her husband—well, that was a problem.

Strowger might have been in the dying business, but now his business was dying and he did not appreciate the irony. Armed with a theory about the rerouted calls, he did the legwork, tracing obituaries to figure out if the families of the various deceased should have been his customers.

He was not pleased with what he found. But, Strowger didn’t just complain; he decided the problem wasn’t the operator—the problem was that there was an operator at all. Why should a telephone company employee decide who got connected to whom? Subscribers should choose for themselves.

And so, back to his childhood penchant, he started tinkering, trying to build an automatic telephone operator.

His first model was built from a collar box and straight pins. He added magnets, then electromagnets. He worked out a system of rotary stepping switches that could automatically route calls based on electrical pulses.

Finally, Eureka! On March 10, 1891, 135 years ago this week, the U.S. Patent Office issued him Patent No. 447,918 for an “Automatic Telephone Exchange.”

(Although Strowger preferred to call it the “girl-less, cuss-less” telephone system.)

Lieut. A.B. Strowger

Patent in hand, Strowger brought in his nephew William and others who understood electricity and had money. They formed a company and went looking for customers, finding one with the local phone system in La Porte, Indiana.

In November 1892, the first automatic telephone exchange opened with 75 subscribers. It worked, and Strowger kept refining the technology.

Unfortunately — and double-unfortunately, because I really do try to emphasize optimism in these features — Strowger only had a little more than a decade to enjoy his success.

His health started to fail in the mid 1890s, and he sold his patents and his share of the company for a modest sum—enough to retire comfortably—and moved to St. Petersburg, Florida with his second wife, Susan.

He died in 1902 at age 63, and his grave is marked with a simple white military headstone: “Lieut. A.B. Strowger, Co. A, 8 NY Cav.”

Like so many others, however, Strowger cashed out just a bit too soon; his patents eventually sold to Bell Systems for $2.5 million, and his stepping switch became the backbone of telephone systems worldwide, remaining in use well into the 1970s.

He was largely forgotten, although in 2003, the Verizon Foundation—the charitable arm of the ultimate corporate successor to Bell, which really ought to celebrate him a bit—made an award to restore the cemetery where he’s buried along with two nearby Civil War memorials.

Funeral directors should probably remember him. Oh, and Ray Parker Jr., who wrote and performed the theme song to the 1984 movie, Ghostbusters.

Why? “Who you gonna call?”

If it weren’t for Almon Brown Strowger, generations of people might not have been able to decide for themselves.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• March 8: “We appear before you this morning to ask ... [to] prohibit the disfranchisement of citizens of the United States on account of sex.” — Susan B. Anthony, addressing the House Judiciary Committee on this day in 1884.

• March 9: “My whole philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be.” — Ruth Handler, co-founder of Mattel, who debuted the Barbie doll at the American International Toy Fair in New York on this day in 1959.

• March 10: “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.” — Ulysses S. Grant. On this day in 1864, President Lincoln signed Grant’s commission as Lieutenant General, making him commander of all Union armies.

• March 11: “Lithuania is free! Latvia will be free! Estonia will be free!” — Members of Lithuania’s Supreme Council, chanting in the chamber at 10:44 p.m. on this day in 1990 after voting 124-0 (with 6 abstentions) to declare independence from the Soviet Union.

• March 12: “I want world sympathy in this battle of Right against Might.” — Mahatma Gandhi, near the end of the Salt March, which began on this day in 1930. Gandhi and 78 followers walked 240 miles to the Arabian Sea, where on April 6 he picked up salt from the beach, breaking British law. More than 60,000 Indians were jailed in the ensuing civil disobedience campaign.

• March 13: “Before the bishop blesses his people, I ask you to pray to the Lord that he will bless me: the prayer of the people asking the blessing for their Bishop.” — Pope Francis, from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica on this day in 2013, moments after his election.

• March 14: “She was just incurable. It was like somebody today with COVID-19 who is going down the tubes.” — Historian Eric Lax, describing 33-year-old Anne Miller’s condition before she became the first American treated with penicillin on this day in 1942 at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Doctors gave her a tablespoon of the experimental drug—half the entire U.S. supply. Her fever broke within hours.

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John Lewis was 25 years old, and he thought he was going to die.

It was March 7, 1965. Lewis and 600 other marchers had walked six blocks from Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama, heading for the Edmund Pettus Bridge, as a protest for the right to vote.

In Dallas County, Alabama, only 2 percent of Black citizens were registered voters. When they tried to register, they were asked to count the bubbles on a bar of soap, or the jellybeans in a jar. They were turned away because they spelled out their middle name instead of using an initial, or showed up on the wrong day, or because the registrar just didn’t feel like it.

So they marched.

At the crest of the bridge, Lewis—chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—and Hosea Williams stopped. On the other side, Alabama State Troopers waited in formation. Behind them, sheriff’s deputies on horseback.

Major John Cloud called out through a bullhorn. The march was unlawful. They had two minutes to disperse.

“Major, may I have a word?” Williams asked.

“There will be no word.”

One minute and five seconds later, Cloud ordered: “Troopers, advance.”

They came with billy clubs raised, bullwhips, and tear gas. They trampled marchers with horses. Lewis was clubbed in the head. He fell. As he tried to get up, the trooper hit him again. His skull fractured. Seventeen marchers were hospitalized and 58 were treated for injuries.

TV Changes Everything

What made Bloody Sunday different? America watched it happen.

That evening, ABC interrupted its broadcast of *Judgment at Nuremberg*—a film about Nazi war crimes—to show footage of American state troopers beating peaceful protesters. Within 48 hours, demonstrations erupted in 80 American cities.

Five days later, Lewis testified before a federal judge, his skull still fractured. He described the trooper’s nightstick, the tear gas, being knocked to the ground. Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. ruled that the demonstrators had a constitutional right to march.

”We Shall Overcome”

Eight days after Bloody Sunday, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress.

LBJ was a Texan who had spent decades in Congress weakening civil rights bills. But he’d watched the footage from Selma. And he’d decided.

“At times,” he told Congress, “history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”

Then he did something unprecedented. He borrowed the language of the movement itself.

“Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

The chamber erupted. Members of Congress—except for the Southerners—stood and cheered. Martin Luther King Jr., watching on television in Selma, reportedly cried.

Johnson told Congress about his first job teaching Mexican-American students in Cotulla, Texas. Kids who came to school hungry, who knew the pain of prejudice but didn’t know why.

“I often walked home late in the afternoon, wishing there was more that I could do,” he said. “But now I do have that chance. And I’ll let you in on a secret—I mean to use it.”

The Law

On March 21, under federal protection, 3,200 marchers set out from Selma. This time, they made it across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. John Lewis was at the front, a few feet from Martin Luther King Jr. They walked 54 miles over five days. By the time they reached Montgomery, 25,000 people had joined them.

Congress debated the Voting Rights Act through the spring and summer. The Senate passed it 77-19. The House passed it 333-85.

On August 6, 1965—five months after Bloody Sunday—President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, banning literacy tests and poll taxes, and establishing federal oversight of elections in areas with histories of discrimination.

The results were immediate. In Alabama, Black voter registration jumped from 23 percent in 1964 to 57 percent in 1968. In Mississippi, it went from 7 percent to 59 percent. The number of elected Black officials in the South exploded.

John Lewis kept one of the pens Johnson used to sign the law. It hung, framed, in his living room for the rest of his life.

Good Trouble

Lewis served in Congress for 33 years, representing Georgia’s 5th district. He called what happened in Selma “good trouble”—the kind of trouble that changes things.

Every year, on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Lewis walked back across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In 2015, President Obama walked with him. In 2020, sick with cancer but still fighting, Lewis crossed the bridge one last time. He died that July at age 80.

Within five months, America went from Bloody Sunday to the Voting Rights Act. The march worked. The testimony worked. The pressure worked. Democracy, battered and broken on a bridge in Alabama, bent toward justice.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• March 1: “[A] public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” — From the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act, signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, creating the world’s first national park this day in 1872. The act set aside 3,500 square miles of wilderness in Montana and Wyoming territories, launching the global national park movement.

• March 2: “I congratulate you, fellow-citizens.” — President Thomas Jefferson, who on this day in 1807 signe the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves. The law did not abolish slavery or stop the domestic slave trade, but it ended legal importation of enslaved people from abroad.

• March 3: “O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light” — Opening lines of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by Francis Scott Key, which Congress designated as the national anthem on this day in 1931 after a contentious 15-year campaign. The debate largely broke along regional lines: Northerners favored “America the Beautiful” by Katharine Lee Bates, while Southerners championed Key’s composition.

• March 4: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, delivered this day in 1933. FDR took office at the height of the Great Depression, with 25% unemployment and 11,000 banks failed. This was the last presidential inauguration held in March; the 20th Amendment moved future inaugurations to January 20.

• March 5: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” — Winston Churchill, speaking at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, with President Truman on the platform, this day in 1946. The speech marked the beginning of the Cold War. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin denounced Churchill’s remarks as “war mongering.”

• March 6: “At long last, the battle has ended! And thus Ghana, your beloved country is free forever!” — Kwame Nkrumah, declaring Ghana’s independence from Britain this day in 1957. Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African nation to gain independence from colonial rule, inspiring liberation movements across the continent. Martin Luther King Jr. attended the independence ceremony.

• March 7: “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.” — Alexander Graham Bell, speaking the first intelligible words over a telephone, after receiving Patent No. 174,465 for his method of “transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically...by causing electrical undulations” on this day in 1876. Bell had filed his patent application just hours before rival inventor Elisha Gray filed a similar claim.

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Jack Hughes scored in overtime to defeat Canada 2-1 in Milan, ending a drought that included two painful losses to Canada in Olympic gold-medal games—in 2002 at Salt Lake City and Sidney Crosby’s famous overtime winner in 2010 at Vancouver.

Canada had also beaten the Americans just last year in the 4 Nations Face-Off final.

Yesterday’s win was enormous. Historic. But the 2026 team was stacked with NHL superstars playing at the highest level. It could have gone either way.

The real miracle happened in 1980, when a 42-year-old coach named Herb Brooks stood before a team of college kids and told them something that seemed absurd: “You were born to be here.”

What almost nobody remembers is that Brooks himself was born to be somewhere else entirely. (Some of this story was dramatized in the 2004 film Miracle, but the core facts are exactly as remarkable in real life.)

Twenty years earlier, he’d been the last player cut from the 1960 U.S. Olympic team—the team that went on to win gold at Squaw Valley.

Here’s the irony: Olympic rosters in 1960 were capped at 17 players. Today they carry 20. If modern roster rules had been in place, Brooks almost certainly would have made the team.

And the Miracle on Ice might never have happened.

6 months of torture

The rejection haunted Brooks. When he got the coaching job for 1980, he carried the memory of being cut like a wound. Every decision he made—every brutal practice, every psychological test, every impossible demand—was filtered through the lens of that failure. He wanted to rewrite history, one skate drill at a time.

When Brooks took over Team USA in 1979, he told the selection committee: “I don’t want the best players. I want the right ones.”

He backed it up.

Brooks shocked hockey observers with his roster choices. He deliberately mixed bitter college rivals—especially players from Minnesota and Boston University—and then positioned himself as the common enemy.

What followed was six months of systematic torture.

Brooks studied Soviet training methods but went further, borrowing ideas from track and swimming coaches—concepts that were foreign to American hockey. Then came the infamous “Herbies”: full-ice sprints repeated until players vomited and collapsed.

After a lackluster exhibition tie against Norway, Brooks forced the team back onto the ice for forty-five minutes of Herbies in the dark after arena staff turned off the lights. Forward Dave Silk later called it the turning point: “That moment probably had more to do with us gelling as a team, feeling like we were a group, a family.”

Brooks believed suffering together would forge the chemistry required to beat the Soviets.

He was right.

Do you believe in miracles?

To understand why, remember one crucial detail: in 1980, NHL players were not allowed in the Olympics. The Americans were true amateurs—college kids, mostly. The Soviets, meanwhile, were “amateurs” in name only: state-sponsored professionals who trained and played together year-round.

It wasn’t just David versus Goliath. It was David versus a full-time machine.

The Soviet team hadn’t lost an Olympic game in twelve years. Just thirteen days earlier, they had crushed these same Americans 10-3 in an exhibition at Madison Square Garden.

But on February 22, 1980, the impossible happened.

The Americans fell behind. Came back. Fell behind again. Came back again. With ten minutes left, Mark Pavelich fed Mike Eruzione, who beat legendary Soviet goalie Vladislav Tretiak.

4-3, United States.

ABC announcer Al Michaels delivered the call that still echoes today: “Do you believe in miracles? YES!”

Brooks didn’t celebrate. He slipped away to a bathroom and cried.

He knew what it felt like to be cut. Now he had given these kids what he never got.

The 18th player

Two days later, the Americans beat Finland to secure the gold medal.

After the Olympics, captain Mike Eruzione stunned everyone by retiring at twenty-five. NHL teams wanted him. He could have played professionally. But he walked away.

“How can you top that?” he said. “The last game I played, I won.”

Herb Brooks died in a car accident in 2003 at age sixty-six. All twenty members of the 1980 team served as his pallbearers.

Yesterday in Milan, when Hughes scored in overtime to give the United States its first Olympic gold in men’s hockey since 1980, Team USA players held up a jersey honoring Johnny Gaudreau, the late NHL star who likely would have been on the roster.

It was a beautiful moment. But back in 1980, nobody expected anything. Nobody believed.

Nobody thought a team of college kids could beat the best team in the world.

Nobody except the man who’d been cut.

The 18th player. The one who shouldn’t have been there.

The miracle was that Brooks convinced them they could—because he knew exactly what it felt like to be told you weren’t good enough.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, February 22: “Your handshake came over the vastest ocean in the world.”— Premier Zhou Enlai greeting President Richard Nixon at Beijing Airport, on the eve of Nixon becoming the first U.S. president to visit the People’s Republic of China since its founding in 1949.

• Monday, February 23: “All that has been written to me about that marvelous man seen at Frankfurt is true.— Future Pope Pius II (Enea Silvio Piccolomini) describing Johannes Gutenberg’s revolutionary printed Bible, completed in Mainz, Germany around February 23, 1455.

• Tuesday, February 24: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”— Chief Justice John Marshall writing for a unanimous Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison, decided February 24, 1803. This landmark case established the principle of judicial review—the power of courts to strike down laws that violate the Constitution.

• Wednesday, February 25: “I shook up the world! I’m the greatest!”— Cassius Clay shouting to reporters after defeating heavyweight champion Sonny Liston at the Miami Beach Convention Hall on February 25, 1964. The 22-year-old Clay was an 8-to-1 underdog (43 of 46 sportswriters picked Liston to win).

• Thursday, February 26: “It is beyond comparison—beyond description; absolutely unparalleled throughout the wide world. Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. Do nothing to mar its grandeur, sublimity and loveliness.”**— President Theodore Roosevelt on the Grand Canyon, which on February 26, 1919 became protected from development under U.S. law.

• Friday, February 27: “This amendment is in character and phraseology precisely similar to the Fifteenth. For each the same method of adoption was pursued. One cannot be valid and the other invalid.” — Justice Louis Brandeis writing for a unanimous Supreme Court in *Leser v. Garnett*, decided February 27, 1922, ruling that the 19th Amendment enrosing the right of women to vote did not violate the rest of the Constitution.

• Saturday, February 28: “We have found the secret of life.”— Francis Crick announcing to patrons at The Eagle pub in Cambridge, England, on February 28, 1953 that Cambridge University scientists James Watson and Crick had determined the double-helix structure of DNA.

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It was March 1964, and the two men were walking across the parade ground at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Stanley was Dean of Arts there—a military historian who’d spent his career thinking about what held countries together and what tore them apart.

His friend, John Matheson, was a Liberal member of parliament with a problem. Canada was tearing itself apart over a flag.

Prime Minister Lester Pearson wanted a new flag—something distinctly Canadian, not the Red Ensign with its Union Jack.

But veterans who had fought under that flag felt betrayed. The Royal Canadian Legion had erupted at Pearson’s speech, and Opposition Leader John Diefenbaker thundered about abandoning Canada’s British heritage.

A parliamentary committee asked for ideas, and was now drowning in submissions: thousands of flags, with beavers, multiple maple leaves, the fleur-de-lis. Nothing was working.

Matheson walked with difficulty; a veteran himself, he’d been wounded at the Moro River during the war. As they crossed the parade ground, Stanley gestured toward the Mackenzie Building, where the college flag snapped in the wind.

Red-white-red. Two red bars flanking a white square with the college crest.

“There is your flag,” Stanley said.

It was almost offhand, but as a soldier and an historian, Stanley had been thinking about symbols his whole life.

Did you get the memo?

Two weeks later, March 23, 1964, Stanley sat down and wrote a four-page memo to Matheson explaining his ideas for a new Canadian flag. (Full memo here.)

The greatest symbols were simple, he wrote, and no flag could represent everything—that was everyone’s mistake.

“If the flag is to be a unifying symbol,” he wrote, “it must avoid the use of national or racial symbols that are of a divisive nature.”

So, it had to skip the Union Jack and the fleur-de-lis. It had to be so simple a child could draw it—highly distinctive and recognizable from a distance.

The RMC flag wasn’t the answer, but it was close, he wrote. Red and white had been Canada’s colors since 1921. What if you stripped away everything else?

At the bottom of page three, he sketched his design—a doodle, really. A single maple leaf, centered on white, flanked by two red bars.

The Great Flag Debate

The memo made its way to the committee room, where Stanley’s sketch was placed among hundreds of professionally rendered designs. The committee remained deadlocked through spring, summer, and into fall.

Prime Minister Pearson favored a different design—the “Pearson Pennant” with three maple leaves and blue bars, but on October 22, the committee chose Stanley’s design.

A graphic artist named Jacques Saint-Cyr had refined the maple leaf to eleven points for better visibility. Another designer adjusted the proportions. But the concept was Stanley’s.

Then came the “Great Flag Debate.” The House of Commons still had to vote, and the fight raged for six more weeks. Diefenbaker fought until the end, urging his party to vote for the red-and-white maple leaf design on the assumption that Liberals would vote for Pearson’s preferred pennant, and continue the stalemate.

But Liberals switched their vote, and on December 15 at 2 a.m., Parliament invoked closure. The vote for the new Maple Leaf flag was 163 to 78.

Stanley had long since left the capital. The official flag-raising ceremony was set for February 15, 1965, and Stanley received death threats for having come up with design, warning he’d be shot if he showed up.

But Stanley had been shot at before. So, he wore his colorful Hudson’s Bay coat to the ceremony anyway and watched as his design rose on the flagpole on Parliament Hill at noon in front of thousands of Canadians in the cold.

The newspapers credited Pearson, or Matheson, or called it a committee effort. And over time, Stanley’s role was nearly forgotten.

Stanley went on to become Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick and received the Order of Canada. He died in 2002 at 95.

But he’s the one who came up with the Canadian answer: subtraction instead of addition. A country as divided as Canada needed a symbol so simple it couldn’t belong to any faction.

---

P.S. — I thought as I was writing this: Was Stanley related to Lord Stanley, the British aristocrat who donated the Stanley Cup in 1892?

Nope. Different families, different centuries, same last name.

It’s a bit of a coincidence though that Canada’s two most famous Stanleys both gave the country its two most famous symbols.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, February 15: “I don’t think my name is likely to be worth much in the bear business, but you’re welcome to use it.” — President Theodore Roosevelt, reply to Morris Michtom, on this day in 1903, granting permission to name a stuffed toy “Teddy’s Bear.”

• Monday, February 16: “The first man-made organic textile fabric prepared entirely from new materials from the mineral kingdom.” — DuPont’s announcement in 1938 describing the invention of nylon, on this day in 1937.

• Tuesday, February 17: “Hello! This is New York calling.” — The opening words of Voice of America’s first Russian-language broadcast, this day in 1947. Programming included news, human-interest stories, and music—especially jazz.

• Wednesday, February 18: “Dr. Slipher, I have found your Planet X.” — Clyde Tombaugh, a 24-year-old self-taught astronomer from Kansas, to Lowell Observatory Director V.M. Slipher, on this day in 1930, after discovering Pluto.

• Thursday, February 19: “The phonograph will undoubtedly be liberally devoted to music.” — Thomas Edison, predicting the future of his invention, on this day in 1878, when he received U.S. Patent No. 200,521 for the phonograph. Edison developed the device while working on telegraph and telephone technology.

• Friday, February 20: “Godspeed, John Glenn.” — Astronaut Scott Carpenter’s farewell to John Glenn at launch, on this day in 1962, as Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth.

• Saturday, February 21: “An earthquake may shake its foundations...but the character which it commemorates and illustrates is secure.” — Robert Winthrop’s dedication speech for the Washington Monument, on this day in 1885. President Chester Arthur presided over the ceremony. The monument opened to the public in 1888 after elevators were installed.

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The spy had been born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1903, son of a Bolshevik revolutionary who’d fled Russia.

In 1921, his father returned to the Soviet Union, and the boy went with him. He learned radio operations in the Red Army and by 1927 was recruited into Soviet intelligence. Then in 1948, using a dead Lithuanian’s passport, he slipped into the United States and disappeared into Brooklyn.

For nine years he posed as an artist named Emil Goldfus, working from a studio across the street from an FBI office, running networks, coordinating atomic espionage. Nobody suspected.

The pilot was born in 1929 in Burdine, Kentucky, son of a coal miner who wanted him to be a doctor. Instead he learned to fly. He joined the Air Force, excelled at piloting jets, and in January 1956 the CIA recruited him for the U-2 program—ultra-secret reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union at altitudes above 70,000 feet.

By 1960 he’d flown dozens of missions his family thought were weather reconnaissance for NASA.

The lawyer had been born in the Bronx in 1916, represented insurance companies, and during World War II served as a Navy officer in the Office of Strategic Services. He arranged for concentration camps to be filmed as they were liberated, then served as assistant prosecutor at Nuremberg.

After the war he went back to insurance law in New York. In August 1957, the Brooklyn Bar Association came to him with a problem: the FBI had arrested a Soviet spy, and multiple prominent lawyers had refused the case.

Would he defend the accused? His wife told him not to. He took it anyway.

The spy was William Fisher, although he gave the name Rudolf Ivanovich Abel when he was arrested. Why? Because using the name of a deceased KGB colonel was a signal to Moscow that he’d been captured and wasn’t cooperating.

The lawyer? James Donovan, an American patriot who believed even a Soviet spy deserved a vigorous defense.

Abel was convicted in October 1957 on three counts of conspiracy to commit espionage. But Donovan had one argument left: don’t execute him. Someday, Donovan told the court, “an American of equivalent rank” might be captured by the Soviets, and Abel could be useful for an exchange.

The judge sentenced Abel to 30 years instead of death.

Enter the pilot: On May 1, 1960, while Fisher/Abel was serving his sentence in the Atlanta federal penitentiary, Francis Gary Powers was flying 1,300 miles inside Soviet airspace when a missile exploded nearby.

The blast tore off his U-2’s right wing. Powers parachuted to safety, but the Soviets captured him alive, recovered the spy cameras from his U2, and photographed the remains.

The U.S. government initially lied, claiming a “weather plane” had strayed off course, but when the Soviets revealed they had Powers and substantial wreckage, the cover story collapsed. Powers was interrogated, made a confession, and on his 31st birthday stood trial in Moscow. He received 10 years’ imprisonment.

The CIA contacted Donovan, and in late 1961, with President Kennedy’s authorization, Donovan traveled to East Berlin to negotiate the swap.

For 10 days he navigated Soviet and East German representatives. The East Germans tried various counteroffers. Donovan threatened to break off negotiations. Finally they agreed: Powers and Abel would be exchanged at the Glienicke Bridge spanning the Havel River between Potsdam and West Berlin.

February 10, 1962 — 64 years ago this week — was a bitterly cold in Berlin. At dawn, Donovan stood on the bridge with Abel. Twenty miles away, an American graduate student named Frederic Pryor crossed through Checkpoint Charlie to freedom. As soon as word came through that Pryor was clear, Donovan gave the signal.

Abel and Powers began walking toward each other across the center line of the bridge. Abel paused before crossing, extended his hand to Donovan.

“Goodbye, Jim,” he said. “Good luck, Rudolf,” Donovan replied.

Six months later Abel sent Donovan a thank-you gift: two 16th-century, vellum-bound editions of the Commentaries on the Justinian Code.

Powers returned to America to a complicated reception. Some criticized him for allowing himself to be captured, but declassified documents later showed he’d followed orders and refused to denounce his country.

His marriage fell apart. He remarried, worked as a test pilot for Lockheed, then as a traffic helicopter pilot for a Los Angeles news station. On August 1, 1977, his helicopter crashed while reporting on California wildfires. He was killed instantly at age 48.

Fisher—Abel—returned to Moscow as a hero, received the Order of Lenin, wrote memoirs, lectured at schools. But the KGB privately sidelined him. He died of lung cancer in 1971 at age 68. Only after his death was his true identity revealed.

Donovan continued negotiating. Months later, President Kennedy asked him to negotiate the release of over 1,100 prisoners from Cuba after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. He succeeded. He died of a heart attack in 1970 at age 53.

Post-script:

This entire story sat largely forgotten until 2015, when a British playwright named Matt Charman was reading a book about Kennedy and came across a footnote.

He researched and wrote the story—his first original screenplay—and made the rounds in Hollywood. When he got back to London, he got a voicemail: Steven Spielberg wanted to hear the pitch directly.

Nervous, overheated in his home, Charman stripped down to his boxer shorts and T-shirt. The phone rang. Halfway through his pitch, Charman heard only silence.

“Are you still there?” he asked.

“I’m rapt,” Spielberg said. “Keep going.”

Steven Spielberg directed Bridge of Spies, with Tom Hanks as Donovan and Mark Rylance as Abel. Rylance won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

And now we know the story.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, February 8: “It was an absolute miracle to be able to push a button and pull up on the screen everyone from all over the country.”—Gordon Macklin, recalling this day in 1971 when NASDAQ, the world’s first electronic stock market, began operations with 500 market makers trading nearly 2 billion shares.

• Monday, February 9: “Caramels are a fad; Chocolate is permanent. I am going to make chocolate,”—Milton Hershey, who on this day in 1894 established the Hershey Chocolate Company, beginning his mission to make chocolate affordable for everyone—not just the wealthy.

• Tuesday, February 10: “I think everyone listening in on the radio should know, Glenn, it actually is a recording of ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo.’ But it’s in gold, solid gold, and is really fine”—announcer Paul Douglas, to Glenn Miller on this day in 1942, presenting the world’s first gold record for selling 1.2 million copies.

• Wednesday, February 11: “Ladies and gentlemen, we … have detected …gravitational waves! We did it!”—David Reitze, LIGO’s executive director, announcing the first direct observation of ripples in spacetime that Einstein predicted a century earlier, on this day in 2016.

• Thursday, February 12: “We call upon all the believers in democracy to join in a national conference for the discussion of present evils, the voicing of protests, and the renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty,”—”The Call” written by Oswald Garrison Villard, founding the NAACP on this day in 2016, the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.

• Friday, February 13: “Electronic Computer Flashes Answers, May Speed Engineering,”—New York Times headline on this day in 1946, announcing ENIAC’s public debut. The press hailed the 30-ton marvel as an “electronic brain” that could solve in seconds what took humans days, ushering in the computer age.

• Saturday, February 14: “The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks, and that’s cool. And that’s pretty much all there is to say.”—Jawed Karim, in the first video ever posted to YouTube. On this day in 2005, Karim and two colleagues with whom he’d worked at PayPal employees—Chad Hurley and Steve Chen founded the platform, revolutionizing how the world shares and watches video.

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As a Black freshman at North Carolina A&T in the fall of 1959, he towered over most of his classmates. Despite his intimidating build, he was quiet—no athlete, no campus celebrity, just a kid who preferred the close companionship of friends.

Even as a child, however, McCain had tested the absurdity of segregation in his own small way.

He’d drink from both the “white” and “colored” water fountains to see if the taste was different. By the time he got to college, he later said, “I was angry with a system that led me on and betrayed me, and destroyed most of my faith in a lot of humankind.”

McCain lived in a dormitory with David Richmond and in the same building as Ezell Blair Jr. and Joseph McNeil, and the four Black students became close friends.

They’d gather in someone’s dorm room for conversations about racial inequality that would stretch so long they’d fall asleep right where they sat. They talked about Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance, about the Freedom Rides, about the murder of Emmett Till.

They read about the sit-ins that had already happened in other cities—Wichita in 1958, Oklahoma City that same year—protests that had worked.

“We finally felt hypocritical,” McCain said, for doing nothing.

They decided to sit at the whites-only lunch counter at Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro. It was McCain who gave the final call when his friends began to get cold feet.

Quiet McCain, who is remembered for asking: “Are you guys chicken or not?”

On the late afternoon of Monday, February 1, 1960, the four young men walked into the F.W. Woolworth at 132 South Elm Street. They bought toothpaste and other small items from a non-segregated counter, saving their receipts.

Then, dressed in their Sunday best, they sat down at the 66-seat L-shaped lunch counter and asked for coffee and donuts.

“We don’t serve Negroes here,” a white waitress told them.

Blair pointed out that he’d just been served two feet away. The waitress replied, “Negroes eat at the other end.”

They didn’t move.

A white police officer arrived with his billy club drawn and asked them to leave. They stayed.

The store manager asked them to leave. They stayed.

An older Black woman who worked behind the counter called them “stupid, ignorant, rabble-rousers, troublemakers.” They stayed.

McCain compared himself and the others to “Mack trucks” because there was no way anyone could move them from their seats. The longer they sat, the more McCain realized that no one was stopping them.

He thought: “Maybe they can’t do anything to us; maybe we can keep it up.”

The store closed at 5:30 p.m. They left.

None of them had been arrested. The police had declared they could do nothing because the four men were paying customers who had not taken any provocative actions. But local businessman Ralph Johns, who had helped the students plan the protest, had already alerted the media.

A photo of the Greensboro Four appeared in local newspapers.

The next day, they returned with more than 20 other students. By February 3, more than 60 students joined them, including women from Bennett College and students from Dudley High School.

By February 5, some 300 people had packed into Woolworth’s, filling virtually every seat at the lunch counter and spilling onto the sidewalk outside.

At one point, an older white woman who walked up behind him as he sat at the counter. She whispered in a calm voice: “Boys, I’m so proud of you.”

(McCain would later say: “What I learned from that little incident was don’t you ever, ever stereotype anybody in this life until you at least experience them and have the opportunity to talk to them.”)

Within a week, sit-ins had spread to 15 cities in five states. Within two months, 54 cities in nine states had protests of their own.

More than 70,000 people eventually participated in the sit-in movement.

Historian Howard Zinn wrote, “It is hard to overestimate the electrical effect of that first sit-in in Greensboro.” For the first time in American history, he argued, “a major social movement, shaking the nation to its bones, is being led by youngsters.”

The Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter quietly desegregated on July 25, 1960—six months after that first afternoon.

The first people served were four Black employees of the store: Geneva Tisdale, Susie Morrison, Anetha Jones, and Charles Best.

McCain graduated from A&T in 1964 with degrees in chemistry and biology. He married, had three sons, and spent more than three decades working as a chemist in Charlotte. Throughout his life, he remained proud of what happened that day. He said he never felt more powerful or confident than while protesting segregation.

“I felt clean,” he remembered about sitting at that lunch counter. “I had gained my manhood by that simple act.”

A portion of that Woolworth’s lunch counter—four stools where McCain and his friends sat—is now preserved at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

The building itself has become the International Civil Rights Center and Museum. On the North Carolina A&T campus, a statue honors the four friends.

It’s called “February One.”

McCain died in 2014 at age 73, a chemist from Charlotte who once sat down in a five-and-dime store and helped change America.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, February 1: “The Grand Central Terminal is not only a station, it is a monument, a civic center, or, if one will, a city.”—The New York Times on this day in 1913 when the world’s largest train station opened in New York City after a decade of construction.

• Monday, February 2: “The civilisation of a people can be measured by their domestic and sanitary appliances.”—George Jennings. On this day in 1852, the first public flushing toilets opened at 95 Fleet Street in London, following the success of Jennings’ “Monkey Closets” at the 1851 Great Exhibition where over 800,000 visitors paid a penny to use them—coining the phrase “spend a penny.”

• Tuesday, February 3: “I laid violent hands upon it without asking permission of the proprietor’s remains,” Samuel Clemens later explained about adopting the pen name “Mark Twain” on this day in 1863 for his first signed article in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. The riverboat term meaning “two fathoms deep” became one of American literature’s most famous pseudonyms.

• Wednesday, February 4: “I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week,”—Mark Zuckerberg, before launching Facebook on this day in 2004. Within 24 hours, 1,200-1,500 Harvard students had signed up for what would become the world’s largest social network.

• Thursday, February 5: “Miles and miles and miles.”—astronaut Alan Shepard, after hitting a golf ball on the Moon on this day in 1971 during the Apollo 14 mission. Later analysis revealed the shot traveled 40 yards—still an impressive feat for a one-handed swing in a bulky spacesuit.

• Friday, February 6: “The High and Mighty Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary is now, by the death of our late Sovereign of happy memory, become Queen Elizabeth the Second.”—proclamation of the Accession Council on this day in 1952 after King George VI died in his sleep at Sandringham. Princess Elizabeth, just 25, learned of her father’s death while on safari in Kenya and immediately became Queen.

• Saturday, February 7: “This Treaty marks a new stage in the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe.”—Proclamation upon the signing of the the Maastricht Treaty this day in 1992, which established the European Union and laid the groundwork for the euro.

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• There was the glass razor—rust-resistant but prone to shattering.

• The pneumatic shoes stuffed with balloons that burst when you walked.

• And, there was the afternoon at university when he tried to create diamonds by heating graphite and shorted out Glasgow’s entire electricity supply.

Born in 1888 in Scotland, Baird suffered from chronic ill health—too sickly for military service in the Great War, too weak to finish his degree. In 1920, broke and unwell, he briefly operated a jam factory in Trinidad before returning to England with another string of failed inventions. Only a thermal sock had sold at all.

But Baird couldn’t let go of something he’d read as a teenager: a German book about the photoelectric properties of selenium.

What if you could transmit pictures through the air, the way radio transmitted sound? By 1923, he’d begun building the world’s first television from whatever he could scrounge: a hatbox, scissors, darning needles, bicycle lenses, a tea chest, sealing wax, cardboard.

(When he accidentally electrocuted himself with 1,000 volts in July 1924, his landlord asked him to leave.)

Baird moved to a cramped attic at 22 Frith Street in Soho and kept working. When he earlier visited the Daily Express to drum up publicity, the news editor was terrified. “For God’s sake, go down to reception and get rid of a lunatic who’s down there,” he reportedly told his staff. “He says he’s got a machine for seeing by wireless! Watch him—he may have a razor on him.”

That began to change in March 1925, when Selfridges department store offered Baird £20 a week for three weeks to demonstrate his device to shoppers.

The images showed only silhouettes, but the public demonstrations generated enough press coverage and scientific curiosity that Baird was no longer dismissed as a lunatic. He’d proven the concept wasn’t fraud.

Baird spent months refining the apparatus. He’d perfected it enough to capture actual gradations of light and shade—the first person televised was William Edward Taynton, a 20-year-old office worker who happened to be nearby. But nobody was around to see it.

By 1926, he felt ready to show scientists what he’d accomplished. He invited members of the Royal Institution to witness his television on the evening of January 26—100 years ago today. Forty scientists in evening dress climbed the stairs to Baird’s laboratory to see what he now called television.

The equipment filled the cramped room. Baird demonstrated with Stooky Bill, then with a human face. Images measured just 3.5 by 2 inches.

A Times reporter wrote that they were “faint and often blurred, but substantiated a claim that through the ‘Televisor’... it is possible to transmit and reproduce instantly the details of movement, and such things as the play of expression on the face.”

That lukewarm assessment, buried two days later, was the only published response. None of the distinguished scientists wrote anything about what they’d witnessed. They had stood in that attic watching the future flicker on a tiny screen and hadn’t recognized it. When a businessman visited in April, hoping to invest, he concluded that putting the device on the market would be “an error of judgment.”

Within months, however, reports from other dignitaries grew more positive. By 1927, Baird transmitted television over 438 miles from London to Glasgow. In 1928, he sent it across the Atlantic. The BBC began experimental broadcasts using his system in 1929.

His mechanical system would eventually be superseded by electronic television. By 1937, the BBC adopted a superior system from Marconi-EMI. A fire destroyed Baird’s laboratories that year. He died in 1946 at age 58, nearly forgotten, after suffering a stroke.

But on that Tuesday evening in Soho, television had crossed from dream to reality. The scientists who climbed those stairs had no way of knowing they were witnessing one of the pivotal moments in human communication. They saw blurred images on a tiny screen, cobbled together by a man who’d failed at nearly everything he’d tried. They looked at the future and saw an error of judgment.

Historians would later mark that evening as the watershed when television became real—not because the technology was perfect, but because someone had proven it could exist at all.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, January 25: "I took off my cap and wanted to yell with the crowd, not because I had gone around the world in 72 days, but because I was home again."—Nellie Bly, who completed her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days, 6 hours, and 11 minutes, this day in 1890. She set out to beat the fictional Phileas Fogg's 80-day journey from Jules Verne's novel, traveling alone with just one small handbag.

• Monday, January 26: "I was so sick crossing the ocean that I kept praying the ship would sink. I wasn't even nervous the day of the race. Why would I be? I knew I couldn't win."—Charlie Jewtraw, who won the first Gold Medal in Winter Olympics history in the 500-meter speed skating event, this day in 1924.

• Tuesday, January 27: "I have not failed. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work."—Thomas Edison, who on this day in 1880 received Patent No. 223,898 for his incandescent electric lamp, paving the way for universal domestic use of electric light.

• Wednesday, January 28: "Check your egos at the door."—Sign posted by producer Quincy Jones at A&M Studios, where 46 music superstars gathered after the American Music Awards to record "We Are the World" for African famine relief, this day in 1985. The song raised over $63 million for humanitarian aid and sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.

• Thursday, January 29: "The operation of mainly light carriages for the conveyance of one to four passengers."—Karl Benz's patent application for the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, submitted this day in 1886. Patent No. 37435 is considered the birth certificate of the automobile.

• Friday, January 30: "I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we've passed the audition."—John Lennon's final words at the end of The Beatles' unannounced 42-minute rooftop concert at 3 Savile Row in London, this day in 1969.

• Saturday, January 31: “They had seen the future, and it works, at least as far as their digestive tract.”—A news reporter observing Russian customers lining up to pay the equivalent of several days’ wages for Big Macs at the Soviet Union’s first McDonald’s, which opened in Moscow this day in 1990. (Of course, it was closed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

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Not athletes—gentlemen. The kind of men who could afford to spend months training without pay, who had family money to cover travelm and who didn’t need a regular job because they had trust funds, estates, or comfortable positions waiting for them after they collected their medals and went home.

The International Olympic Committee, founded by French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin, built this idea into the modern Games from the start. Only amateurs could compete. If you had ever accepted money for playing sports—any sport, at any level—you were a professional. And professionals were banned.

Officially, it was about preserving the “purity” of competition. In reality, it kept poor people out.

Enter Jim Thorpe.

Thorpe didn’t come from money. He was born in 1887 in Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma, to parents of Sac and Fox descent. His Native name was Wa-Tho-Huk—“Bright Path.”

He was sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, one of the infamous boarding schools created to “civilize” Native children by stripping away their language and culture.

Carlisle did have a football program, though. And a track team. And a coach named Pop Warner.

And, Thorpe turned out to be unlike anything anyone had seen.

By 1911, he was being called the best college football player in America. On the track, he was even more. He could sprint, jump, throw, and endure. He didn’t just win events that required different skills; he made specialists look ordinary.

At the Stockholm Olympics in 1912, Thorpe didn’t just win. He overwhelmed the field.

In the pentathlon, he finished first in four of the five events. In the decathlon—ten different events over two days—he beat his nearest competitor by nearly 700 points, a margin so large it wouldn’t be matched for decades.

At one point, his shoes went missing. He found two mismatched shoes in a trash can. One was too big, so he wore an extra sock. He won anyway.

When King Gustav V of Sweden presented him with his medals, he said, “You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world.”

Thorpe, uncomfortable with ceremony, reportedly replied, “Thanks, King.”

Six months later, it was over.

In January 1913, the Worcester Telegram reported that Thorpe had once been paid to play minor-league baseball. The payments were trivial; the violation was technical. But the IOC enforced its rules without mercy.

Many college athletes played summer baseball under fake name, but Thorpe, raised in a school designed to erase his culture and remake him in white America’s image, hadn’t learned the unwritten rules.

The IOC stripped him of his medals and erased his records. The golds were reassigned to Hugo Wieslander of Sweden and Ferdinand Bie of Norway, both of whom publicly protested that Thorpe was the rightful champion.

It didn’t matter.

As for Thorpe, he went on to play professional football and baseball and became one of the first stars of what would become the NFL. But there were no endorsements, no pensions, no safety net. He worked odd jobs, and struggled with both money and alcohol.

Thrope died in 1953 at 64 years old, living in a trailer park in California. His widow had to ask for donations to pay for his funeral.

But, his family never stopped fighting.

In the early 1980s, two researchers, Robert Wheeler and Florence Ridlon, uncovered something the IOC had missed—or perhapsignored. Olympic rules required any protest about eligibility to be filed within 30 days of competition. Thorpe’s disqualification came six months later.

By the IOC’s own rulebook, it was invalid.

With that evidence and support from the U.S. Congress, they pressured the committee. And on January 19, 1983—seventy years after the medals were taken away—the IOC finally reversed course.

That day, IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch presented replica gold medals to Thorpe’s children at a ceremony in Los Angeles. The originals were long gone.

A full reckoning wouldn’t come until July 2022, 110 years after Stockholm, when the IOC finally declared Jim Thorpe the sole gold medalist.

Today’s Olympic and college athletes sign multi-million-dollar endorsement deals. The amateur rule that destroyed Thorpe’s career now looks less like a principle and more like a gate.

It preserved competition for people who didn’t need the money. It made sure the Carlisle student who played baseball for $2 a game could be punished for the same thing aristocrats quietly did all the time.

Jim Thorpe was the greatest athlete in the world in 1912. Everyone who saw him knew it. The king knew it. His competitors knew it.

On January 19, 1983, the Olympic Committee finally admitted it.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, January 18: "I honestly had no earthly idea that I was breaking hockey's color barrier. I was just there to play hockey." — Willie O'Ree, who this day in 1958 became the first Black player in the NHL, playing for the Boston Bruins.

• Monday, January 19: "How do you fly to a place that no one has been to? That's one of the most exciting things about this mission." — Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons, launched this day in 2006 toward Pluto.

• Tuesday, January 20: “Passengers could be carried...over a series of descending and ascending longitudinal planes by the gravity momentum acquired by the car in its passage over the planes...thereby obviating all necessity for changing cars on the round trip.” — From L.A. Thompson’s patent for the “Roller Coasting Structure,” granted this day in 1885.

• Wednesday, January 21: "The principles advocated in the Daily News will be principles of progress and improvement; of education, civil and religious liberty, and equal legislation." — Charles Dickens, launching his newspaper this day in 1846.

• Thursday, January 22: "A proud day for all of us." — First Lady Pat Nixon, christening the first Pan Am 747 "Jumbo Jet" which began commercial service this day in 1970.

• Friday, January 23: "By the help of the Most High, it shall be the effort of my life to shed honor on this diploma." — Elizabeth Blackwell, receiving her medical degree this day in 1849, becoming the first woman to graduate from medical school in America. The students had voted to admit her as a joke.

• Saturday, January 24: "It's a natural." — American Can Company executive, on introducing the first canned beer this day in 1935, revolutionizing how Americans consumed their favorite beverage.

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The U.S. officially turns 250 this year.

There are a lot of things to like about America, but one we might take for granted is that we choose to celebrate the nation’s founding in the beginning of summer.

Result: parades, barbecues, fireworks, beach trips. No offense to February, for example, it wouldn’t be the same.

That isn’t to say we couldn’t have settled on another date. One might have considered March 4, 1789, when the U.S. Constitution went into effect, or October 19, 1781, when the British surrendered at Yorktown.

For your consideration, as they say during awards season, may I suggest another contender date—or perhaps we might call it an honorable mention.

January 14, 1784

That would be January 14, 1784—in which case we’d be celebrating America’s 242nd birthday this week.

The rationale is worth knowing even if you’re as partial to 4th of July cookouts as I am. It’s that while July 4 celebrates the signing of the Declaration of Independence, January 14 was a big milestone on the way toward the rest of the world agreeing with that declaration.

The story goes like this:

The Revolutionary War effectively ended when General Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, but a surrender doesn’t necessarily change the political reality. You need a peace treaty for that.

Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay spent months in Paris negotiating with British representatives to work out the terms. On September 3, 1783, they signed the Treaty of Paris:

• The Americans got almost everything they wanted.

• British recognition of independence.

• Withdrawal of all British troops.

• Territory extending from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River, from the Great Lakes to the northern border of Florida. Worth noting—that’s 890,000 square miles total, compared to the 360,000 square miles the original thirteen colonies occupied.

It was, by any measure, an extraordinary diplomatic achievement.

6 months or sooner

But then, the British added Article 10, which said that to become valid, the treaty had to be ratified and exchanged “in the Space of Six Months or sooner.”

So, calculate six months from September 3, 1783 and you get March 3, 1784. The treaty needed to get from Paris to wherever Congress was meeting—which turned out to be Annapolis, Maryland—and the Congress had to ratify it.

Then the ratified document had to get back across the Atlantic to Paris for the formal exchange.

In 1783, a ship crossing the Atlantic from Europe to America took about six to eight weeks in good weather. Longer in winter. And that was just the ocean crossing—you still needed time to get from a European port to Paris.

The British set that deadline deliberately, as a sort of challenge to see if this new “United States” could actually function as a nation. Could it get its act together enough to meet an international deadline with consequences?

Fair question.

Make it official

Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress needed representatives from nine of the thirteen states present to ratify a treaty. But as of early January 1784, Congress was having trouble getting enough delegates to show up. By January 12, only seven states had sent delegates to Annapolis.

Connecticut’s delegates arrived on January 13. That made eight.

But it still wasn’t enough.

Enter Richard Beresford of South Carolina who was sick in Philadelphia, about 90 miles away.

We wouldn’t normally have much good to say about Beresford. He was a wealthy planter who depended on enslaved people for his fortune. His participation in Congress was largely in defense of slavery and the interests of the planter class.

But on January 14, 1784, he left his sickbed, made the winter journey to Annapolis, and walked into the Maryland State House.

Nine states. Barely a quorum, but that same day, Congress voted unanimously to ratify the Treaty of Paris.

It made it official: The United States of America was no longer a collection of rebellious colonies fighting for recognition. We were a sovereign nation, recognized by the greatest empire on earth.

How about April? Or May?

The Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation was weak. It couldn’t tax. It couldn’t enforce laws. It couldn’t regulate commerce. Within a few years, the failures became so obvious that the nation scrapped the Articles entirely and wrote a new Constitution.

On this one day, though, the Continental Congress justified its existence.

The ratified treaty was carried back across the Atlantic. Two couriers left by ship later in January with copies for Franklin and King George III. Winter weather delayed their arrival, but the British accepted the explanation.

King George III ratified the treaty in April 1784. The formal exchange of ratified copies happened in Paris on May 12, 1784.

The Revolutionary War was officially, finally, legally over.

We celebrate July 4th, and we should. That’s when we declared independence. January 14, 1784 is the last thing Americans had to do to make it real.

It’s more fun to celebrate in the summer. But maybe grill a hot dog and raise a toast on Wednesday as well.

Happy 242nd, America.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, January 11: “The rationale was simple enough: These revolutionary semiconductors are made in a valley, from silicon. … How was I to know that the term would quickly be adopted industry-wide?” — Don Hoefler, who coined the term “Silicon Valley” in an Electronic News article this day in 1971. The region had previously been known as the “Valley of Heart’s Delight” due to its orchards.

• Monday, January 12: "We're gonna win the game. I guarantee it." — Joe Namath, this day in 1969 before leading the Jets to their stunning Super Bowl III victory.

• Tuesday, January 13: "It will soon be possible to distribute grand opera music to almost any dwelling in Greater New York." — Lee de Forest, this day in 1910 broadcasting the first public radio performance from the Metropolitan Opera.

• Wednesday, January 14: "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free." — Michelangelo, who on this day in 1501 beginning work on the David.

• Thursday, January 15: "All the pieces had to come together. This group of strangers had to rise to the occasion." — Captain Chesley Sullenberger, reflecting on the successful water landing of U.S. Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River, this day in 2009 .

• Friday, January 16: “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.” — Steve Jobs, this day in 2007 introducing the iPhone.

• Saturday, January 17: "May God bring lasting peace to us all over the world." — Paul Antonio, mechanic who built the first UN ballot box, this day in 1946 at the first Security Council meeting.

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The Federal Aviation Administration’s headquarters is at 800 Independence Avenue SW in Washington, D.C., directly across the street from the Smithsonian’s Hirschhorn Museum and the Air and Space Museum.

A marker on the sidewalk out front, erected in January 2017, explains what used to be there:

“An infamous slave pen, owned by W.H. Williams ...

A seemingly innocuous yellow house, set back from the street in a grove of trees, concealed from view a brick-walled yard, in which enslaved persons were held, awaiting transport to southern markets.

It was one of the most lucrative of the slave pens operating in Washington, DC in the years before the Civil War.”

The marker almost certainly would not be there if it not for the experience of one of the many people who were held in chains there. It continues:

In 1841, Solomon Northup, a free Black man and professional musician, was drugged, kidnapped, and sold as a slave while visiting Washington, DC ...

Eventually, Northup regained his freedom and documented the experience in his book, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup (1853).

Northup was 33 years old at the time that he was tricked, kidnapped, and sold into slavery.

He’d lived his entire life up until then in upstate New York, where he had a wife, Anne, and three children: Elizabeth, Margaret, and Alonzo. Northup made his living as a carpenter and a violinist, skilled enough that local hotels hired him for their dances. He owned property. He voted.

In March 1841, two men he met in Saratoga Springs offered him work playing the fiddle for their traveling circus. As Northup later wrote, they paid him well and worked to ensure he obtained papers showing his free status.

But then, he was drugged — in his book, Northup seems to be unsure whether it was the two men who’d convinced him to head South who had done so, or someone else—but regardless, he lost consciousness and woke up in chains in a cell in the Williams Slave Pen.

His money and documents were gone, and he was beaten brutally for hours until he stopped insisting the he was a free person from New York. Within days, Solomon Northup became “Platt”—a runaway slave from Georgia.

He was shipped to New Orleans, where he was auctioned for $1,000. What followed were twelve years on Louisiana cotton and sugar plantations.

Twelve years of whippings, forced labor, and the constant threat of violence.

Twelve years watching other enslaved people ripped from their families, children sold away from mothers, human beings treated as property.

Twelve years wondering if somewhere in New York, his wife and children had any idea if he was alive or dead.

Nearly 12 years, before deliverance came, largely in the form of a Canadian carpenter named Samuel Bass, who abhorred slavery, and in whom Northup confided.

Bass sent letters to Northup’s family and friends back home in Saratoga Springs; some of those friends mobilized support among prominent citizens and convinced New York Governor Washington Hunt to appoint a white friend of Northup’s with the same last name—Henry Northup—as an official state agent, and send him to Louisiana under an 1840 law designed to rescue kidnapped citizens.

Armed with affidavits and court documents, and accompanied by the local sheriff, Henry Northup located Solomon Northup and reached the plantation where he was held by a brutal plantation owner called Edwin Epps, on January 3, 1853.

The next day as Solomon Northup wrote:

Tuesday, the fourth of January, Epps and his counsel, the Hon. H. Taylor, [Henry] Northup, Waddill, the Judge and sheriff of Avoyelles, and myself, met in a room in the village of Marksville.

Mr. Northup stated the facts in regard to me, and presented his commission, and the affidavits accompanying it. The sheriff described the scene in the cotton field. I was also interrogated at great length.

Finally, Mr. Taylor assured his client that he was satisfied, and that litigation would not only be expensive, but utterly useless.

In accordance with his advice, a paper was drawn up and signed by the proper parties, wherein Epps acknowledged he was satisfied of my right to freedom, and formally surrendered me to the authorities of New-York.

Three weeks later, on January 21, Solomon reunited with his family. His daughters had married. He’d missed years of their lives.

They had known he had been enslaved, but had no idea where in the South he had been taken, or what name he was living under. One of his sons had spent the entire 12 years obsessed with the idea of earning and saving enough money to travel the South, find his father, and buy his freedom.

Within months, working with editor David Wilson, Northup published his memoir. Twelve Years a Slave was a bestseller, with 30,000 copies in three years.

More importantly, it became proof: a firsthand account by a man who’d lived as both free citizen and enslaved person, who could describe the mechanics of plantation slavery with the authority of lived experience.

I’ve pulled punches in describing what slavery was like for Solomon Northup and others above; frankly it’s very hard for me even to conceive what it was like.

But, the book did no such thing. It named names, places, dates, and offered evidence.

It galvanized Northern readers who might otherwise have remained indifferent—much like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, only presented as a true story.

Northup became an active abolitionist, giving speeches throughout the Northeast, staging plays based on his story, and it seems clear, helping others escape via the Underground Railroad.

Within five years afterward, however, Solomon Northup disappeared from the historical record. How he died, where he died—nobody knows.

His book disappeared too.

After several 19th-century printings, *Twelve Years a Slave* was forgotten for nearly 100 years, until 1968, when historians Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon discovered it and published an annotated edition.

In 2013, director Steve McQueen adapted the book into a film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

It’s hard to think of anything “optimistic” about Solomon Northup’s story, except how it ended, literally 172 years ago yesterday.

But had he not gone through his ordeal, people might not have known, and history might been a little bit different.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, January 4: “Let us reaffirm our commitment to work together for an inclusive and equitable world, where the rights of people with disabilities are fully realized.” — UN Secretary-General António Guterres, in an official message for the first World Braille Day, this day in 2019.

• Monday, January 5: “Now, what you hear is not a test, I’m rappin’ to the beat ...” opening line to “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang, which broke the Billboard Hot 100 Top 40 on January 5, 1980, reaching #36, the first rap song to do so.

• Tuesday, January 6: “A patient waiter is no loser.” — Samuel Morse, in one of the first demonstrated telegraph messages, on this day in 1838. The message was transmitted over two miles of wire in Morristown, N.J.

• Wednesday, January 7: “Hello? Is that Mr. Gifford? Well, good morning, Sir Evelyn.” — First lines from the first transatlantic telephone call (recorded and preserved at the Library of Congress), on this day in 1927 between the President of America’s AT&T company, Walter S. Gifford, and the head of the British General Post Office, Sir Evelyn P. Murray.

• Thursday, January 8: “Let us commemorate it as an event that gives us increased power as a nation ...”—a toast from President Andrew Jackson this day in 1835, marking the only time in U.S. history that the national debt has been reduced to zero.

• Friday, January 9: “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.” — Steve Jobs, this day in 2007 introducing the iPhone.

• Saturday, January 10: “The excitement of the public to get places, and the running about of officials ... no doubt took up more than half the time which will be occupied by the stoppage of a train at each station on ordinary occasions.” — from a contemporary article in The Guardian, describing the opening of the London Underground on this day in 1863.

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Before Ellis Island became a symbol of American promise, immigration to America was handled by individual states through a cramped facility called Castle Garden at Manhattan’s southern tip.

From 1855 to 1890, eight million immigrants squeezed through, without any standardized health inspections or federal oversight. It was clear the system had to change.

The federal government stepped in. President Benjamin Harrison designated a small island in New York Harbor—previously used by the Navy to store gunpowder—as America’s first federal immigration station.

They built a massive three-story wooden structure that would become the gateway through which 12 million people would pass over the next 62 years.

On New Year’s Eve 1891, a steamship called the Nevada sat anchored just off Manhattan. It had arrived too late for its passengers to be processed that day.

Among those passengers were three Irish siblings:

• 17-year-old Annie Moore and her two younger brothers —

• Anthony (15) and

• Philip (12).

They’d left Queenstown, County Cork on December 20, spending 12 days at sea—including Christmas—in the cramped conditions of steerage. They were coming to join their parents, who’d emigrated four years earlier and had been living at 32 Monroe Street in Manhattan.

As morning broke on January 1, 1892, bells rang across the harbor. Ships were decorated with red, white, and blue bunting. At 10:30 a.m., a flag on Ellis Island dipped three times—the signal to begin.

A barge ferried the first group of passengers from the Nevada to the dock. When the gangplank lowered, Annie Moore—brown-haired, rosy-cheeked—bounded down with her brothers in tow. She was the first to enter through the enormous double doors.

She climbed the main staircase, skipping two steps at a time, and was directed to one of 10 inspection aisles. An official greeted her, and to mark the historic occasion, presented her with a $10 gold piece. (That coin, according to romantic newspaper accounts, she would “never part with.” The reality was almost certainly different—her father was a longshoreman, and that $10 probably didn’t last the day.)

After passing her health inspection, Annie and her brothers were reunited with their parents. The New York Times headline the next day read: “OPENED BY PRESIDENT HARRISON: Rosy-Cheeked Irish Girl the First New Arrival.”

Her celebrity lasted about 24 hours.

Annie Moore lived out her life in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She married Joseph Schayer, a bakery clerk who was the son of German immigrants. They had 11 children. Six of them died young. She died of heart failure in 1924 at age 50 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Calvary Cemetery in Queens, alongside six of her children.

For decades, her grave sat unmarked. There was a case of mistaken identity—researchers in the 1990s thought they’d found her in Texas. That woman’s descendants were invited to ceremonies. Irish President Mary Robinson honored her memory.

It was all wrong.

In 2006, genealogist Megan Smolenyak tracked down the real Annie Moore’s great-nephew. The actual story was less glamorous. Annie never left the Lower East Side. She lived in tenement buildings near the Fulton Fish Market. Smolenyak called it “the typical hardscrabble immigrant life.”

In 2008, 84 years after her death, a ceremony was held at Calvary Cemetery. President Obama sent a message of remembrance. A Celtic cross made of Irish blue limestone was finally placed at her grave. Today, bronze statues of Annie Moore and her brothers stand at the quayside in Cobh, Ireland and on Ellis Island itself.

Smolenyak discovered something while researching the family tree. Within two generations, Annie’s descendants had married people from different backgrounds—Irish, German, Italian, Jewish.

“I liked that her family was typically American,” Smolenyak said. “Within just a couple generations, they climbed the socioeconomic ladder and they had married people with all sorts of different backgrounds.”

Forty percent of Americans today are descended from people who passed through Ellis Island. That’s roughly 130 million people who can trace their ancestry through that facility in New York Harbor.

Between 1900 and 1914—the peak years—an average of 1,900 people passed through every single day.

Annie Moore never returned to Ireland. She lived her entire American life within a few miles of where she first stepped off the Nevada. She raised children. She buried six of them. She died at 50.

Ellis Island closed in 1954. The original wooden structure that Annie Moore entered burned down in 1897. In 1990, it reopened as the country’s primary museum on immigration.

For 82 years after her death, nobody could find Annie Moore’s grave. Now there’s a Celtic cross in Calvary Cemetery, because a genealogist wouldn’t let the case go cold.

Every January 1st, there are plenty of things to commemorate. But I like the fact that Annie Moore’s American story—and ultimately, millions of other American stories—all started on the first day of one particular year.

Here’s to the firsts from today we’ll someday celebrate, too.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, December 28: "If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I'll do it myself!" — Josephine Cochrane, widowed socialite from Shelbyville, Illinois, who received U.S. Patent No. 355,139 for her dishwashing machine on December 28, 1886, after her servants kept chipping her heirloom china and she grew tired of washing the dishes herself.

• Monday, December 29: "Meet the young stranger as he enters our city, take him by the hand... and in every way throw around him good influences, so that he may feel that he is not a stranger." — Captain Thomas Valentine Sullivan, retired sea captain and founder of America's first YMCA, which opened in Boston on December 29, 1851, providing a "home away from home" for young sailors on shore leave.

• Tuesday, December 30: "The congestion of tramways can be neutralized only by the establishment of high-speed railways — namely, elevated railways or underground railways." — Noritsugu Hayakawa, businessman who brought Tokyo its first subway on December 30, 1927, after visiting London's Underground in 1914 and becoming convinced that Tokyo needed its own underground railway to become a world-class city.

• Wednesday, December 31: "From base to dome, the giant structure was alight — a torch to usher in the newborn, a funeral pyre for the old which pierced the very heavens." — The New York Times, describing the first-ever Times Square New Year's Eve celebration on December 31, 1904, when 200,000 people gathered to watch fireworks explode from atop the newspaper's new headquarters, displacing traditional celebrations that had been held at Trinity Church.

• Thursday, January 1: "The euro is your money, it is our money. It's our future. It is a piece of Europe in our hands." — Romano Prodi, European Commission President, as euro notes and coins became reality on January 1, 2002, for 300 million Europeans across 12 countries, with fireworks erupting from Berlin to Athens as people queued at ATMs to get the first pristine euros.

• Friday, January 2: “A gift free to the world.” — Louis Daguerre, describing the daguerreotype process when the French government purchased his patent and made it publicly available. On January 2, 1839, Daguerre used his process to capture the first photograph of the Moon, marking the moment astronomers could finally capture celestial images instead of relying on hand-drawn sketches.

• Saturday, January 3: "We came looking for carbonates. We have them. We're going to chase them." — Phil Christensen, scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission, after Spirit landed on Mars on January 3, 2004 (January 4 UTC), bouncing 28 times before rolling to a stop in Gusev Crater and immediately spotting the first possible sign of water in the distance.

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Thanks for reading. Image: John Whipple, William Bond, and George Bond, The Moon, No. 37, 1851, daguerreotype made through Great Refractor Equatorial Mount Telescope, Harvard College Observatory, case size 4-½ x 3-¼ inches. The 1839 version I mentioned above was destroyed in a fire; this is the oldest existing photograph of the moon.

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10 feet up

In the 1840s, young men flooded into London from farms and villages across England. The Industrial Revolution transformed the country, and factory jobs beckoned.

But all work and no play makes Johnny a bit psychotic, and after 12-hour shifts in textile mills and drapery shops, really the only places for all these young workers to go were taverns and brothels.

George Williams was one of these workers. At age 20 he’d left the family farm for a textile job in London, and he was troubled by what he saw.

So, in 1844, he gathered 11 fellow workers and formed the Young Men’s Christian Association—a place for men to practice what was known as Muscular Christianity: discipline, selflessness, and the moral strength found through sports.

The YMCA idea was a hit. Within a few decades there were YMCAs in 45 countries with hundreds of thousands of members.

Like any growing organization, there was a new problem: Who would run all these YMCAs?

Springfield, Massachusetts

In 1885, supporters opened the School for Christian Workers in Springfield, Massachusetts—a two-year program that would teach them to run gymnasiums, lead Bible studies, and guide young men in America’s rapidly growing cities.

Imagine a mini-West Point for future YMCA leaders, which is how James Naismith comes into the story.

Raised by his uncle in rural Ontario after his parents died, Naismith was an athlete-slash-theologian who’d excelled at McGill University in Montreal. He’d earned a physical education degree and a theology degree even before enrolling at the School for Christian Workers in 1890. He was committed to the cause.

After completing the program, he was hired as faculty in 1891. One of his first tasks was deceptively tricky: Invent an indoor sport that would be interesting, easy to learn, and safe enough to play on wooden gymnasium floors.

Naismith had two weeks. Indoor football or soccer? Beginners got hurt too easily. Indoor lacrosse? Somehow, 80-mile-an-hour shots in a compressed indoor field with no safety equipment seemed like a bad idea.

“I slumped down in my chair, my head in my hands,” Naismith later wrote. “I was a thoroughly disheartened and discouraged young instructor.”

‘Duck on a rock’

Then he remembered a childhood game called “duck on a rock.” Kids would put a small stone—the “duck”—on top of a large rock, then try to knock it off by throwing stones from 10 or 15 feet away. The trick: Throwing straight and hard didn’t work. You had to arc your throw high in the air.

What if he organized a team sport with an elevated goal? On December 21, 1891, he found the school janitor, Pop Stebbins, and asked for two boxes.

Stebbins didn’t have boxes, but he found two old peach baskets. Naismith nailed them to the lower rail of the gymnasium balcony, one at each end, exactly 10 feet off the ground.

He wrote out 13 rules and posted them on a bulletin board.

“I called the boys to the gym,” Naismith recalled in a 1939 radio interview, “divided them up into teams of nine and gave them a little soccer ball. I showed them two peach baskets ... and I told them the idea was to throw the ball into the opposing team’s peach basket. I blew the whistle, and the first game of basketball began.”

The first game was chaos. “The boys began tackling, kicking and punching in the clinches. They ended up in a free-for-all in the middle of the gym floor.”

But something clicked.

‘Not an accident’

When students left for Christmas break just days later, they went to YMCAs across the country where they’d soon be working, and they taught basketball. Within a year, the game had spread throughout YMCA networks across America.

By 1893, it was international. The first collegiate game was played in 1895. The first professional league formed in 1898.

And since then—let’s just say the game has caught on.

“The invention of basketball was not an accident,” Naismith later said. “It was developed to meet a need.”

Naismith became a Presbyterian minister, earned a medical degree, and served in World War I improving the welfare of American troops.

His greatest thrill came in 1936, when he was 75 years old and basketball became an official Olympic sport at the Games in Berlin. Naismith performed the ceremonial tipoff and presented medals to the players.

He died three years later, having watched his winter distraction transform into something far beyond.

Today, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame stands in Springfield. His original handwritten rules sold at auction in 2010 for $4.3 million—a sports memorabilia record.

“I am sure that no man can derive more pleasure from money or power,” Naismith once said, “than I do from seeing a pair of basketball goals in some out of the way place.”

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, December 12: “The greatest dam in the world will soon be under construction... bringing power to millions and demonstrating engineering’s ability to harness nature for human progress.” — President Calvin Coolidge signed the Boulder Canyon Project Act on December 21, 1928, authorizing construction of what would become Hoover Dam, one of the greatest civil engineering achievements in American history.

• Monday, December 22: “Freedom and unity for all Germans!” — Celebration cry as the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin reopened on December 22, 1989, after 28 years of being blocked by the Berlin Wall, symbolizing the reunification of East and West Germany.

• Tuesday, December 23: “A magnificent Christmas present.” — William Shockley describing the December 23, 1947, demonstration of the point-contact transistor to Bell Labs executives by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. This tiny device—made of gold foil on germanium—replaced bulky vacuum tubes and launched the Information Age, making possible everything from hearing aids to computers.

• Wednesday, December 24: “Oh my God, look at that picture over there! There’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!” — William Anders of Apollo 8, who captured the iconic “Earthrise” photograph on December 24, 1968, showing Earth rising above the lunar horizon—one of the most influential environmental photographs ever taken.

• Thursday, December 25: “Victory or Death.” — Password given to Continental Army soldiers by General George Washington as he led 2,400 troops across the ice-choked Delaware River on Christmas night 1776 in a howling nor’easter, surprising and defeating Hessian forces at Trenton the next morning and reviving the American cause after months of devastating defeats.

• Friday, December 26: “Good King Wenceslas looked out, on the Feast of Stephen...” — Opening of the Christmas carol celebrating St. Stephen’s Day, also known as Boxing Day, celebrated on December 26 across Britain and the Commonwealth as a day for charitable giving, traditionally when wealthy families boxed up leftovers and gifts for their servants and tradespeople.

• Saturday, December 27: “I am going to send home a shipload of geological specimens.” — Charles Darwin, age 22, who set sail from Plymouth, England, aboard HMS Beagle on December 27, 1831, beginning a five-year voyage that would provide the observations leading to his theory of evolution by natural selection.

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It’s a Wonderful Life

In 1946, actor Jimmy Stewart looked like hell.

He was 38 years old but could pass for 50: gaunt, weathered, prematurely aged. He’d spent the last five years in the cockpit of a B-24 Liberator, flying bombing missions over Germany, watching friends die, making decisions that either saved lives or cost them.

He’d risen from private to colonel and became one of the most decorated pilots in his unit. But he’d come home with nightmares he couldn’t shake and weight he couldn’t gain back.

Acting felt pointless to him now. Before the war, Stewart had been one of Hollywood’s biggest stars—the charming everyman in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” the romantic lead in “The Philadelphia Story” (which won him an Oscar).

But that felt like someone else’s life. After what he’d seen, standing in front of a camera and pretending seemed silly. Indecent, even.

He seriously considered going home to Pennsylvania to run the family hardware store.

Then Frank Capra called. Capra—another war veteran, another man trying to figure out if movies still mattered—had a script he wanted to film, based on a short novella published during the war. It was called The Greatest Gift, and it was about a man who’d given up his dreams to help others, who felt like a failure, and who stood on a bridge on Christmas Eve wondering if anyone would miss him if he were gone.

Stewart agreed to do the film, but thought it might be his last.

On set, he struggled with things that used to be easy—remembering lines, hitting marks. His hearing was going from all those hours in loud bombers. In a scene in which his character breaks down in front of his family, Capra and crew realized they were watching Stewart’s real-life pain and what we would now call PTSD, captured on film.

Meanwhile, the film went way beyond budget thanks to script rewrites, a chaotic shooting schedule, and an obsessive quest to create realistic-looking fake snow.

Stewart and Capra persevered, and the movie—retitled “It’s a Wonderful Life”—premiered December 20, 1946—79 years ago this week—in New York City.

It bombed.

“The weakness of this picture,” wrote The New York Times, “is the sentimentality of it—its illusory concept of life.” Audiences stayed away.

They’d just survived a brutal war; maybe they wanted escapism, not a movie about a suicidal man contemplating jumping off a bridge.

The flop bankrupted Liberty Films, the independent studio Capra had founded with fellow war veteran directors; Capra would make only five more films, none successful.

But for Stewart, the result was different. His performance, even in a failed film, was undeniable. Within two years he was starring in “Rope” for Hitchcock. By 1950, he was back on Broadway in “Harvey,” then reprised it on film to great success.

He transitioned from romantic leads to darker, more complex roles—Westerns with Anthony Mann, psychological thrillers with Hitchcock. “Rear Window.” “Vertigo.” “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”

As for “It’s a Wonderful Life,” for nearly three decades, it was just a forgotten flop.

But in 1974, in what can only be described as a clerical miracle, Republic Pictures failed to renew the film’s copyright. The movie fell into the public domain; suddenly any TV station could air it for free.

So they did, especially at Christmas, when stations needed cheap programming to fill airtime, to the point that it became ubiquitous. People recorded it on VHS, families watched it together, and it became as essential to Christmas as wrapped presents and decorated trees.

In fact, I’m going to assume that you’ve seen it; it’s hard to imagine there are too many people living in the United States over the age of say, 30 or 40, who haven’t. Today it’s considered not just a Christmas classic but one of the 100 greatest American movies of all time.

All of which is a great story. But, there’s another reason why I think it resonates.

Remember the movie’s message? The inscription in the book at the end: “Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.”

That’s not just a nice sentiment. It’s scientifically true, at least according to the Harvard Grant Study, which has followed people for nearly 90 years to understand what makes humans happy and healthy.

The finding? Dr. Robert Waldinger, who runs it, put it simply: “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.”

George Bailey learned it on a bridge. Jimmy Stewart lived it coming home from war. And decades of Harvard research backs them both up.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, December 14: “Victory awaits those who have everything in order—people call that luck. Defeat is certain for those who have forgotten to take the necessary precautions in time—that is called bad luck.” — Roald Amundsen, whose five-man Norwegian expedition reached the South Pole on this day in 1911, beating Robert Falcon Scott’s British team by 33 days.

• Monday, December 15: “This is an extraordinary moment for Pisa and Italy and all of humanity. A monument that is known around the world is finally open again for everyone to see.” — Pisa Mayor Paolo Fontanelli, as the Leaning Tower of Pisa reopened on this day in 2001 after 11 years and $27 million in repairs that stabilized it without eliminating its famous lean.

• Tuesday, December 16: “There is a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity, in this last Effort of the Patriots, that I greatly admire. The People should never rise, without doing something to be remembered—something notable And striking.” — John Adams, writing in his diary on December 17, 1773, about the Boston Tea Party that occurred the night before, when colonists dumped 342 chests of British tea into Boston Harbor.

• Wednesday, December 17: “My goal in creating the show was to offer the audience an alternative to what I called ‘the mainstream trash’ that they were watching.” — Matt Groening, whose animated series The Simpsons premiered on Fox on this day in 1989 with “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire,” becoming the longest-running American primetime scripted series.

• Thursday, December 18: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” — The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, proclaimed on this day in 1865 after Secretary of State William Seward certified its ratification by three-quarters of the states.

• Friday, December 19: “Mr. Commissioner, I accept the Williamsburg Bridge from your hands and I now pronounce it to be open from this day forward to the public use.” — New York City Mayor Seth Low, speaking at the dedication ceremony on this day in 1903 for the Williamsburg Bridge, which at 7,308 feet became the world’s longest suspension bridge until 1924.

• Saturday, December 20: “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three eighths of our territory must pass to market.” — President Thomas Jefferson, in a letter written in 1802, describing why the Louisiana Purchase—which was completed on this day in 1803—was essential to the nation’s future, doubling the size of the United States for $15 million.

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Thank you so much to everyone who took me up on the Life Story Magic offers on Friday. The launch vastly exceeded my expectations. I’m sorry to have had to shut things off temporarily—purely because I had to make sure I don’t bite off more than I can chew.

• Goal Number 1: Overdeliver for the people who took advantage of the deal.

• Goal Number 2: Figure out how everyone who wants this service can get it—especially if you’d like to give it to a loved one as a Christmas or holiday gift later this month.

So, stay tuned. Over the next few days I’ll stress-test the process I’m using to manage all of this. I’m confident I’ll be back very shortly with another opportunity and offer for everyone else who is interested.

Actually, totally optional, but let’s do this. If you wanted to grab a Life Story Magic offer but the offer ran out before you could take advantage, please respond to this email.

This will help me figure out the best way to make sure everyone gets the chance.

With that … here’s today’s Big Optimism. I think it’s a good one, if I do say so myself!

The Blue Marble

Sometimes you don’t understand how fantastic a brief moment was until you can look back later. That’s part of our our theme today, and it’s a tale we can tell today by starting with the story of Harrison Schmitt.

Born in a small mining town in New Mexico in 1935, Schmitt earned his PhD from Harvard in 1964. He joined the U.S. Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Center in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he spent his days mapping the moon through telescopes and training the pilots who would actually go there.

Then, a year after he finished graduate school, NASA announced it was recruiting scientist-astronauts for the first time.

Schmitt applied. The catch? Every astronaut before him had been a military pilot, and Schmitt had never flown a plane in his life.

So at age 30, he started 53 weeks of training to fly fighter jets at Williams Air Force Base. It wasn’t easy, but he made it through.

Then, he spent years training other astronauts on lunar geology while hoping for his own shot at the moon.

Apollo 17

Originally, Schmitt looked likely to get aboard Apollo 18 or 19, but when both of those missions were canceled due to budget cuts, it seemed he’d never get the chance.

The community of lunar geologists pushed back hard, however, arguing that after sending eleven pilots to the moon, NASA should send at least one scientist. In August 1971, Schmitt was assigned to Apollo 17, replacing pilot Joe Engle.

He would be the first—and as it turned out, the only—professional scientist to walk on the moon.

Apollo 17 launched at 12:33 a.m. on December 7, 1972—the first nighttime launch in the Apollo program, with Commander Gene Cernan, command module pilot Ron Evans, and lunar module pilot Schmitt aboard for their three-day journey.

Here’s where we reach the fantastic moment, because Apollo 17’s cargo was several Hasselblad cameras with Zeiss lenses. NASA had trained all its astronauts in photography since the Gemini program, because they understood that images could communicate the majesty of spaceflight in ways that telemetry data never could.

About five hours after launch, the trajectory and the timing were perfect. December put Antarctica in full daylight, and with the sun directly behind them and Earth some 29,000 miles away, the planet appeared as a fully illuminated sphere—something no previous Apollo mission’s path had allowed.

Someone aboard—most likely Schmitt, based on interviews conducted years later—looked back, raised one of the Hasselblads, and clicked the shutter. Then the exposed film stayed sealed in the camera as the spacecraft continued toward the moon.

‘God willing … we shall return’

On December 11, Cernan and Schmitt landed in the Taurus-Littrow valley, where Schmitt spent three days collecting rock samples, including one specimen that would prove the moon once had a magnetic field.

He was so excited he sang “I Was Strolling on the Moon One Day” during one of his moonwalks.

On December 13, he and Cernan became the last humans to leave footprints on the lunar surface. Cernan’s final words:

“We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.”

On December 19, Apollo 17 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. Only then, when the film was processed, did anyone see what they’d captured. NASA released the photo without fanfare as image AS17-148-22727.

Honestly, the world needed a better name, and the one that caught on was “The Blue Marble”—which as you probably know is what the Earth looked like: a blue marble floating in the darkness of space.

To the moon and back

The photograph went viral long before we said things like “going viral,” appearing on magazine covers, posters, and textbooks. As a U.S. government work, it had no copyright restrictions—anyone could reproduce it freely; by some estimates, it became the most reproduced photographic image in history.

In the middle of a mission focused on reaching the moon, someone paused to look back—and snap a photo.

It’s remarkable that it happened so fast that we can only make the educated guess that it was Schmitt who took it—although that’s where the evidence points.

The fact that it sat undeveloped in a camera for twelve days, traveling all the way to the moon and back before anyone knew what they had, makes it even more remarkable.

Fifty-three years later, no human has traveled far enough from Earth to take another photograph like it; Apollo 17 was the last crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit.

The Blue Marble remains our most recent selfie as a species.

It was taken, we believe, by a geologist from a small mining town who learned to fly so he could see the rocks on another world, and ended up showing us our own.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• Sunday, December 7: “They regret the offensive words, the reproaches without foundation, and the reprehensible gestures which, on both sides, have marked or accompanied the sad events of this period.” — Joint Declaration of Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I, who simultaneously lifted the mutual excommunications that had divided the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches since 1054 on this day in 1965.

• Monday, December 8: “Music is the wine which inspires us to new generative processes, and I am the Bacchus …” — Ludwig van Beethoven, whose Seventh Symphony premiered in Vienna at a benefit concert for soldiers wounded at the Battle of Hanau on this day in 1813.

• Tuesday, December 9: “The world and all its peoples have won freedom from smallpox, a most devastating disease sweeping in epidemic form through many countries since earliest time, leaving death, blindness and disfigurement in its wake.” — World Health Organization declaration, certifying that smallpox had been eradicated from the globe on this day in 1979.

• Wednesday, December 10: “To those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” — Alfred Nobel’s will, which established the Nobel Prizes first awarded on this day in 1901.

• Thursday, December 11: “Autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown.” — Balfour Declaration of 1926, formalized into law when the British Parliament passed the Statute of Westminster on this day in 1931, granting Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Irish Free State, and Newfoundland full legislative independence from Britain.

• Friday, December 12: December 12: “S” — Guglielmo Marconi’s first transatlantic wireless transmission—a single letter—which was received in Newfoundland on this day in 1901 after traveling 2,200 miles from Cornwall, England.

• Saturday, December 13: “Motels opened up the American road to those who were neither rugged enough for car camping nor wealthy enough to stay in ‘real’ hotels.” — Eric Zorn, describing the Milestone Mo-Tel which opened in San Luis Obispo, California on this day in 1925, where architect Arthur Heineman coined the word “motel” when “motor hotel” wouldn’t fit on his sign.

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The whole thing was a setup.

Plessy was challenging segregation laws, and everyone involved knew it.

• The conductor had been tipped off.

• The committee organizing the protest paid for the private detective to ensure Plessy was charged with the crime they wanted to fight.

• Even the railroad was on board—not for moral reasons, but because they didn’t want to pay for extra cars to accommodate different races.

Plessy spent a night in jail and had to post $500 bail. He was convicted as planned, lost his first appeal to the state supreme court as planned, and made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court—as planned.

Then everything fell apart.

The Supreme Court voted 7 to 1 to uphold Plessy’s conviction, and enshrined the idea of “separate but equal” into U.S. constitutional precedent, paving the way for decades of Jim Crow laws and legal discrimination.

His lawyers misjudged the Supreme Court—and suffered from bad timing. Between the time Plessy was arrested and the time it reached the court, three potentially anti-discrimination justices had died, and were replaced with men who had actually served in the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Also, the reason there were only eight justices voting was that one of them had to skip the oral argument because his daughter was sick.

Bad luck, bad timing, judicial buzzsaw—and bad law.

Rosa Parks

Sixty-three years later, in the summer of 1955, a woman named Rosa Parks traveled to the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee for a two-week workshop on implementing school desegregation.

She’d been secretary of the Montgomery NAACP chapter since 1943. She’d spent years investigating cases of racial and sexual violence, trying to get justice in a system designed to deny it. It had taken Parks three attempts even just to register to vote, navigating poll taxes and literacy tests designed to humiliate.

She arrived at Highlander that summer exhausted and burned out—”tense and maybe somewhat bitter” as she later put it.

On the last day of the workshop, someone asked what she would do when she returned to Montgomery to keep up the fight.

Nothing, she replied. Montgomery was the Cradle of the Confederacy. White resistance was too high and Black people wouldn’t stick together. She promised to go back and keep working with her NAACP Youth Council, but things seemed futile. That was all she could offer.

But then, on December 1, 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus.

The boycott

Unlike Plessy’s carefully orchestrated arrest, Parks’s refusal wasn’t planned ahead of time. But E.D. Nixon and the Montgomery NAACP had been looking for the right test case for years—something Parks certainly knew. When she was arrested, Nixon saw his opportunity.

Sitting in her home later that evening, he convinced Parks—and her husband and mother, despite their fears—that she should become the plaintiff. She was 42 years old, a woman of unquestioned honesty and integrity, someone with the firm quiet spirit that would be needed for the long battle ahead.

She was convicted the next day, fined $10 plus $4 in court costs. Her appeal would eventually get tangled in Alabama state courts and go nowhere—the appellate court upheld her conviction on a technicality. But by the night of her conviction, 35,000 flyers had already been mimeographed and distributed to Black schoolchildren, telling their parents about a one-day bus boycott.

Over 95% of Black Montgomery refused to ride the buses on December 5th. That afternoon, community leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association and chose a 26-year-old minister new to town—Martin Luther King Jr.—to lead what would become a 381-day boycott.

Meanwhile, attorney Fred Gray and NAACP lawyers made a crucial strategic decision. They wouldn’t wait for Parks’s state court appeal. Instead, they filed a federal lawsuit—Browder v. Gayle—on behalf of other women who had been arrested for the same offense that year.

On June 5, 1956, a federal court ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court affirmed the decision that November.

‘Tired of giving in’

Parks wasn’t even a plaintiff in the case that actually overturned bus segregation, but she was the one whose story sparked the boycott. The woman who thought nothing would happen in Montgomery because people wouldn’t stick together had just helped lead a year-long movement where 50,000 people walked to work, organized carpools, held mass meetings at churches, and sustained each other through economic hardship and threats and violence.

Years later, she reflected on that day:

“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then.

I was 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

The personal cost was enormous. Parks lost her job at the Montgomery Fair department store. Her husband Raymond was fired from his barbershop job when his boss forbade him to talk about the case. They faced death threats and financial ruin. Eventually they left Montgomery for Detroit, where Parks would spend decades continuing her activism until her death in 2005.

Plessy and Parks were both brave, strategic and justified. But Plessy walked into a judicial buzzsaw essentially alone. Parks walked with a community ready to walk with her.

She had 50,000 people alongside her because leaders had spent years organizing, registering voters, investigating injustices, and building the infrastructure that could sustain a year-long boycott.

Walk boldly and for the right cause. And when you see people doing that, walk with them.

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7 more optimistic things from this week

• Sunday, November 30: “I’m never pleased with anything, I’m a perfectionist, it’s part of who I am.” — Michael Jackson, whose “Thriller” was released on November 30, 1982. It became the best-selling album of all time with over 67 million copies sold worldwide, won 8 Grammy Awards, and broke racial barriers on MTV.

• Monday, December 1: “When I’m through, about everybody will have one.” — Henry Ford. On December 1, 1913, Henry Ford installed the first moving assembly line for mass production of automobiles at his Highland Park plant. The innovation reduced the time to build a Model T from more than 12 hours to just 93 minutes.

• Tuesday, December 2: “I wanted to leave a small mark in the world.” — Barney Clark. On December 2, 1982, retired dentist Barney Clark became the first person to receive a permanent artificial heart—the Jarvik-7—at the University of Utah Medical Center. Though he lived only 112 days, his courageous decision to volunteer for the experimental procedure advanced cardiac medicine and paved the way for modern artificial hearts and ventricular assist devices.

• Wednesday, December 3: “Merry Christmas” — Neil Papworth. On December 3, 1992, 22-year-old engineer Papworth sent the first SMS text message from a computer to Richard Jarvis’s mobile phone on the Vodafone network. That simple “Merry Christmas” launched a communication revolution—today, over 23 billion text messages are sent every day worldwide.

• Thursday, December 4: “The Observer is Impartial” — The Observer’s founding principle. On December 4, 1791, the first edition of The Observer was published in Britain, making it the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper. Still publishing today after more than 230 years, it set the precedent for Sunday journalism and provided news on a day when other papers didn’t publish.

• Friday, December 5: “Love of learning is the guide of life.” — Phi Beta Kappa motto. On December 5, 1776—in the midst of the Revolutionary War—five students at the College of William & Mary gathered at Raleigh’s Tavern in Williamsburg, Virginia to found Phi Beta Kappa, America’s first academic honor society.

• Saturday, December 6: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” — 13th Amendment, Section 1. On December 6, 1865, Georgia became the 27th state to ratify the 13th Amendment, reaching the three-quarters majority needed to abolish slavery in the United States.

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Bonus: We get comments again, and I have some ideas on how to take advantage of some of the other features on Substack. Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest ones, and that’s what I think I’m going for here.

William and Anne

“Item I gyve unto my wief my second best bed wth the furniture.”

— William Shakespeare’s will, 1616

She was 26, pregnant, and from a respectable family. He was 18—still legally a minor in Elizabethan England—and his family had fallen on hard times.

On November 28, 1582, they paid a 40-pound bond for their marriage license in Stratford-upon-Avon. The ceremony needed to happen quickly. She was three months along, and Advent was coming. Church rules forbade marriages during Advent, which started December 2nd. The usual three readings of the banns were waived. Just one would do.

Her name was Anne Hathaway. His was William Shakespeare.

The historical record is thin: legal documents, a few mentions, fragments. No letters between them survive, no diary entries. For most of their marriage, we’re left with speculation, historians and novelists filling in the blanks.

But one thing we’re pretty sure of: On the day of their marriage 443 years ago this week, she was the catch, not him.

Anne came from a solid yeoman farming family in Shottery, just outside Stratford. Her father left her money in his will. She was eight years older than William, which was unusual. William Shakespeare, meanwhile, was the son of John Shakespeare, whose fortunes had declined dramatically. An 18-year-old from a struggling family wasn’t exactly a prize catch.

Some historians have called it a shotgun wedding—Anne’s family forcing the marriage once she got pregnant. Maybe young William felt trapped, setting up decades of resentment.

The evidence? After their first daughter Susanna was born in May 1583, Anne gave birth to twins in February 1585—Hamnet and Judith. Shortly after, William left for London. He spent the next two decades there, building his career as an actor and playwright, while Anne stayed in Stratford raising their children.

They lived apart for twenty years. When Shakespeare died in 1616, he left Anne his “second best bed.” One line. Centuries of scholars have pointed to this as proof the marriage was cold.

We should be careful about filling in blanks with assumptions.

Scholar Germaine Greer argues the opposite. The age difference wasn’t evidence that Anne trapped him, but that he pursued her. Women like Anne—eldest daughters who’d lost parents—often stayed home to care for younger siblings and married later. Pre-marital pregnancy wasn’t scandalous in Elizabethan England. Handfasting—a binding pre-marriage ceremony where couples clasped hands, sometimes tied together with ribbon, and made promises to each other—was legally recognized, and pregnancy frequently came before the formal church wedding.

The “second best bed”? The best bed was reserved for guests. The second-best bed was the marriage bed. Shakespeare was leaving her the bed they’d shared.

They did lose a child. In August 1596, their son Hamnet died at age eleven. Four years later, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. The names were interchangeable in that era. Scholars have spent centuries debating whether the play contains Shakespeare’s grief.

In King John, written around the time Hamnet died, Shakespeare has a mother lament her dead son: “Grief fills the room up of my absent child, / Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me.”

Irish novelist Maggie O’Farrell was fascinated by how little attention Hamnet received in Shakespeare biographies. In 2020, she published Hamnet, imagining the boy’s death and its impact on his family. O’Farrell doesn’t even name Shakespeare in the novel. When Hamnet dies, Anne (called Agnes) bears the immediate weight of the grief. Years later, she watches her husband perform in a play named after their dead son.

One thing I’ve learned: You can never know what’s going on in somebody else’s marriage. It’s almost the opposite of Tolstoy: All unhappy marriages are alike, but every loving marriage is loving in its own way.

In 2025, a newly analyzed 17th-century letter overturned centuries of assumptions. The letter, addressed to “Good Mrs Shakspaire,” suggests the couple lived together in London on Trinity Lane between 1600 and 1610.

When Shakespeare retired from the theater around 1613, he didn’t stay in London. He moved back to Stratford. Back to Anne. He lived with her for the last three years of his life.

After Shakespeare died in 1616, Anne lived seven more years. They’re buried side by side in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Four hundred forty-three years after that quick marriage in November 1582, we’re left with fragments. They stayed married for 34 years. He came home to her. They’re buried together.

Finding the right person to be with matters. Even if we might never know all the details, it feels better to conclude that William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway were exactly right, for each other.

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7 more optimistic things from this week

• Sunday, November 23: “Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.” — Charles Darwin, reflecting years later on the initial reception of his work On the Origin of Species on this day in 1859. All 1,250 copies selling out immediately; Darwin had delayed publishing for 20 years, calling it “like confessing a murder.”

• Monday, November 24: “Here is the letter that destroyed my universe.” — Astronomer Harlow Shapley, after receiving Edwin Hubble’s letter with proof that the Andromeda “nebula” was actually a separate galaxy. Hubble’s discovery was made public this day in 1924, proving that the Milky Way was just one of countless galaxies and expanding the known universe by at least a million times.

• Tuesday, November 25: “The boldest dreams of my life have now been fulfilled.” — Albert Einstein, in a letter to his friend Michele Besso shortly after presenting the final form of his General Theory of Relativity to the Prussian Academy of Sciences on this day in 1915.

• Wednesday, November 26: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” — Captain Renault, played by Claude Rains in Casablanca, which premiered on this day in 1942. The film became one of Hollywood’s most-revered classics, winning three Academy Awards including Best Picture.

• Thursday, November 27: “We did not dare dream its success would be so great.” — Advertisement from Macy’s the day after the first Macy’s Christmas Parade (later renamed Thanksgiving Day Parade) on this day in 1924. Over 250,000 spectators lined the route, and Macy’s immediately announced it would become an annual tradition.

• Friday, November 28: “We are tired of having a ‘sphere’ doled out to us, and of being told that anything outside that sphere is ‘unwomanly.’” — Kate Sheppard, leader of New Zealand’s suffrage movement. On this day in 1893, women in New Zealand became the first country in the world where women could vote in parliamentary elections. About 90,290 women cast their votes—an 82% turnout.

• Saturday, November 29: “We wanted something that was simple enough that any drunk could play.” — Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari, on the creation of Pong, the first commercially successful video game, which was released on this day in 1972.

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