CTRL+Z: Rewritten

On June 11th, 1971, Arthur Sulzberger sat in the publisher's office at the New York Times with 7,000 pages of a top secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam War, copied without permission by a former analyst named Daniel...

On July 27th, 1433, the officers of the biggest navy on earth lined up in a palace courtyard in Beijing to receive robes and paper money from Emperor Xuande. They had been gone 2 and a half years, as far as the Persian...

On January 1st, 1962, the Beatles drove 10 hours through snow to a Decca studio in West Hampstead, borrowed the company's amplifiers, and played 15 songs in an hour with Pete Best on drums. Five weeks later, on February...

On June 8th, 1528, Pope Clement VII signed a decretal commission — a document giving two cardinals the power to end Henry VIII's marriage on English soil, with no appeal to anyone — and then ordered it shown to the king...

On April 28th, 1967, Muhammad Ali stood in a line of 46 men on the third floor of a Houston induction center while Lieutenant Steven Dunkley read the rule: take one step forward when your name is called, and the step...

SPOILER ALERT: This episode discusses the endings of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Lost, Parks and Recreation, Mad Men, The Leftovers, and Ozark. On June 10th, 2007, David Chase ended The Sopranos with a family eating...

On May 9th, 1933, guards climbed a scaffold in the lobby of the RCA Building and brought Diego Rivera down mid-brushstroke. His fresco for Rockefeller Center held a portrait of Lenin, and Rivera had refused Nelson...

On January 25th, 1993, Sears killed the most famous catalog in American history, and Wall Street applauded. The Big Book was losing up to 175 million dollars a year, and Arthur Martinez, 5 months into the job, chose to...

In February of 1942, the ships carrying Australia's best soldiers were in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and Winston Churchill turned them around without asking. Singapore had surrendered 7 days earlier. Darwin had...

In December of 1135, Henry the First of England died in Normandy, and the man best positioned to take his throne had already sworn twice not to. Henry had made every baron in his kingdom kneel and lay a hand on a chest...

In 1980, the most respected executive in America needed a successor. Reginald Jones ran General Electric, a company of 400,000 employees and the last original member of the Dow, and he chose by calling each finalist...

4th of July Episode! In 1776, one British general had George Washington cornered. Washington's army was trapped on a strip of high ground in Brooklyn, its back to a river with no boats, beaten and out of room. General...

In 1991, the men around Mikhail Gorbachev spent two years begging him to send in the army and hold the Soviet Union together. He had already ordered three crackdowns that left unarmed civilians dead, but when it came...

In 1981, a study Kodak paid for and signed told the company that digital photography would kill film within a decade. Kodak read its own warning and used it to squeeze a few more years out of film instead. The company...

In 216 BC, at a place in southern Italy called Cannae, Hannibal destroyed the largest army Rome had ever raised, tens of thousands killed in a single afternoon. With the capital nearly defenseless, he chose not to march...