How did modern medicine become modern? It was thanks, in part, to a renegade doctor who pushed the boundaries of experimentation - and ethics. And it all began with a bang, from the barrel of a shotgun.

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World War I was known as the War to End All Wars due to its scale and loss of life. At the height of the fighting, when American soldiers on the front lines longed for home, an unlikely beacon of hope arrived.

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In 1605, a plot to kill the King of England was underway, and the man who attempted it, along with his name, would go down in infamy.

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What if a seemingly unremarkable choice could have prevented one of the most infamous disasters of all time?

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Adolf Hitler's rise to power and the devastation that followed in his wake was hardly inevitable. In fact, if not for a single split-second decision by a woman you've probably never heard of, we might not know the name Hitler at all.

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Mobsters, shootouts, and petal-to-the-metal police chases. This is prohibition-era America – a time when a group of adrenaline-fueled outlaws and their need for speed paved the way for a modern American pastime.

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During the Gilded Age in New York City, the horrors of mental health care are exposed in explosive fashion, forever changing the way stories are uncovered.

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Why do Americans measure things in inches and pounds while the rest of the world uses centimeters and kilograms? The answer becomes clear when George Washington and Thomas Jefferson’s vision for the future clashes with a band of marauding pirates.

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New York City in the mid 1800s was run by violent gangs, corrupt politicians, and grifting opportunists who operated with no fear of punishment. It was like a powder keg ready to blow, and all it took to light the fuse, and change the future of law enforcement, was a performance of Shakespeare.

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If not for inventor Thomas Edison's iron grip over the nascent film industry, and a few defiant trailblazers, movies as we know them might have never come to be.

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