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Same Day, Different Century
By Zach IpsenHistory
Same Day, Different Century episodes
- FDR Signs the Social Security Act
On August 14, 1935, Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act in the Cabinet Room of the White House. The photograph taken that afternoon has been treated ever since as the birth of American social insurance. The reality is more complicated. The idea was already fifty years old, Germany and Britain had run versions of it for decades, and most of the important fights had already been lost. A retired California doctor, a Louisiana senator, and a hostile Supreme Court all shaped what the law became and what it left out.
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10 min - The Fall of Tenochtitlan
On August 13, 1521, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan fell after months of siege, and its young ruler Cuauhtémoc was captured fleeing across the lake by canoe. The island city was one of the largest in the world, fed by an aqueduct that had been cut three months earlier. Hernán Cortés led roughly a thousand Spaniards, but the army around them was overwhelmingly Nahua, drawn from states with their own reasons to see the Mexica fall.
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11 min - The First Antiseptic Surgery
On August 12, 1865, Glasgow surgeon Joseph Lister dressed an eleven-year-old boy's shattered leg with carbolic acid instead of reaching for the saw. In Lister's ward, close to half of all amputation patients died of infection, and a bone that broke through the skin was usually an argument for amputation. Drawing on Louis Pasteur's work and a sewage disinfectant used on English fields, Lister tested one idea: that wound infection has a living, external cause, and can therefore be blocked.
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12 min - The Maya Calendar's Zero Date
On August 11, 3114 BC, the Maya Long Count calendar begins counting days, from a starting point no one witnessed and no one remembered. Scribes reasoned that morning backward into a prehistory with no cities and no writing, then built a system that could name any day across five thousand years without repeating.
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11 min - Ruth Bader Ginsburg Joins the Supreme Court
On August 10, 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was sworn in as the 107th justice of the United States Supreme Court. She arrived as a consensus choice, confirmed 96 to 3, backed by Republicans who read her judicial record as restrained and viewed warily by some on the left. Thirty-four years earlier, she had graduated at the top of her Columbia Law class.
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10 min - Construction on the Dome of Florence Cathedral Begins
On August 7, 1420, work began on the dome of Florence Cathedral, and no one yet knew how to finish it. For decades the crossing had stood open to the sky, one hundred and forty feet across, because the timber framework such a vault required was beyond what the city could buy or support. Filippo Brunelleschi, a goldsmith who had lost the Baptistery doors competition to Lorenzo Ghiberti, proposed raising it with no centering at all. What rose above Florence is still the largest brick dome ever built.
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10 min - Hiroshima: The First Atomic Bomb
On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 dropped the first atomic bomb ever used in war on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Just after eight that morning, the telegraph and radio lines to a city of several hundred thousand people went dead, and no one in the capital could say why.
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12 min - William Wallace is Captured
On August 5, 1305, William Wallace was seized near Glasgow and handed over to the English crown. Edward I had spent nine years trying to hold Scotland, and by 1304 he had bought peace from nearly every Scottish noble with pardons, restored lands, and a way home. Wallace alone was named in the terms only to be excluded from them. This episode follows him from the bridge at Stirling to Westminster Hall, where he answered a charge of treason with a question about allegiance that no law has ever fully settled.
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10 min - George Washington Becomes a Master Mason
On August 4, 1753, a twenty-one-year-old George Washington was raised to the degree of Master Mason in a small, unchartered lodge in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He was a backcountry surveyor with a dead father, a dead half-brother, and a militia commission he had never used in the field. Three lines in a ledger record his three degrees, and almost nothing else survives.
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10 min - Columbus Sets Sail
On August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus and about ninety men set sail, carrying a chart with a number on it that was wrong. Portugal's experts had rejected his plan. So had Castile's. Their objection was never the shape of the Earth, which every educated person involved knew was round. It was the width of the ocean.
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12 min
About Same Day, Different Century
From the publisher's feed
History didn't happen in textbooks, it happened on days just like today. Same Day, Different Century uncovers one remarkable true story from this exact date in history, every weekday.