IN 1903….a woman born to a formerly enslaved mother….did something no woman of any race had done before in America….her name was Maggie Lena Walker…..and she chartered a bank in Richmond, Virginia called the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank….she became the first woman, Black or White to serve as president of a chartered bank in the United States….she built a bank inside Jackson Ward….a neighborhood so prosperous it earned the name The Harlem of the South….Black doctors, lawyers and shop owners lined its streets and the bank helped hundreds of families buy their first homes….she once said, “Every dollar deposited a Black bank is a dollar working for Black freedom”…..the bank survived the Great Depression when many others failed merging decades later into what is still one of the oldest Black-owned banks in the country…..Jackson Ward later lost most of its footprint to a highway built straight through its heart in the 1950’s…..but the bank Maggie Lena Walker founded is still open today…..more than 120-years later.

PRINCESS LEONOR OF SPAIN….is 20-years-old…..speaks eight languages….is in the military service…..and will become Spain’s reigning Queen….in 105-years.

HERMANN GÖRING…..came to a Paris museum 21 times to pick out stolen painting for himself….a small, bespectacled French curator watched every visit and categorized every painting…..and he never knew….Rose Valland had spent 9 years at the Jeu de Paume as an unpaid volunteer before the Nazis arrived and they underestimated her completely….she understood German….she listened….she took notes….she passed them to the Resistance….her records helped recover an estimated 60,000 pieces of stolen artwork after the war….she did it by being the one person….nobody noticed.

IN 1284…..master mason Gerhard von Rile faced ruin….he had spent three decades designing Cologne Cathedral….but political enemies and cost overruns threatened to strip him of his life’s work….the city council gave him a final deadline….and then would hand the project over to his rival…..Arnold von Westfalen….rather then see his cathedral finished by another….Gerhard made a shocking choice….he began secretly sabotaging his own construction to stop anyone who followed.

QUEEN ANNE….endured 17 pregnancies and out lived every child….at least 12 ended in miscarriage or stillbirth….of the five babies born alive, four died before the age of two….her only child to survive infancy….Prince William died at age 11….his death left Britian without a Protestant heir and triggered a succession crisis…..when Anne died childless….the crown passed to George I…..ending the Stuart dynasty.

HISTORY 101…..

THE U.S. GOVERNMENT….legally sterilized tens of thousands of its own citizens without their consent….from the 1900’s through the 1970’s over 60,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized under state eugenics laws….targeting the poor, disabled and minorities….in Buck vs Bell….the Supreme Court ruled forced sterilization constitutional in 1927…..justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote….. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough”…..California alone sterilized over 20,000 people…..Nazi Germany later cited American eugenics laws as a legal model for their own program…..Buck vs Bell has never been formally overturned….it still remains a valid U.S. law today….did you know this?

IN JULY 1917……the soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, 24th U.S. Infantry Regiment arrived in Houston, Texas….they were Black men in the uniform of the United States Army….part of the storied Buffalo Soldiers……sent to guard the construction of a military camp as their country fought a world war “to make the world safe for democracy”….but Houston had no democracy for them…..from the day they arrived, the soldiers faced relentless abuse….forced to the back of streetcars, barred from public spaces, subjected to racial slurs by white workers, and singled out for brutal harassment by the all-white Houston police…..these were men trained to fight for their country, being treated as less than human in it….on August 23, 1917, it came to a head….Houston police beat and arrested a Black woman…..then beat and shot at Corporal Charles Baltimore…..a Black military policeman…..when he came to ask about her arrest….a rumor reached the camp that Baltimore had been killed…..along with word that a white mob was marching on them…..around 150 soldiers took up their rifles and marched on the city…..in the roughly two hours of violence that followed, about twenty people were killed….four Black soldiers and some fifteen white residents, including several policemen…..it remains the only riot of its era in which more white people died than Black….because this time, the men being terrorized were armed, trained soldiers who fought back….the retribution was unlike anything the country had ever done….the Army held the largest murder trial and the largest court-martial in United States history….in the end, nineteen Black soldiers were executed by hanging….the first thirteen were hanged in secret at dawn on December 11, 1917…..before any appeal could be filed ……and buried in graves marked only with numbers, one through thirteen…..witnesses said the men sang together as they walked to the gallows…..dozens more were sentenced to life in prison…..just weeks before this, white mobs in East St. Louis had slaughtered dozens of Black men, women, and children and burned their neighborhoods to the ground…..not one white person was ever executed for it….that same year, across the country, Black Americans were being lynched with total impunity…..and no white killer faced the gallows…..but when Black soldiers fought back against the violence done to them….the United States government hanged nineteen of them….the outcry was so great that President Woodrow Wilson was forced to change the Army’s rules…..requiring that no soldier could ever again be executed without review by the War Department and the President himself….it came too late for the men of the 24th.

AS A TEENAGER……Louis Vuitton left his village and began walking 470 kilometers to Paris….the journey took over two years because he survived taking odd jobs along the way….he arrived at 16 and apprenticed to a trunk maker for 17 years….Vuitton later became a personal packer to Empress Eugénie in 1854…..he opened his own shop…..four years later he created a flat, waterproof trunk that could be stacked…..and that was the foundation of a global luxury empire.

THE NUCLEAR MELTDOWN….in 1959, the Sodium Reactor Experiment in the Santa Susana Mountains above Los Angeles….suffered a partial meltdown that released radioactive gases into the atmosphere for weeks….yet the public wouldn’t learn the truth for decades…..the reactor was designed to test liquid sodium cooling technology….it had been operating since 1957….what planners hadn’t anticipated was how the reactor’s innovative design would prove fatally flawed when put to the ultimate test.

OPERATION ACOUSTIC KITTY…..the CIA’s cat-spy experiment began in 1964…..when scientists wired a cat with a microphone…to eavesdrop on Soviet agents…..the first field test failed when the cat wandered off mid-mission….after spending $20,000…..the program ended in 1967….it became history’s most famous failed gadget.