Documents That Changed the World

Words define a language, and in turn languages help to define cultures and societies. And people define words, as the last man who tried to define them all himself knew, in the process trying also to define and distinguish his developing nation

800 years ago, an Italian mathematician and world traveler brought the gift of digits to Europe, from India, through Arabia, and taught the West how to count, and calculate, and figure it all out

Vote for the person you want, somebody in charge counts ‘em up and then we find out the winner. As if. The many ways that can go wrong, and the importance of good design done well but somebody who knows how

When the market started to crash, the ticker, reliable source of up-to-the-second information, fell behind, and all of a sudden not knowing what you didn't know was worse than knowing, and the spiral went down and down from there

Two Thanksgivings! Twice the turkey, twice the parades, twice the football? Nope, but for a few years the nation was split by a presidential proclamation that didn't quite work as intended

How do you read words that aren't there? The towering idea of the Declaration of Independence, the passage on slavery deleted before its adoption, and the hole that silence has left behind

Encyclopedias have changed, due to the one you know - but actually the one you probably don't, and the ways in which we know the things we know are changing right along with them

The Richter Scale...isn't used any more, and the man who created it had a mind more sensitive to the movements of the earth than the subtleties of society

Hungry yet? The cookbook, and the woman, who standardized recipes and encouraged us all to think about food as science and art

Name after name, row after row, the wall, and the things we bring to it, including ourselves, all of which help us remember and reconcile

How to know when to believe a research study, drawing the line between real and spurious, and how a "random" line in a book defines the way we understand the world

Bishop James Ussher, the search for the beginning of the universe, and the date (and time) of Creation, making the most of the tools at hand

One of the greatest legacies, and worst-written wills of all times, though almost completely not what the author had in mind; wills, their history and how to (almost always) get the last word

O say do you know...the story behind the Star-Spangled Banner? It took off fast, then slowly, and has stood the test of time while still, and always, becoming

The first scholarly journal, at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution, and helping to give birth to the way we write and think about scholarship and investigation...and now it's all changing again

It's just "a piece of paper," except it's not. The story of Catherine Elizabeth Benson Brewer, the first woman to receive a diploma, and how we recognize achievement, yesterday and today (written/researched/recorded by Kelsey Gibbons)

I have in my hand a list...of 57 Communists in the State Department. Or was it 205? Or 81? Or was there a list at all? How documents get their power, from us, even if they don't exist

One of the oldest works of literature we know, a hymn written by Enheduanna, perhaps the first known named author, in the Sumerian city of Ur, a plea for help that doesn't feel out of place 4300 years later

Why the Popes ruled Italy: one of the greatest gifts in history, as a result of one of the greatest forgery in history, the art of making a document lie, and figuring out what's real and what's not

The secret decoding of a secret message: how Britain found out that Germany wanted Mexico to attack America to keep them out of World War I, and the spectacular backfire that resulted (researched/produced by Jill Fenno)

The black box that reveals, not conceals: how flight recorders were developed, how they work, how they're used, what happens to the information, and how they're related to the 8-track tape

That poster--isn't what you think. She's not Rosie the Riveter, and the lives she's led, as, feminist icon, symbol of wartime solidarity, cultural nostalgia touchstone, are almost all entirely wrong

Seward's Folly, enabled by a single piece of paper exchanged for $7.2 million, adding vast new territories to the US, and telling us about how money moves, and how people feel about how that's changing (researched/produced/co-written by Andrew Kyrios)

486 frames, likely the most scrutinized film of all time, dissected, debated, debunked, and the harbinger of things to come as events are increasingly documented and shared

Undoubtedly one of the great document stories of all time, which help us to think about permanence, durability, and what can happen when media outlast messages