The two men met on the shores of the Hudson River in Weehawken, New Jersey at dawn on July 11, 1804. At the turn, Hamilton shot first and deliberately put his shot above Burr’s head. Burr, with all the time in the world to decide his next actions, took deliberate aim and put his shot directly into Hamilton.

Two bicycle mechanics who never attended college, or even obtained a high school diploma, would reinvent the science of aviation and aerodynamics on their own. As innovative as ever, they built a miniature wind tunnel in a spare room of their bike shop. And field-tested their designs on the wind-strewn beaches of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and the cow-dotted fields in Huffman Prairie, Ohio.

For thirteen days in October of 1962, the United States and Russia played a game of brinkmanship that brought the entire globe to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. Declassified recordings of Kennedy’s security council, and later interviews with Nikita Khrushchev, revealed just how close the world’s superpowers came to a global nuclear confrontation.

Napoleon was well into planning an invasion of Britain, and sent an expeditionary force of 40,000 to put down a revolution in Santo Domingo, led by Toussaint Louverture. Once that was quickly done, they would fortify a military presence in New Orleans, and set up France to be a colonial power in North America.