History Comes Alive: Surprising Stories & Birthdays from This Day in the Past

On March twenty-ninth, 1974, a group of farmers in China were digging a well when their shovels hit something hard. It was the head of a soldier, made of terracotta clay. They had no idea they had just stumbled upon one of the greatest archaeological finds of the twentieth century. An entire army, buried for over two thousand years, silent and waiting. We were just talking about March twenty-sixth, and how a single day can give us both the birth of a poet like Robert Frost and the first biological weapon test. Well, March twenty-ninth has that same kind of incredible, almost chaotic, range. Because on this same day, eighty-eight years before those farmers found that clay head, an Atlanta pharmacist named John Pemberton was stirring a kettle in his backyard.

It was 1886, and he was perfecting a new formula for a nerve tonic. He called it Coca-Cola. Think about that. On one March twenty-ninth, we unearth an ancient, buried empire. On another, we create the recipe for a new, liquid one. An empire of taste that would conquer the entire globe. And the day isn’t done! Because on March twenty-ninth, 1918, a baby boy named Sam Walton was born. The founder of Walmart. So on the same calendar date, you get the man who created one of the world's most desired products, and the man who would create the world's most dominant system for selling… well, for selling everything.

Including, of course, oceans of Coca-Cola. You just can’t make this stuff up! Here’s the turn. Looking back, we see these as separate stories—archaeology, business, biography. But they’re not. They are all about the stunning scale of human ambition. Emperor Qin Shi Huang wanted an army to protect him in the afterlife, so he had one built from the earth itself. John Pemberton wanted to create a drink, and he ended up creating a global identity. Sam Walton wanted to build a store, and he ended up rewiring the entire planet’s supply chain. What the retrospective shows us is that history isn't just a series of things that happened.

It's a record of things that were willed into existence. The farmers didn't will that army into being, but its discovery was an event that forced us to completely recalibrate our sense of the past. Its scale was unimaginable until it was right there in front of us. That’s what this day is about. The past isn’t just behind us. Sometimes, it’s right underneath our feet, just waiting for a shovel. And the future is in a kettle, just waiting for the right ingredients.