This course will describe how seemingly “everyday people” and innocuous things almost and sometimes did alter the modern world. Much like a character in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, people in positions of relatively little consequence with unremarkable backgrounds have suddenly been thrust into the center of events with potentially enormous consequences, often without realizing it. A cab driver in 1930s New York, a Lieutenant Colonel in the Soviet Union’s vast defense establishment, and the wife of a British merchant ship’s chief engineer all may have unknowingly changed history - or come very close. This course will describe those and other individual's actions and both their real and potential consequences.
