On May 9th, 1933, guards climbed a scaffold in the lobby of the RCA Building and brought Diego Rivera down mid-brushstroke. His fresco for Rockefeller Center held a portrait of Lenin, and Rivera had refused Nelson Rockefeller's written request to paint it out. The wall got a canvas drape, and 9 months later, workmen chiseled 63 feet of plaster into powder near midnight.

Buried in Rivera's refusal letter sat a counteroffer almost nobody remembers. He would trade the mural's nightclub scene for Abraham Lincoln, standing with John Brown, Nat Turner, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Lenin on one side, Lincoln on the other. Nelson, 24 years old, said no.

What if he'd said yes?

This week we hit CTRL+Z on May 8th, 1933, and follow the ripple to today: a finished fresco drawing Depression crowds past a communist in a capitalist lobby, a congressman waving photographs of the wall on the House floor, a velvet curtain going up in the McCarthy years and coming down for a funeral, and delegates at the 1964 Republican convention booing the man who kept it. Rockefeller Center destroyed the painting, hired another artist, and put Lincoln on that wall anyway. The mural Rivera lost became the most famous artwork America ever destroyed, and the version that survives hangs in an office lobby where tourists walk past it on the way to the elevator.

On January 25th, 1993, Sears killed the most famous catalog in American history, and Wall Street applauded. The Big Book was losing up to 175 million dollars a year, and Arthur Martinez, 5 months into the job, chose to eliminate it rather than shrink it. 113 stores closed. 50,000 jobs vanished. The last telephone order came in on May 27th.

Two weeks before the announcement, in White Plains, New York, a company called Prodigy passed 2 million subscribers and became the largest online service in America. It sold merchandise on a screen, years before the web. Sears owned half of it.

What if Martinez had connected them?

This week we hit CTRL+Z on January 25th, 1993, and follow the ripple to today: catalog buyers rebuilding an online store item by item, an electronic Wish Book selling Sega Genesis consoles at midnight, Jeff Bezos choosing books because a 100-year-old competitor already sells everything else, and a dot-com crash that kills every internet store except the ones sitting on real warehouses. Sears spent a century shipping goods to people who couldn't reach a store, built the screen that came next, and dismantled the machine 18 months before the future needed it.

In February of 1942, the ships carrying Australia's best soldiers were in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and Winston Churchill turned them around without asking. Singapore had surrendered 7 days earlier. Darwin had been bombed 3 days earlier. Churchill cabled Prime Minister John Curtin that the 7th Division was going to Burma, that some ships lacked the fuel to come home, and that the President of the United States agreed.

Curtin, 4 months into the job, said no. 4 times.

Every Australian prime minister before him had given London what it asked for. The convoy turned south, the men came home, and they held the Kokoda Track and won at Milne Bay, the first clear defeat of the Japanese army on land in the entire war.

What if he'd said yes?

This week we hit CTRL+Z on February 22nd, 1942, and follow the ripple to today: 5,000 Australians walking 900 miles out of a lost Burma, teenage militia holding a mountain track alone, a division stranded in Ceylon while its country waits, and a nation that signs the same American treaty in 1951 but signs it as a follower instead of a partner. Australia came within one midnight cable of staying a colony in its own head, and the refusal is where the modern country began.