Nursery

Expectation: Richard Nixon, who built his entire political career prosecuting suspected communists — the HUAC investigations, the Alger Hiss case, the red-baiting campaigns of the 1950s — wa...

Reversal: His unimpeachable anti-communist credentials were precisely what made the opening possible: any Democrat would be accused of appeasement, any moderate Republican of naivety, but...

Expectation: Measuring the age of the Earth was a problem about the deep past; the hard parts would be finding rocks old enough and instruments fine enough.

Reversal: The present kept spoiling the measurement. Industrial lead — from the gasoline additive Thomas Midgley invented — contaminated every sample, forcing Patterson to build the clean...

Expectation: The Soviet Constitution of 1936 — internationally praised as one of the most progressive democratic documents ever written, guaranteeing freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and...

Reversal: Stalin adopted it at the precise opening of the Great Purge, during which hundreds of thousands of people guaranteed those freedoms were shot and millions were sent to the Gulag...

Expectation: The physician who proved that disinfected hands prevent fatal infection would be embraced by medicine — and, of all people, protected by his own discovery.

Reversal: Rejected by the profession he tried to save from itself, Semmelweis died in an asylum of wound sepsis — the same septic process whose prevention he had demonstrated eighteen yea...