On May 8, 1945, the morning Europe was celebrating VE Day, French colonial forces massacred thousands of Algerian Muslims who had gathered in Sétif to mark the same Allied victory. The story of what happened, why it was suppressed for decades, and how it set the stage for Algeria's War of Independence is one of the most consequential chapters of the twentieth century, and one of the least known. Rich explores the multiple truths that coexist in this story: liberation and colonial violence, a celebrated hero and an authorized massacre, a repression designed to prevent revolution that instead made it inevitable.

On May 7, 1915, the same afternoon the Lusitania was sinking in the Atlantic, Japan delivered an ultimatum to China that would ignite a century of nationalist fury and plant the ideological seeds of the modern Chinese state. Richard Backus explores the Twenty-One Demands: the buried diplomatic crisis that explains why Asia looks the way it does today. Japan was playing by the rules the West had written. China had no allies and no time. And no one was watching.

On May 6, 2010, nearly a trillion dollars vanished from Wall Street in thirty-six minutes then came back. The Flash Crash was triggered not by fraud or panic, but by a routine hedge meeting a market structure too precarious to absorb it. Richard Backus explores who was really responsible, what the investigation revealed, and why the question the Flash Crash raised in 2010 is more urgent today than it was then.