The 23-year-old religious and spiritual leader of Tibet gets an invitation from the occupying Chinese to come to a dance performance. Without bodyguards. Sensing a trap, he flees on foot over the Himalayas to India, where he remains in exile.

He's a giant of silent comedies, in more ways than one. Hollywood's first million-dollar star is a baby-faced man-mountain with the grace of a dancer. But a sensational rape and manslaughter case has derailed his life and career.

A century before the COVID-19 coronavirus, the United States, like all combatants in the Great War, wants to keep the exploding flu crisis quiet to protect morale and prevent the enemy from seeing weakness. Sound familiar? | (Correction: An earlier version of this episode contained an error. Some 675,000 AIDS deaths occurred in the United States.)

As an 18-year-old, Tracy Sims was the leader of civil rights protests that forced San Francisco hotels to end hiring discrimination. Now Tamam Tracy Moncur, the retired schoolteacher remembers a time when "the whole country was on fire for civil rights."

"That's the way it is," says the Most Trusted Man in America — for the last time, as he retires from anchoring the CBS Evening News. It's like a presidential changeover.

In a college gym in small-town Missouri, former Prime Minister Winston Churchill tries to shake Americans out of their postwar bliss by saying their old ally "Uncle Joe" Stalin has dropped an "Iron Curtain" across Europe.

When a commotion outside his apartment woke George Holliday up at 1 a.m., the plumber grabbed his new camcorder and went out to his balcony. He saw a police beating, and within a few days, everyone would see it.

The Mitchell Brothers, Jim and "Party Artie," revolutionized the adult entertainment business, first with their O'Farrell Theatre in San Francisco, then with movies like "Behind the Green Door." They were close. Then Jim killed Artie. Why?

In the wake of the Fusion and Netflix series "Who Killed Malcolm X?" the New York D.A. has reopened the case of Muhammad Abdul Aziz, then known as Norman 3X Butler, who served 20 years for the murder despite multiple alibi witnesses.

AP Photographer Joe Rosenthal had one chance to get what would become one of the most iconic pictures in history. He didn't miss. After the war, he spent 35 years at the San Francisco Chronicle.

The lifelong anti-Communist shocks the world by initiating the first high-level contact with the People's Republic in more than 20 years. Even after he's driven from office, it would remain a signature achievement.

Total SF host Peter Hartlaub joins King Kaufman to talk about the most infamous headline in San Francisco history and the man behind it, Scott Newhall, the mad genius of the Chronicle's mid-century rise.

Chief engineer Joseph Strauss' massive safety net had saved 12 construction workers who'd fallen during construction. They called themselves the Halfway to Hell Club. Then a broken bolt turned the net into a killer.

In the most famous hit in American mob history, seven members of Bugs Moran's North Side Gang are gunned down, cementing control of Chicago for Al Capone's South Side Gang.

Despite a GOP majority in the Senate, President Bill Clinton is easily acquitted on both articles of impeachment stemming from his lies about an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Sparks fly at a San Francisco panel on changing sexual mores as anthropologist Margaret Mead suggests a new kind of marriage and promotes access to birth control for 16-year-old girls.

The big Bay Area business news of the day is Wells Fargo buying Crocker Bank. Nobody knew the computer graphics division of Lucasfilms would become a $7 billion company.

Seven years before Gov. George Wallace's Stand in the Schoolhouse Door, Autherine Lucy integrates the University of Alabama. But she's expelled after two days — "for her own protection."

They were the gang that couldn't bomb straight. Their plan to blow up court records was dumb, they didn't know anything about dynamite, and they talked too much.

As the Union nears victory in the Civil War, a constitutional amendment that would ban slavery wins a close vote. All that's needed now is ratification by three-quarters of the states. But do states at war with the U.S. count?

An 8-part miniseries about slavery told from the point of view of the slaves? ABC acted like it was afraid its adaptation of Alex Haley's novel was going to flop. It became the biggest hit in TV history.

After a circus of a trial, the leader of a murderous "family" and three female followers are guilty on all charges in the Tate-Labianca Murders, which claimed the lives of Sharon Tate and six others.

When Sgt. Shoichi Yokoi of the Imperial Japanese Army is captured on Guam, the first thing he asks is whether FDR has died yet. Well, yes, 27 years earlier, just before the end of World War II.

Britain mourns its longest-reigning monarch, who dies after nearly 64 years on the throne. Her screw-up, playboy son Bertie is about to be crowned King Edward VII — and all he'll do is save the monarchy. | Related: Edward VII Dies

It's one of the most dramatic capers in San Francisco history, and San Francisco has no idea it's going on. The media agrees to clam up so the bad guys won't know the cops are on the case. Related: Patty Hearst