Copyright � 2026 by Shane
Tourtellotte
I’ve been pretty forthright -- not to mention insistent -- about explaining the various hazards of time travel. If my lessons have taken, you should now have some good instincts about what trips might be too dangerous for the enjoyment or benefits you might gain.
But nothing’s perfect. Maybe you haven’t paid that much attention. Maybe some specific applications have eluded your mental grasp. (Theoretically, I might even be a lousy teacher, but what are the odds of that?)
Or maybe you learn best by practical examples. Then I can help, because I have some practical examples for you. This is the supplementary list of events not to see. They’re rejected as being too dangerous directly to you, or too disruptive to the timeline, or just not all they’re historically cracked up to be. Again, if you get further ideas from these examples, they’ve more than done their job.
For once in this handbook, I won’t spend too much time discouraging you. This will just be the Top Twelve Events for a Time-Traveler to Avoid:
March 15, 44 BC -- Curia Pompeii, on the Campus Martius outside Rome
The attraction is almost irresistible, to witness the assassination of Julius Caesar in the annex to Pompey's Theater, the event that marked the death of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Empire. But resist you must, for very practical reasons. The occasion was a meeting of the Roman Senate, and that was something for Senators alone. No visitors' gallery akin to the U.S. Senate's existed; no curious onlookers were tolerated. Show up, and you'll only create a disruption, possibly one that prevents the historic event you had intended to witness. So unless you can brilliantly disguise yourself as Cicero -- and you can’t -- skip this.
c. 30 -- Golgotha, outside Jerusalem
Yeah, this one. I'm not putting the Crucifixion off-limits out of doctrinaire Christianity or dogmatic atheism. I'm doing it for your safety, because of what's happened before. I knew the two guys who went back to this time, one determined to prove Jesus the Son of God, the other confident of debunking the myth in the name of reason. Neither ever came back. Did these antagonists find and slaughter each other over this ultimate disagreement? Is one lying in wait to kill any other time-traveler who ventures back to discover what he learned to be the unbearable truth? Did the Almighty smite them both out of the continuum for their presumption? I don't know, and I'm fine with not knowing. So should you be.
1045 -- Coventry, England
This was when Lady Godiva made her legendary ride, meeting her greedy husband's challenge to remit taxes on Coventry if she'd parade herself naked through town. And "legendary" is the operative word: it never happened. The tale's likely an old pagan ceremony given a redeeming gloss of Christian altruism. No contemporary source mentions it for more than a century after Godiva died. Even Peeping Tom was an accretion added centuries later, like Lancelot to King Arthur and Maid Marian to Robin Hood. (Seems the English do this a lot.) If you really want to look at a naked woman, your current century provides adequate resources. To say the least.
1589-1592 -- The Leaning Tower of Pisa, Grand Duchy of Tuscany
It’s one of the most famous experiments in the history of science. Galileo Galilei dropped two cannonballs of different sizes from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, to demonstrate they would fall at the same speed and thus disprove Aristotle’s ancient theory that objects fall at speeds proportionate to their mass. Its practicality stands as a precursor to his grand telescopic discoveries that put him (eventually, through numerous convolutions) on his collision course with Pope and Church.
Galileo probably didn’t do the experiment. Even if he did, a Dutch pair beat him with their experiment at Nieuwe Kerk in Delft in 1586. Other Italians may have beaten Galileo to it in 1544, or earlier. If you want to marvel at Galileo, go find him in his telescopic phase.
December 25-26, 1776 -- McKonkey's Ferry, Pennsylvania/Johnson's Ferry, New Jersey
Washington crossing the Delaware to attack Trenton, New Jersey was a pivot point in the American Revolution, deserving of the historic status it has held for over two centuries. It was also much harder than the famed, and idealized, painting by Emmanuel Leutze makes it appear. Not only was the river choked with ice, but sleet and snow knifed down from the skies. You would be cold, wet, and miserable, with dreadful visibility at any vantage point -- and your skulking about a secret military operation could get you nabbed as a spy. Demystifying an iconic moment isn't worth pneumonia, or a hanging.
July 1, 1863 -- Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Some battles you could visit are straightforward set-piece affairs, letting you hunker down at one place and watch pretty safely without getting swallowed up in the chaos. Gettysburg is not such a battle. Any place where you could watch the first day's clashes will get swept behind Confederate lines, including the town itself. (And inside Gettysburg, you're liable to get dragooned into helping care for the thousands of casualties: it's no safe haven.) Every other eligible vantage point ends up part of the battlefield before the end. War in this era is getting too big to be a spectator sport. (Read up on First Bull Run to see how others learned this the hard way.)
April 14, 1865 -- Ford's Theater, Washington, D.C.
The presence of Abraham Lincoln at this showing of Our American Cousin guaranteed a packed house at Ford's, meaning there's no open space for you to fill in hopes of seeing the tragedy about to unfold. Not that voyeurism is the only reason you'd have for attending. There's some dispute over whether John Wilkes Booth really did break his leg leaping to the stage after shooting Lincoln, or while later fleeing through Maryland. (Oddly enough, theater eyewitnesses started remembering Booth's injury only after word got out that he'd broken his leg.) But it would risk the timeline too much to crowd somebody else out of the event -- and absolutely don't try tackling Booth as he comes running out of the rear entrance. They'll get him without you.
October 1, 1932 -- Wrigley Field, Chicago, Illinois
This one is so tempting: to see whether Babe Ruth really did "call his shot" in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series. Contemporary newspaper and radio accounts, and later historians' works, are an utter jumble, and surviving home movies of the game haven't cleared matters up either. Did he point to center field? Did he actually point on his previous homer (he hit two that day), but the story got transferred to the longer, more awesome blow?
I wish you could watch it. I wish I could. But the ballpark was sold out, and bumping somebody else out of watching this, of all games, would test the elasticity of the timeline too far. We'll have to live with the legend.
December 7, 1941 -- Pearl Harbor, Hawaii Territory
The Japanese attack that hurled America into World War II is too dangerous for sight-seeing -- and not because of the Japanese. The U.S. Navy and Army were, of course, caught totally off-guard, and when they fired anti-aircraft artillery at the raiding planes, they hadn't fused their shells to explode before falling back to the ground. Live rounds rained down on the battlefield and surrounding areas, killing dozens of civilians. Don't be one of them. And don't think you can zip back home before things get too hot: you're not going to see the shell with your name on it.
July 28, 1945 -- Manhattan, New York
On the morning of September 11, 2001, many people had a sudden sharp reminder of an awful accident that happened 56 years earlier: a B-25 bomber crashing into the Empire State Building, killing three in the airplane and eleven in the building. This foreshock of future terror in New York, itself terrible enough, gets my veto for the very reason that made it possible. The thick fog clinging to Manhattan that morning made the skies unnavigable, the B-25 actually hitting the Empire State Building because it had dodged around the Chrysler Building seconds before. It also makes seeing what’s happening a thousand feet above street level difficult or impossible. There are better historical opportunities for rubbernecking.
June 1947 -- Roswell, New Mexico
Don't. Just don't. There was no UFO. The military cover-up was of merely terrestrial secrets, probably attempts to monitor possible Soviet nuclear tests. If it gives you a clue, Roswell's airbase housed the 509th Bombardment Group, which was accustomed to nuclear secrets: it was formed to drop the first atomic bombs. History repeated itself later. Tests of the first Stealth aircraft at a Nevada base whipped up similar rumors, and gave birth to the Area 51 conspiracy theory. Both sides won. The military got cover for its secret tests and instant discrediting of any persistent snoops. The rest of us got The X-Files.
November 22, 1963 -- Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas
And speaking of conspiracy-mongering ... I actually tried to make this work. I tried to find some place where you could witness the assassination of John Kennedy, without getting caught on the Zapruder film or otherwise recorded for posterity, without getting embroiled in someone's screwball theory about how you were the real shooter, without requiring some extra to portray you in Oliver Stone's JFK. I mapped out all the angles, searched for some little place to squeeze you in between sightlines that didn't involve the words "grassy" or "knoll." Then I realized: Lee Harvey Oswald didn't put as much thought into the events of this day as I was doing. That's when I quit.
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