People have told Jack Horner he’s crazy before, but he has always turned out to be right. In 1982, on the strength of seven years of undergraduate study, a stint in the Marines, and a gig as a paleontology researcher at Princeton, Horner got a job at Montana State University’s Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman. He was hired as a curator but soon told his bosses that he wanted to teach paleontology. “They said it wasn’t going to happen,” Horner recalls. Four years and a MacArthur genius grant later, “th...

1941:SS Patrick Henry, the first Liberty ship, is launched at the Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyard near Baltimore.

Originally referred to as “emergency vessels,” these cargo ships were among the first to be mass-produced. Numbers were critical as the Allies hustled to recover from the staggering losses wrought by German submarines during the Battle of the Atlantic. The vessels became known as Liberty ships after President Franklin D. Roosevelt, christening the Patrick Henry, quoted the ship’s namesake: “Give me liberty, or give me death.”

Liberty ships represented the assembly line fully realized....