In February 1956, a 96-year-old man named Samuel J. Seymour stepped onto a national TV game show with an unbelievable secret: "I saw John Wilkes Booth shoot Abraham Lincoln." His appearance on the CBS program I've Got a Secret challenged celebrity panelists to guess this defining fact about his past. In 1865, a five-year-old Seymour was taken by his godmother to see a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. He remembered the sound of the gunshot and the sight of a man leaping from the balcony to the stage. Young Seymour did not understand that the President had been murdered; he was terrified that the man who fell had hurt himself, and he cried out for someone to help him. Seymour’s television appearance bridged a 91-year gap, giving 20th-century audiences a direct eyewitness account of a 19th-century tragedy just two months before his death. Seymour was not the only person to bring a distant era to modern screens. Dewey Beard, known in Lakota as Iron Hail, was born around 1858. In 1876, he rode with Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, witnessing the destruction of George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry. Fourteen years later, Beard survived the Wounded Knee Massacre. Living until 1955, Beard spent his later years as an advocate for the Lakota people. When his land was threatened by government development in the 1950s, he took his fight to Washington and appeared in early television newscasts. Viewers saw the face of a man who had personally fired arrows at Custer's troops during the peak of the Plains Indian Wars. Decades later, Eva Hart brought another historic event to life on television. Seven years old when she boarded the RMS Titanic in 1912, Hart survived in Lifeboat 14 while her father perished. In the 1980s and 1990s, she gave television interviews describing the victims' screams. Crucially, she insisted on live broadcasts that she had watched the Titanic break completely in half before sinking. For over 70 years, maritime experts dismissed her claim, asserting the ship sank intact. It was not until Robert Ballard discovered the wreckage in 1985—in two distinct pieces—that her televised eyewitness testimony was proven correct.