I’d join Hank Williams on that last car ride to Canton and see if I couldn’t talk some sense to him. 29 was way too young.
I’d bring a modern pulmonary specialist with me back to the late 1940s and cure George Orwell’s tuberculosis. A personal hero and intellectual idol of mine, and it would be fascinating to read his books and essays about political events from 1950 to, say, 1990. Oh, heck, we’re dreaming, how about right up to 2006! 
He’d just end up becoming a pulp scifi author.
I’d have a few words with Christopher Marlowe about the company he’s keeping and advise him against taking lunch at the seamy alehouses of Deptford.
I might indeed save Martin Luther King’s life…
But, for the sake of variety, I’d want to do something screwy, like having some Nazi (Otto Skorzeny?) jump Ray at the last minute, before he could shoot. Just to mess with people’s heads. 
Better still, I’d go back a few centuries further and introduce the moveable-type printing press (baked clay letters would be good enough for a start), vegetable-pulp paper, and the sewn-sheet codex book. Then there would be so many copies of every book that burning one library, even the greatest in the world, wouldn’t be that big a setback.
Especially if he does it while riding on a dinosaur!
Right after you pick up the manuscript from Will, you seal it in a lead box and bury it. Maybe under the flagstones of some church that you know has made it the past four centuries without being damaged by war or anything else and without being renovated. Then you hop to the present and dig it up.
I doubt it, but EPCOT would be – Walt’s original concept for it was an arcology, not a theme park. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epcot#The_Planned_Community
When his successors finally decided they did want to be in the business of running a town after all, they built one along far more conventional lines. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration%2C_Florida
And this is in CS because . . . ?
“Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot one, and there’ll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland?”
- Terry Pratchett
“Hey, Mr. Ritter? May I call you John? Just a hunch, but can you call in sick today? Yeah, instead of going to the set of Eight Simple Rules, I’m going to drive you to the doctor and get you an EKG.”*
“Hello, is this the FBI? Yes, um, tomorrow, do you think you could have some extra security at the Boston airports, specifically Logan? Be on the lookout for some Arab men dressed in suits and carrying box cutters.”
“Mr. Presley? Yes, your ex-wife hired me. For the sake of your daughter and your fans, I’m going to be your personal trainer after you get back from rehab. This is Suzy, your nutritionist. We’re going to cut back on those fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches for awhile.”
*Or is it EEG? Whichever one is for screening the heart.
Gengis Khan, it would be really interesting to see what he could do with another 15 years, and if not him the Kublia Khan, they both died early and before they could quite finish off europe.
you have to wonder what the world would be like today if they had managed that simple trick.
You are seriously underestimating the stubbornness of an academic with a theory if you think that would end the speculation about who Shakespeare really was…
But you’d have your mint, so I don’t think you’d be too unhappy.
I’d like to see what would happen if I could go and cure Heinlein’s consumption. It probably wouldn’t be quite the same as in Larry Niven’s “The Return of William Proxmire,” but it would be fun, nonetheless.