January 11 · This Day in America
Amelia Earhart lifts a red Lockheed Vega off a rain-soaked field near Honolulu and points it at the empty Pacific. No one has flown this route alone. The Army has lost crews trying it. Ahead lie 2,400 miles of open ocean and one small target — the California coast — with nothing but a radio and her own nerve to find it. For nearly nineteen hours there is only water and weather and the engine's drone. She sips hot chocolate, listens to a broadcast tracking her, talks back into a microphone the world cannot answer. Then, in the dark, the lights of the Bay Area resolve out of the haze. Ten thousand people are waiting at Oakland. She lands tired, calm, and first — the only pilot, man or woman, to make this crossing and live. She does not say it was easy. She says it was worth doing.
Source: pioneersofflight.si.edu
Also on this day · 1978
Toni Morrison's third novel, Song of Solomon, is honored with the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction — the recognition that lifts her from respected editor and writer to a major American voice. The book follows a man named Milkman Dead back through his family's buried history toward a name, a song, and finally flight. Years later, the Nobel committee will essentially be agreeing with this verdict. It started here.
Source: www.nationalbook.org