January 16 · This Day in America
Nebraska becomes the thirty-sixth state to approve it, and with that one vote the Eighteenth Amendment crosses the threshold into the Constitution. For the first and only time, the founding document does not protect a freedom but takes one away: the manufacture, sale, and transport of intoxicating liquors is now unlawful, nationwide, by constitutional command. It is the high-water mark of a reform crusade a century in the making — temperance preachers, suffragists, and dry politicians who believed a sober nation would be a just one. They are sincere, and they are wrong about people. The country gets a year's grace before it takes effect, then thirteen years of speakeasies, bootleggers, and a lesson written into the law itself: that what a free people will not give up willingly cannot simply be commanded. It is the only amendment Americans would ever vote to erase.
Source: guides.loc.gov
Also on this day · 1978
NASA introduces its eighth astronaut class, and for the first time the photograph includes women: Sally Ride, Judith Resnik, Kathryn Sullivan, Anna Fisher, Rhea Seddon, and Shannon Lucid. Sixteen years after the agency turned away a group of qualified women pilots, six of them now wear the badge. Within a decade Ride flies, Sullivan walks in space, Resnik is lost aboard Challenger. The door, once opened, stays open.
Source: www.nasa.gov