January 31 · This Day in America
On the floor of the House of Representatives, the clerk calls the roll on an amendment of twenty-eight words: that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States. A year earlier it had passed the Senate and died here. Now, with the war nearly won and Lincoln's hand working every wavering vote, the tally climbs — 119 to 56, two votes past the two-thirds it needed. The chamber does not stay orderly. Members weep. The galleries, packed with Black Americans who came to watch, erupt. Outside, cannon fire across the capital. What had been argued since the founding, fought over in Kansas, and paid for in four years of unthinkable blood is now headed to the states to become the supreme law of the land. Slavery, written into the country's bones, is being cut out of them. "This amendment," one congressman said, "is a king's cure for all the evils." The states would ratify it before the year was out.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1958
Four months after Sputnik shocked the country, a Juno rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral and puts Explorer 1 into orbit — the first American satellite. It is small, the size of a slim mailbox, but it carries a cosmic-ray instrument built by James Van Allen. The data come back strange, and then they make sense: Earth is wrapped in belts of trapped radiation, the Van Allen belts, the first scientific discovery of the Space Age. America was in the race now.
Source: www.nasa.gov
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”Thirteenth Amendment, 1865