February 6 · This Day in America
By a vote of 187 to 168, the Massachusetts convention ratifies the United States Constitution and becomes the sixth state in the new union. The count is close, the argument fierce, the farmers of the interior deeply suspicious of a strong central government. To win them over, the convention does something new: it ratifies and then attaches a list of amendments it wants added, protections for individual liberty and for the states. It is the first state to do so, and the model spreads. Without Massachusetts, the Constitution might have stalled. And the price of Massachusetts, the demand that rights be written down and not merely assumed, becomes, two years later, the Bill of Rights itself.
Source: avalon.law.yale.edu
Also on this day · 1911
In a small flat above a bank building in Tampico, Illinois, Ronald Wilson Reagan is born. He will be a radio announcer, a Hollywood actor, a union president, and a governor before he becomes the 40th president of the United States. From a rented room over a Main Street in farm country to the Oval Office is a distance that is hard to measure, and very American.
Source: www.history.com