February 15 · This Day in America
At twenty minutes to ten on a warm night, the battleship USS Maine — sent to Havana to protect American interests during Cuba's war for independence — erupts in a single catastrophic blast and sinks where she sits. Two hundred and sixty-six American sailors die in the harbor. The cause is not known that night, and is still argued; a 1976 study concluded a coal-bunker fire most likely set off the magazines, not a Spanish mine. But the country does not wait for findings. Newspapers roar, and the cry becomes a national pulse: Remember the Maine. Within months the United States is at war with Spain, and steps off its own continent as a world power for the first time. An explosion of unknown origin pushed a nation through a door it never quite closed again.
Source: www.history.navy.mil
Also on this day · 1820
She is born into a Quaker family that believes a woman's conscience is her own. She will be arrested for voting, fined, and refuse on principle to pay — and die in 1906, fourteen years before the amendment that bears her cause is ratified. She never cast a legal ballot in her life. Generations of American women have, because she insisted, all her life, that they would.
Source: www.nps.gov
“Failure is impossible.”Susan B. Anthony, 1906