March 14 · This Day in America
A young Yankee tutor visiting a Georgia plantation watches workers spend brutal hours pulling sticky seeds from cotton by hand. Within months Eli Whitney builds a simple machine of wire teeth and a turning drum that does the work of dozens. On this day he is granted the patent. It is one of the most consequential inventions in American history — and one of the most tragic. The gin makes short-staple cotton wildly profitable, and the South responds not with fewer hands but with more: the enslaved population explodes as cotton spreads west across a continent. A device meant to ease labor instead chains the country tighter to slavery and sets the table for civil war. Genius is not the same as wisdom. America would spend the next seventy years, and six hundred thousand lives, learning the difference.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1964
Four months after he stepped from a crowd of reporters and shot Lee Harvey Oswald on live television in the basement of Dallas police headquarters, Jack Ruby is found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. The verdict is later overturned on appeal, and Ruby dies of cancer in 1967 before a new trial — leaving the questions around Kennedy's assassination unanswered, and a nation still arguing with itself about what it saw.
Source: www.archives.gov