April 13 · This Day in America
On a tobacco plantation in the Virginia foothills, a boy is born who will one day write the sentence the whole country argues with forever. Thomas Jefferson — author of the Declaration, third president, founder of a university, architect of the house on the hill he could see from his cradle — will give America its most luminous words about human equality. He will also own more than six hundred enslaved people across his life, and free almost none. Both of those things are true on the same day, in the same man, and the nation he helped invent has never stopped living inside that contradiction. He is brilliant, restless, and impossible to finish thinking about. He believed the country could always be argued toward something better. He left it the language to do it, and the unfinished work of meaning it.
Source: www.monticello.org
Also on this day · 1970
Two hundred thousand miles from Earth, an oxygen tank aboard Apollo 13 explodes. The Moon landing is instantly impossible; the only goal now is to bring three men home alive in a crippled ship. For four days, astronauts and engineers improvise a lifeboat out of the lunar module, build a carbon-dioxide scrubber from a sock and a manual cover, and fly a wounded spacecraft around the Moon by hand. They splash down safely. NASA calls it the successful failure.
Source: www.nasa.gov
“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”Thomas Jefferson, 1800