April 23 · This Day in America
On April 23, 1898, President William McKinley signs Proclamation 412, calling forth 125,000 volunteers to fight Spain. The country that had spent a century looking inward — settling its own frontier, healing its own civil war — now reaches across two oceans at once, toward Cuba and the Philippines. Men line up by the thousands in town squares from Maine to Arizona; among them Theodore Roosevelt, who quits his Navy desk to raise the Rough Riders. The war will be over by August, and the United States will emerge holding territory in the Caribbean and the far Pacific, an empire it never quite admitted wanting and never knew how to be. April 23 is the hinge. The republic that began in 1776 by refusing to be ruled from across the sea becomes, in a single proclamation, a power that reaches across the sea itself. The whole twentieth century is waiting on the other side.
Source: millercenter.org
Also on this day · 1985
On April 23, 1985, Coca-Cola announces it is changing its 99-year-old formula. New Coke beat both Pepsi and old Coke in blind taste tests — and Americans revolted anyway. The company took up to 8,000 angry calls a day and 40,000 letters; people hoarded the old stuff like it was vanishing. Seventy-nine days later the original returned as Coca-Cola Classic. It turned out the country wasn't drinking a flavor. It was drinking a memory.
Source: www.coca-colacompany.com