May 20 · This Day in America
At 7:52 in the morning, a single-engine monoplane lumbers down a muddy Roosevelt Field on Long Island, so heavy with fuel it barely clears the telephone wires at the far end. Inside is one man — Charles Lindbergh, twenty-five, an airmail pilot nobody famous — and no radio, no parachute, no copilot, no front window. He has a periscope and a wicker chair and 3,610 miles of open ocean ahead. For thirty-three and a half hours he flies through fog and ice and a sleeplessness so total he holds his own eyelids open and watches phantoms drift through the fuselage. Then, near midnight on the second day, the lights of Paris. A hundred thousand people surge across Le Bourget field to carry him off. The world had said the Atlantic could not be crossed alone. One quiet American had just done it, and aviation grew up overnight.
Source: airandspace.si.edu
Also on this day · 1862
In the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signs the Homestead Act: any citizen or future citizen could claim 160 acres of public land, free, if they lived on it five years and made it bloom. Over the next decades it moved 270 million acres — a tenth of the country — into private hands, and remade the West. The promise was real, and uneven: it was land already lived on, taken from Native nations.
Source: www.archives.gov