May 21 · This Day in America
In her apartment in Washington, a sixty-year-old woman holds the first meeting of an organization she has spent years willing into existence. Clara Barton was a clerk and a schoolteacher before the Civil War made her something else: the woman who walked onto battlefields with wagons of bandages while the cannon were still firing, until soldiers called her the Angel of the Battlefield. After the war she ran the search for the missing dead, naming thousands of the lost at Andersonville so families would finally know. In Europe she met the Red Cross and would not let it go. On this day she finally plants it in American soil — a promise that when the worst happens, to soldiers or to ordinary people in a flood or a fire, strangers will come. They still come. More than a century later, the thing she started in a parlor shows up wherever Americans are having their hardest day.
Source: www.redcross.org
Also on this day · 1932
Fighting ice, fog, a flaming exhaust, and a broken altimeter, Amelia Earhart brings her red Lockheed Vega down in an Irish pasture after nearly fifteen hours alone over the ocean — the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo. The date is May 21, 1932, exactly five years to the day after Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris. A startled farmhand asked if she'd flown far. "From America," she said.
Source: airandspace.si.edu