May 25 · This Day in America
For eleven days the delegates trickled into Philadelphia through spring mud, too few to do anything but wait. On May 25, seven states finally make a quorum, and inside the Pennsylvania State House the Constitutional Convention opens. Their first act is small and enormous: they rise and unanimously elect George Washington to preside. The official charge is only to revise the Articles of Confederation. They will quietly decide instead to build something entirely new. Windows nailed shut against eavesdroppers, a vow of secrecy taken, fifty-five men begin arguing through a Philadelphia summer over what a free people owe each other and how power can be made to answer to them. The document they have not yet written will outlast every one of them. It begins here, in a room, with a vote and a chair.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1961
Standing before a joint session, President Kennedy asks the nation to do something no one yet knows how to do. The United States, he says, should commit to landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely before the decade is out. America has barely fifteen minutes of human spaceflight to its name. Eight years later, two Americans walk on the Moon. He set the deadline before the engineering existed.
Source: www.nasa.gov
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”John F. Kennedy, 1961