May 29 · This Day in America
Little Rhode Island holds out the longest. It was first to renounce the British crown and now, more than a year after the Constitution has already taken effect, it is the last of the original thirteen to join under it. The new federal government is real, working, and watching — Congress has threatened to treat the holdout as a foreign country. At the state convention in Newport, the vote is agonizingly close: thirty-four to thirty-two. Rhode Island ratifies anyway, but it sends along a long list of demanded protections — bans on poll taxes, on forced military service, on the slave trade — pressing for the rights that would shape the Bill of Rights. The bells of Newport ring out as the smallest, stubbornest state joins what one newspaper called "the Great American Family." The circle is closed. All thirteen are in.
Source: prologue.blogs.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1917
In an upstairs bedroom at 83 Beals Street in Brookline, Massachusetts, Rose Kennedy gives birth to her second son, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. It is an ordinary middle-class house on a quiet street — no marble, no portent. The boy born here will ask the country to go to the Moon and not live to see it happen. The house is kept today exactly as it was, a small room where a very large American story began.
Source: www.nps.gov