June 18 · This Day in America
Thirty-six years after declaring independence, the young republic does something it has never done: it formally declares war on another nation. The grievances have piled up for years — British warships stopping American vessels at sea, seizing sailors and pressing them into His Majesty's navy, choking American trade. President James Madison asks Congress to choose. It does, by the narrowest margin any war declaration in American history ever would: 79 to 49 in the House, 19 to 13 in the Senate. The country is barely ready. Its army is small, its navy smaller, its capital still a half-built town. Within two years the British will burn that capital, and the President's wife will flee with a portrait of Washington. But the nation will survive the war it barely chose, and come out of it, somehow, more certain it is a nation at all.
Source: history.state.gov
Also on this day · 1983
At Cape Canaveral the Space Shuttle Challenger lifts off on mission STS-7, and aboard it Sally Ride, a 32-year-old physicist, rides into orbit as the first American woman ever to leave the planet. Half a million people came to watch. Before the flight a reporter had asked whether spaceflight would damage her reproductive organs. In orbit she ran the robotic arm and did the work. The sky, it turned out, had no such question.
Source: www.nasa.gov