June 23 · This Day in America
President Nixon signs the Education Amendments of 1972. Tucked inside is Title IX, a single sentence written largely by Patsy Mink, Edith Green, and Birch Bayh: no person, on the basis of sex, shall be denied the benefits of any education program that takes federal money. Nixon, signing, talks mostly about busing and barely mentions it. Almost no one in the room grasps what they have done. The thirty-seven words say nothing about sports. But they will open locker rooms, scholarships, science labs, and law schools to half the population that had quietly been turned away. A girl born after this day grows up assuming she can have a team, a field, a place on it — and assumes it so completely she may never know there was a before. That assumption is the monument. It was built out of one sentence.
Source: guides.loc.gov
Also on this day · 1868
A Milwaukee newspaperman named Christopher Latham Sholes, with Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule, receives a patent for a machine that writes. It is clumsy and jams often; the famous QWERTY layout, designed to keep common letters apart, comes later. But it will put words into print faster than a hand ever could, open offices to a generation of working women, and shape the keyboard under nearly every set of fingers reading this.
Source: www.britannica.com