June 28 · This Day in America
In the early hours of a Saturday, New York City police raid the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. Raids like this are routine, humiliating, and almost never resisted. This time is different. The crowd does not scatter into the dark. They stay on the sidewalk, and then they push back, and the resistance spills into the streets and lasts, on and off, for six nights. Drag queens, hustlers, kids with nowhere else to go, people the law had spent a century telling to disappear, decide together not to. It is not the first act of gay defiance in America, but it is the one that catches. Within a year the movement that grows from it has spread across the country, and on the first anniversary marchers walk up Christopher Street in the open daylight. A bar full of people who were supposed to be ashamed started something the country could not unsee.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1919
In the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, exactly five years after the assassination that lit the fuse, Germany and the Allies sign the treaty that formally ends the First World War. It carries Woodrow Wilson's dream of a League of Nations and a peace without revenge. It carries neither well. The Senate will reject it, America will stay out of the League, and the treaty's harshness will help seed the next war. A hopeful signature on a flawed page.
Source: history.state.gov