July 10 · This Day in America
President Benjamin Harrison signs the bill, and Wyoming becomes the 44th state. It arrives carrying something no other state has: women who can vote, a right the territory granted in 1869 and never gave back. In Congress the suffrage clause nearly sinks the whole application. The House vote is brutally close, 139 to 127, and the demand is plain — drop the women, and statehood is yours. Wyoming does not drop the women. The Equality State enters the Union with its constitution intact, the first place in the nation where women's suffrage is written into the founding law of a state. It would be thirty more years before the rest of the country caught up. One state had already decided, and held the line until everyone else arrived.
Source: www.wyohistory.org
Also on this day · 1962
NASA launches Telstar 1 from Cape Canaveral — a beach-ball-sized satellite built by Bell Labs. Within days it relays the first live television pictures across the Atlantic. Soon Walter Cronkite in New York and the BBC in Brussels share a single broadcast in real time. For all of human history, news crossed water at the speed of a ship. Now it crossed at the speed of light, and the world got suddenly, permanently smaller.
Source: www.nasa.gov