July 19 · This Day in America
In a chapel in upstate New York, about three hundred people gather for the first women's rights convention organized by women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton reads a document modeled deliberately on the Declaration of Independence, with one revolutionary edit: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal." It indicts a country that taxes women, governs them, and denies them the vote. The boldest demand, suffrage, nearly fails on the floor; it carries only after Frederick Douglass rises to argue for it. Sixty-eight women and thirty-two men sign their names, knowing they will be mocked for it, and they are. It would take seventy-two years and a constitutional amendment before most American women could vote. The argument started here, in a borrowed room, with a sentence the founders left unfinished.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1969
Three days out from Earth, Apollo 11 fires its engine on the far side of the Moon, out of radio contact, and lets lunar gravity take hold. The crew swings into orbit and begins watching the Sea of Tranquility scroll past below, scouting the patch of gray they will try to land on the next day. Two hundred forty thousand miles from home, three men circle another world and quietly check their math.
Source: airandspace.si.edu
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”Declaration of Sentiments, Seneca Falls, 1848