August 3 · This Day in America
Before dawn on August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus orders the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María down the Rio Tinto and out into the open Atlantic. He is chasing a route to Asia and a fortune in spice. He will never find them. What he finds instead, ten weeks later, is a landmass Europe didn't know existed and millions of people who had been here for thousands of years. The voyage opens an age of contact and conquest that builds and breaks whole worlds — wealth and exchange on one side of the ledger, conquest, disease, and slavery on the other. The full story holds both. But everything about the Americas that comes after — including a country that one day declares all men created equal — begins with sails disappearing over a horizon no one aboard could yet picture.
Source: www.loc.gov
Also on this day · 1958
The nuclear submarine USS Nautilus, submerged the whole way, slips beneath the Arctic ice and crosses the geographic North Pole at 11:15 p.m. on August 3, 1958. Commander William Anderson announces it over the intercom: "For the world, our country, and the Navy — the North Pole." No ship had ever reached the top of the Earth. This one did it without ever surfacing, gliding under a thousand miles of ice in the dark.
Source: www.history.navy.mil
“For the world, our country, and the Navy — the North Pole.”Cmdr. William R. Anderson, USS Nautilus, 1958