August 7 · This Day in America
From his headquarters at Newburgh, New York, near the end of a long war, General George Washington issues an order unlike anything in European armies. He establishes the Badge of Military Merit: a purple cloth heart, edged in silver, to be awarded not to generals or aristocrats but to enlisted men, for "any singularly meritorious action." Whoever earns it may walk past sentries unchallenged, his name written in a Book of Merit. In the armies of kings, honors flowed to the wellborn. Washington, commanding a citizens' army, decides that the merit of a common soldier is worth marking forever. The badge is nearly forgotten after the Revolution, then revived on his 200th birthday in 1932 as the Purple Heart — now given to every American wounded or killed in service. It began as one general's quiet insistence that the man in the ranks counts.
Source: www.mountvernon.org
Also on this day · 1959
On August 7, 1959, NASA launches Explorer 6 from Cape Canaveral. A week later, from 17,000 miles out, it transmits the first crude photograph of Earth ever taken from a satellite — a blurry crescent of sunlit Pacific. It barely looks like anything. But it is the first time humanity saw its own planet from the outside, the small beginning of a view that would change how we think about home.
Source: nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov