August 21 · This Day in America
On a Sunday night in rural Virginia, an enslaved preacher named Nat Turner gathers six men at a place called Cabin Pond. He believes he has been called to strike at slavery itself. In the dark hours, the group moves house to house; over roughly two days, the rebellion grows to dozens and leaves some fifty-five white people dead before the militia crushes it. Reprisals are savage: scores of Black people, many uninvolved, are killed. Turner hides for two months, is captured, tried, and hanged. The revolt fails, and yet it changes everything. Slaveholding states pass harsher laws — banning Black assembly, preaching, and literacy — and the South's belief in its own safety is broken for good. It is one of the hardest days in the American story, told straight: a man who would not accept being owned, and a nation forced to look at what it had built.
Source: encyclopediavirginia.org
Also on this day · 1959
President Eisenhower puts his name to the proclamation admitting Hawaii to the Union as the fiftieth state — islands in the middle of the Pacific, thousands of miles from the mainland, now fully American. He also issues the order for a new flag, the stars rearranged into the familiar nine rows we know today. "All forty-nine states will join in welcoming the new one," he says. The map of the United States was finished.
Source: www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov