August 26 · This Day in America
At dawn, a registered letter from Tennessee reaches Washington, and Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby quietly signs the proclamation certifying the Nineteenth Amendment. With a pen stroke and no ceremony, the right to vote can no longer be denied on account of sex. Behind that one sentence stand seventy-two years of work: Seneca Falls, parades pelted with eggs, hunger strikes and force-feedings, generations of women who organized and were jailed and died before the law caught up to them. Carrie Chapman Catt learns of it by telephone. There is no grand parade that morning, only the staggering fact itself — that twenty-six million American women are now, by law, full citizens of the republic they had always helped build. The Constitution had been amended toward its own promise. It would not be the last time.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1883
Half a world away, the volcano Krakatoa begins the cataclysmic eruption that will be heard across a tenth of the Earth. In the days after, American skies turn strange: sunsets blaze an unearthly red and green from ash carried into the high atmosphere. In Poughkeepsie and New Haven, fire companies are called out, sure the horizon is burning. It is the planet, reminding a confident young nation how small and connected the world really is.
Source: guides.loc.gov
“We learned that the last step in the enfranchisement of women had been taken.”Maud Wood Park, suffragist, 1920