September 3 · This Day in America
In a hotel on the Rue Jacob in Paris, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay sit down with a British envoy and sign their names. With that, the war is truly over. Article One is the sentence everything else hung on: His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States to be free, sovereign and independent. Seven years after thirteen colonies declared it true, the empire they declared it against admits it in writing. The new nation's borders run, impossibly, all the way to the Mississippi — its territory doubled overnight, a continent waiting on the other side of the ink. The men who signed had spent their lives gambling on an idea that all the odds said should have failed. It did not fail. America was, at last, not a rebellion but a country.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1976
Three weeks after its sister craft, NASA's Viking 2 lander settles onto the rust-colored plain of Utopia Planitia and begins sending photographs from the surface of another planet. Built and flown by Americans, it would run for over three years, sniffing the soil for life and the wind for weather. No green men — but the pictures came back, and a cold red world was suddenly a place we had been.
Source: www.nasa.gov
“His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States... to be free, sovereign and independent States.”Treaty of Paris, 1783