September 5 · This Day in America
Fifty-six delegates from twelve colonies gather at City Tavern in Philadelphia, then walk together to Carpenters' Hall and shut the door. They have never done this before — Virginians and Bostonians and Carolinians, strangers with different accents and different stakes, sitting in one room as if they were one people. Boston's port is blockaded; Parliament's Intolerable Acts have made the crisis everyone's. They choose Peyton Randolph to preside and Charles Thomson to keep the record, and they begin the slow, dangerous work of speaking as a continent. Nothing here declares independence. But for the first time, the colonies stop being thirteen separate quarrels with London and become a single argument — and a people learning, in a borrowed hall, how to govern themselves.
Source: constitutioncenter.org
Also on this day · 1882
In New York City, the Central Labor Union holds a parade no law required and no boss approved: ten thousand workers march from City Hall to Union Square, then picnic and make speeches all afternoon. Many gave up a day's pay to be there. It was a holiday they declared for themselves, and a dozen years later the country made it official — the only national holiday born from a crowd.
Source: www.dol.gov