September 8 · This Day in America
Admiral Pedro Menendez de Aviles steps ashore on the Florida coast with some six hundred soldiers and settlers and claims the land for Spain, naming the place for Saint Augustine, whose feast had fallen as the fleet first sighted land. It is 1565. Jamestown is forty-two years away. The Pilgrims will not reach Plymouth Rock for fifty-five more. The town Menendez stakes out this day will be besieged, burned, and rebuilt, will fly the flags of Spain and Britain and the United States, and will simply refuse to die. More than four and a half centuries later, people still live there, on the same ground, by the same harbor — the oldest continuously occupied European-and-African settlement in what became the United States. American history did not start in English. It started here.
Source: www.smithsonianmag.com
Also on this day · 1966
At 8:30 on a Thursday night, NBC airs an episode called "The Man Trap," and a starship named Enterprise sets out on a five-year mission. The show would be canceled in three seasons and then refuse to stay dead — spawning films, spinoffs, real scientists, and a stubbornly American faith that the future is somewhere worth going. It boldly went, and a lot of us followed.
Source: www.history.com