September 9 · This Day in America
Two months after the Declaration, the Second Continental Congress is still settling the small, enormous things. On this day it resolves that in all commissions and official instruments, the words "United Colonies" shall be struck and replaced by "United States." A colony belongs to someone else. A state governs itself. With one clerical line, a confederation of breakaway provinces formally stops describing itself as anyone's property. The phrase had floated through Jefferson's draft already; now it is the law of the new thing's own name. No bells ring for it. No painting captures the moment. But every passport, every treaty, every oath sworn since traces back to this quiet sentence in a Philadelphia minute book — the day the country decided what to call itself, and meant it.
Source: constitutioncenter.org
Also on this day · 1850
Gold changed the math. Tens of thousands poured west in a single year, and California skipped the usual slow apprenticeship of territorial status entirely. On this day President Millard Fillmore signs it in as the 31st state — admitted free, as part of the fragile Compromise of 1850 that bought the Union one more uneasy decade. A coastline of strangers, two thousand miles from Washington, suddenly part of the American whole.
Source: history.house.gov