September 18 · This Day in America
There is almost nothing here yet. The new federal city is mud, surveyor's stakes, and ambition. On this morning George Washington crosses the Potomac, walks to a low rise of ground, and climbs down into a foundation trench in his Masonic apron. He sets a silver plate, and over it the cornerstone of the United States Capitol. There is a parade, an artillery salute, and a five-hundred-pound ox roasted for whoever came. The building Washington begins will take a century to finish. The British will burn it. It will rise again, and a cast-iron dome will go up even as the country tears itself apart in civil war. He is laying the first stone of a building he will never see completed — a fitting thing for a man who spent his life starting things meant to outlast him.
Source: www.senate.gov
Also on this day · 1947
Forty years after the Wright brothers, the air arm finally leaves the Army's wing. Under the National Security Act, the United States Air Force is established as an independent service and Stuart Symington is sworn in as its first secretary. The same sweeping law creates the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the CIA — the architecture of the American superpower, built in a single afternoon of signatures.
Source: www.afhistory.af.mil