September 29 · This Day in America
On September 29, 1988, after twenty-nine days on the mountain and one failed attempt the year before, Stacy Allison of Oregon steps onto the highest point on Earth — 29,000 feet of wind and thin blue air — the first American woman ever to stand on the summit of Mount Everest. She had been turned back once already, beaten down a season earlier by a storm that pinned her team to the ice. She came back. The view from the top of the world lasts only minutes; you cannot breathe up there for long, and the descent kills more climbers than the climb. But for those minutes an American woman stood where no American woman had stood, on the roof of the planet, with nothing above her but sky. The frontier was never only westward. Sometimes it is straight up.
Source: www.history.com
Also on this day · 1789
On September 29, 1789, the final day of its first session, Congress passes an act recognizing and adapting the troops of the old confederation to the new Constitution — the legal birth of the United States Army under the founding charter. It was a small force, fewer than a thousand men. But the Constitution had given Congress, not a king, the power to raise it, with funding that must be renewed every two years. A standing army, on a short leash, answerable to the people's representatives.
Source: constitutioncenter.org