October 10 · This Day in America
The Navy had been training its officers the hard way — boys sent straight to sea, learning ship and sky from whoever would teach them, discipline kept by the rope. In 1842 a midshipman was hanged at sea for a plot to mutiny, and the country recoiled. So Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft, a historian by trade, quietly arranges to move the school onto a sleepy ten-acre Army post in Annapolis called Fort Severn — without waiting for Congress to fund it. Today fifty midshipmen and seven professors begin: mathematics, navigation, gunnery, steam, French. No Congress, no money, no campus to speak of. Just a deliberate idea — that the officers entrusted with the nation's ships should first be educated, not merely toughened. By 1850 it is the United States Naval Academy. Every admiral the country would ever produce now had a place to begin.
Source: www.usna.edu
Also on this day · 1767
After nearly five years of hauling instruments through wilderness, English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon end their work — a 233-mile boundary settling a bitter Penn-versus-Calvert dispute over where Pennsylvania stopped and Maryland began. They marked it with crested stones and went home, a tidy colonial property fix. They could not have known their two names would become America's shorthand for the line between slave and free, North and South — a survey that ended up dividing more than land.
Source: www.history.com