October 12 · This Day in America
It began in a magazine. A minister named Francis Bellamy had written twenty-three words for The Youth's Companion, meant to be spoken by children before a flag on the 400th anniversary of Columbus's landing. Today, in schoolyards across the country, it happens all at once. More than twelve million children — in cities and one-room prairie schools, immigrant kids and farm kids — turn toward the flag and recite the same sentence on the same morning. No God in it yet, no nation indivisible argued over in courts yet. Just a young, raw, sprawling country trying to teach itself a single shared line. It is one of the largest coordinated acts of voice in American history, and almost nobody remembers it was a debut. The words would change. The ritual never stopped. Every weekday since, somewhere, a room full of children stands and tries the promise on again.
Source: www.smithsonianmag.com
Also on this day · 1492
After ten weeks of open ocean and a crew near mutiny, a sailor on the Pinta cries out at land in the moonlight. At daybreak Columbus's three ships anchor off a Bahamian island the Taino call Guanahani. He believes he has reached the Indies; he has not. What he has done is bind two halves of the world together for good — a meeting that would bring everything that followed, the wonders and the catastrophes alike. The hemisphere is never alone again.
Source: www.britannica.com