October 19 · This Day in America
Trapped on a Virginia peninsula, his back to the York River and a French fleet sealing the bay, Lord Cornwallis runs out of options. Some eight thousand British and Hessian troops march out to lay down their arms while a combined American and French army watches in two long lines. A military band, by tradition, plays a slow melancholy tune. Cornwallis, pleading illness, sends a deputy with his sword; Washington has it received by a deputy of his own. It is the practical end of the Revolutionary War. The fighting that began at Lexington with farmers and a rumor finishes here, six years later, with an empire conceding a continent. When the news reached London, the prime minister is said to have taken it "as he would have taken a ball in the breast." A new nation had won the right to exist, and now had to learn how.
Source: www.battlefields.org
Also on this day · 1960
Invited by Atlanta students, the young Dr. King takes a seat at the segregated Magnolia Room in Rich's department store and refuses to leave. He is arrested with dozens of others, then held on a technicality and sentenced to hard labor. A phone call from presidential candidate John F. Kennedy to a frightened Coretta Scott King helped free him — and helped move a generation of Black voters, and a country.
Source: kinginstitute.stanford.edu