November 17 · This Day in America
After sixteen months of argument, the Continental Congress finishes its first attempt at a government and mails it home. On November 17, 1777, Congress sends the Articles of Confederation to the thirteen states with a covering letter that all but admits the strain: agreeing on anything, it says, was hard, and the states are asked to authorize their delegates to ratify by spring. The document is cautious, jealous of state power, and will prove too weak to hold a country together. But it is the first time these former colonies try to write down, together, how Americans will govern themselves. Every flaw in it becomes a lesson. Ten years later, in a hotter room in Philadelphia, men who remembered exactly how this failed would build something sturdier. A nation learning to govern itself has to start by being wrong on paper.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1973
At a televised question session with Associated Press editors at a Disney World hotel in Orlando, a president under siege by Watergate makes a sentence no one would let him forget. "People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook." Less than nine months later, facing near-certain impeachment, Richard Nixon resigned. The line outlived the man's argument.
Source: www.presidency.ucsb.edu