December 21 · This Day in America
By tradition, it is December 21, 1620, when a scouting party from the Mayflower steps onto the cold rock of a place they will call Plymouth. They are sick, half-starved, and far off course; they meant for Virginia and found New England in winter instead. Behind them is an ocean they survived for sixty-six days. Ahead is a season that will kill half of them before spring. They are not the first Europeans here, and the land is not empty — the Wampanoag have lived here for thousands of years, and the colony will only last because Tisquantum and Massasoit choose, for a time, to help it. But a small, stubborn settlement takes root, and the compact these passengers signed in the harbor — to govern themselves by agreed laws — becomes one of the threads the country is later woven from.
Source: blogs.loc.gov
Also on this day · 1937
At the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles on December 21, 1937, the lights go down on Walt Disney's gamble. Critics had called it "Disney's Folly"; he had mortgaged his house to finish it. Then the first full-length animated feature ever made unspooled, and a theater full of Hollywood — Chaplin, Garland, Dietrich — rose to its feet in tears and cheers. An entire art form had just been born in the dark.
Source: www.waltdisney.org