December 27 · This Day in America
Three men fall toward the Pacific at 25,000 miles an hour, the fastest any human has ever moved, inside a charring capsule trailing fire. Then the parachutes catch. At 10:51 a.m., Apollo 8 splashes down southwest of Hawaii, near the carrier Yorktown, and Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders are back on Earth — the first people ever to leave it entirely, circle another world, and return. They had read Genesis to a watching planet on Christmas Eve from lunar orbit. They had looked back and photographed the whole Earth rising over the Moon's dead horizon, a small blue thing in a black ocean. 1968 had been a year of assassination and grief. It ended with a picture of home, taken from somewhere no one had ever stood, and the unspoken understanding that we are all on it together.
Source: www.nasa.gov
Also on this day · 1923
Two young Yale graduates, Briton Hadden and Henry Luce, publish the first issue of a slim weekly that promises to tell busy Americans what happened in the world in under an hour of reading. They called it Time. It would invent the newsmagazine, the Person of the Year, and a brisk national habit of looking up from one's own street to take in the whole country and the century it was racing through.
Source: time.com