December 28 · This Day in America
President James K. Polk signs the bill, and the tallgrass prairie between two great rivers becomes Iowa, the 29th state in the Union. It is a quiet milestone with a loud meaning. Iowa enters as a free state, one careful counterweight on a scale the country is fighting to keep level as slavery's question presses west with every new statehood. The black soil here will turn out to be among the richest farmland on Earth, and the people who break it will help feed a nation and then the world. No cannon, no treaty signing watched by crowds — just a signature in Washington and, a thousand miles away, a place deciding what kind of state it intends to be.
Source: www.iowapbs.org
Also on this day · 1856
In a Presbyterian manse in the Shenandoah Valley, a child is born who will remember the Civil War from a Georgia boyhood and grow up to be the only president with a doctorate. As the 28th president he will lead the nation through the First World War and stake his health and his name on a League of Nations to end war itself — a dream the Senate refused and the next century kept arguing about.
Source: www.archives.gov