r/USHistory

On This Day, August 20, 1977, NASA launched Voyager 2 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard a Titan IIIE-Centaur rocket. The spacecraft began what would become one of humanity's greatest journeys through the Solar System.

Voyager 2 was originally designed to explore the outer planets, taking advantage of a rare alignment that allowed the spacecraft to use the gravity of one planet to help propel it toward the next.

It first flew past Jupiter in July 1979, followed by Saturn in August 1981. But its journey didn't end there.

Voyager 2 became the first human-made spacecraft to fly past Uranus, reaching the planet in January 1986. During the encounter, it discovered 10 previously unknown moons and two new rings.

Then, in August 1989, Voyager 2 became the first spacecraft to fly past Neptune, discovering new moons, rings, and the planet's famous Great Dark Spot.

This made Voyager 2 the only spacecraft ever to visit all four of the Solar System's giant planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

And then came another historic milestone.

On November 5, 2018, Voyager 2 crossed the heliopause and entered interstellar space, becoming only the second human-made spacecraft to do so, after Voyager 1.

Think about that…

When Voyager 2 left Earth in 1977, personal computers were only beginning to emerge, and humanity had never explored Uranus or Neptune up close.

Yet this tiny spacecraft kept traveling.

🚀 Launched: August 20, 1977

🪐 Jupiter: 1979

🪐 Saturn: 1981

🔵 Uranus: 1986

🔵 Neptune: 1989

🌌 Interstellar space: 2018

Nearly five decades after leaving Earth, Voyager 2 remains one of humanity's most remarkable explorers.

We sent it into the unknown… and it kept going.

William Hooper grew up in Boston, went to Harvard, and studied law under James Otis, the man whose arguments against arbitrary British authority essentially invented the constitutional language of colonial resistance. Then he moved to North Carolina, became deputy attorney general, and promptly spent several years defending colonial government against backcountry farmers who thought the system was corrupt and rigged against them.

The Regulators weren't wrong about everything. They were protesting real abuses: corrupt local officials, excessive fees, taxes that hit small farmers harder than eastern elites. But their resistance turned disorderly and sometimes violent, and Hooper sided with Governor Tryon's government against them. In 1770, a crowd of Regulators in Hillsborough grabbed him and dragged him through the streets.

Hooper wasn't a hypocrite for siding with the government that day. He genuinely believed that legitimate authority deserved obedience and that disorder was its own kind of tyranny. That belief is actually what makes his later trajectory interesting. He didn't abandon his principles when he moved toward independence. He applied them to a different target.

By 1773 and 1774, Parliament's actions were convincing him that Britain itself had become the greater threat to constitutional government. The same framework he had used to defend the colonial government against the Regulators now pointed toward resistance against the Crown. When Parliament closed Boston's harbor after the Tea Party, his New England roots became unusually visible. He helped rally North Carolinians behind his native city, presided over meetings that pushed the colony toward its first Provincial Congress, and started writing publicly against Crown policy.

By 1774 he was already telling friends privately that the colonies were moving rapidly toward independence, which at that point was still a genuinely radical thing to say out loud.

North Carolina moved faster than almost anyone. On April 12, 1776, the Halifax Resolves authorized its delegates in Congress to support independence, the first formal authorization from any colony. Hooper had helped get it there, a Massachusetts-born lawyer who had once defended North Carolina's colonial government against internal rebellion, now helping that same colony become the first to push for a break with Britain.

The other signer worth knowing from this blog is Lyman Hall, who reached Philadelphia by an even stranger route. Hall was a Connecticut Yankee, Yale educated, originally trained as a Congregational minister before switching to medicine, who ended up in the Midway district of coastal Georgia as part of a transplanted New England community. Georgia was one of the most hesitant colonies, economically dependent on Britain and genuinely vulnerable. When the First Continental Congress met in 1774, Georgia sent nobody. But St. John's Parish, where Hall lived, wanted in anyway. They selected Hall to represent them in Philadelphia before Georgia itself had agreed to be represented. He showed up to Congress as the delegate of one parish inside a colony that hadn't officially joined the movement yet. Georgia eventually caught up. After the Revolution, St. John's Parish was renamed Liberty County in recognition of how far ahead of everyone else it had been.

Both men paid for their signatures after the fact. When the war moved south, British forces damaged Hooper's property near Wilmington and burned one of his houses. His family was forced inland during the British occupation of 1781. Hall lost his property when the British captured Savannah in 1778 and spent years displaced before returning to Georgia, where he was eventually elected governor.

The full story of both men is on the Virtual Wayback blog and there's a video on the YouTube channel going deeper. You can also talk directly with Hooper and Hall on Virtual Wayback.

What I keep coming back to is the Regulator episode. Hooper got dragged through the streets for defending the wrong government, then spent the next few years figuring out which government actually deserved defending. Does that make him more credible as a revolutionary than someone who had been against Britain from the start? And is there an argument that the people he opposed in 1770, the backcountry farmers protesting a corrupt system, had a better case for rebellion than the colonial elites who eventually declared independence?

1st Painting (1st and 2nd Image): Washington Crossing the Delaware (James Monroe is the one holding the flag)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Crossing_the_Delaware_(1851_paintings)

2nd Painting (3rd and 4th Image): The Capture of the Hessians at Trenton, December 26, 1776 (James Monroe is the one wounded on his shoulder)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Capture_of_the_Hessians_at_Trenton,_December_26,_1776

3rd Painting (5th and 6th Image): General George Washington Resigning His Commission (James Monroe is the one seated next to Thomas Jefferson)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_George_Washington_Resigning_His_Commission

4th Painting (7th, 8th, and 9th Image): The Coronation of Napoleon (Replica from 1808-1822) (James Monroe is at the crowd on the top right)

https://collections.chateauversailles.fr/?permid=permobj_efb1c634-b95f-402f-8c6f-12848982844c#/query/eda9a168-4f06-48e1-804b-5f8e60e1f54d

On This Day, August 19, 1964, something happened high above Earth that would help change the way the world communicates.

NASA launched Syncom III, the world's first truly geostationary communications satellite.

Unlike satellites that constantly moved across the sky, Syncom III was placed into an orbit where it appeared to remain stationary above one point on Earth.

That meant communication stations could keep their antennas pointed at the same place in the sky.

But Syncom III had an even bigger moment coming…

Just two months later, it helped transmit live television coverage of the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games across the Pacific to the United States.

For the first time, millions of people in America could watch events happening on the other side of the Pacific almost as they happened.

🌎 One satellite.

📡 One orbit.

📺 A world suddenly felt much smaller.

Syncom III helped demonstrate the enormous potential of 24-hour satellite communications and paved the way for the global communications systems we rely on today.

🚀 Before smartphones.

📺 Before global satellite TV.

🌎 There was Syncom III.

The world was getting connected.

The event was intended to be a harmless fundraising publicity stunt, but the balloons drifted back over the city and Lake Erie and landed in the surrounding area, causing problems for traffic and a nearby airport. The event also interfered with a United States Coast Guard search for two boaters who were later found drowned.

--- 1920: The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, giving women the right to vote: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

--- "The Fight For Women's Suffrage". That is the title of one of the episodes of my podcast: History Analyzed. After seven decades of protests, petitions, and civil disobedience, the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, granting women the right to vote. Learn about Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, and the countless other women who fought against a deeply sexist and patriarchal society for women's suffrage. These women endured arrests and forced feedings to obtain their right to vote. You can find History Analyzed on every podcast app.

--- link to Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3XhMPPpgzqD1tY49xb9hsY

--- link to Apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-fight-for-womens-suffrage/id1632161929?i=1000577454866

 

Watch full video in Youtube

Most accounts of the Battle of Long Island focus on the tactical mistakes or the daring night crossing itself, but looking at the actual logs and diaries from August 27–30, 1776, the physical mechanics of the escape come down to three specific weather events:

- A two-day Nor'easter that physically trapped British square-rigged warships in the lower bay from sailing up the East River.

- An 11:00 PM wind shift to the southwest, which let John Glover’s Marblehead fishermen raise sails on their flatboats instead of rowing against heavy current all night.

- A heavy, localized dawn fog that sat right over the East River and ferry landing while the British encampment just a few hundred yards away was under clear skies.

On This Day, August 18, 1590, English governor John White returned to Roanoke Island, North Carolina, after being away for nearly three years due to war with Spain.

He expected to find his daughter, granddaughter Virginia Dare, and the other colonists waiting for him.

Instead…

Everyone was gone.

There were no bodies.

No signs of a battle.

No explanation.

The settlement had been abandoned.

But then White discovered something that made the mystery even more fascinating.

The word “CRO” had been carved into a tree.

And at the abandoned settlement, the word “CROATOAN” had been carved into a post.

Croatoan referred to the Native American people and the area now known as Hatteras Island.

White believed the colonists may have relocated there, but before he could properly search the area, a storm forced him to abandon the attempt.

More than 430 years later, historians still cannot definitively say what happened to the Lost Colony.

And there's one eerie coincidence…

August 18, 1590, was Virginia Dare's third birthday.

The grandfather who had left to find supplies returned on her birthday…

…and she was gone.

What happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke?

No one knows for certain.

The futuristic seats you see are known as Tel-a-Chairs. They were invented by John Rice, an American mechanical engineer and prolific inventor from Bordentown, New Jersey.

These individual entertainment stations operated with coins; depositing 10 cents granted 10 minutes of television, while a 25-cent fee allowed viewing of a half-hour broadcast.