In 1956, Congress approved the Federal Highway Act, which allocated more than $25 billion dollars to build 41,000 miles of public highway, crisscrossing and uniting the Continental United States in an entirely new way. The first transcontinental road, from Washington D.C. to San Francisco, was built by the US Army in 1919, though the nation had very limited potential for expanding or even maintaining its existing infrastructure until the 1950s.
On June 10, 1752, Benjamin Franklin made a famous kite flight in a thunderstorm, allowing it to be struck by lightning and collecting the resulting electric charge in a Leyden jar, proving the electrical nature of lightning. Franklin's demonstration was one of many in his innovative life, and has capture popular imagination like little else.
On May 29, 1913, Igor Stravinsky's masterwork Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) premiered at the Théatre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, outraging, scandalizing, and delighting audiences who had never seen or heard anything quite like it before--and, as there was no reliable record of Vaslav Nijinksy's choreography or Nicholas Roerich's costumes or sceneries, have not seen or heard anything quite like it since.
On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided on the case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, ruling that racial segregation in public educational facilities is unconstitutional. In the decades that followed, the integration process has been in many places slow, dangerous, or even functionally nonexistent.
On May 22, 1843, the inaugural wagon train of the Great Emigration departed from Independence, Missouri, bound for the Pacific coast. A group of 1,000 settlers (along with 1,000 head of cattle) began a five-month journey across the Western half of the continent, arriving in Oregon in late October.
