After nearly four months of secret debate in the sweltering Pennsylvania State House, 39 of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the finished document. Benjamin Franklin, 81 and ailing, reportedly wept as he signed, and famously told onlookers he was confident the carved sun on Washington's chair was rising, not setting. The document then went to the states for a ratification fight that would take nearly a year.
General Robert E. Lee's first invasion of the North collided with George McCellan's Army of the Potomac along Antietam Creek. Fighting surged through a cornfield, a sunken farm road that became known as Bloody Lane, and a stone bridge later called Burnside Bridge. The battle ended in tactical stalemate, but Lee's retreat gave Lincoln the victory he needed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation days later.
Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's plan sent over 34,000 British and American airborne troops by parachute and glider to capture a string of bridges culminating at Arnhem, opening a corridor into Germany's industrial heartland. British 1st Airborne Division landed too far from Arnhem's bridge and met unexpectedly strong German panzer forces, leading to a costly nine-day battle that ended in withdrawal.
After thirteen days of secluded negotiations brokered by U.S. President Jimmy Carter at the Camp David presidential retreat, Sadat and Begin agreed to a framework for peace between their nations and for broader Middle East negotiations. The agreement led directly to the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, though it drew fierce condemnation from much of the Arab world and contributed to Sadat's assassination three years later.
