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Sept 17, 1787: The oldest and shortest written constitution in the world was signed 238 years ago by 39 of the 55 delegates attending the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. As president of the Convention, George Washington was first to sign the document.

With their signatures, the Founding Fathers laid the foundation for the most prosperous and free nation in history - the United States of America.


"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." – John Adams

“The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE.”  – Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Paper No. 22

James McHenry, a Maryland delegate, also kept brief notes of what happened on September 17, 1787.

“Dr. Franklin put a paper into Mr. Wilson’s hand to read containing his reasons for assenting to the constitution. It was plain, insinuating, persuasive-and in any event of the system guarded the Doctors fame,” he wrote.

After the meeting concluded, McHenry noted, “A lady asked Dr. Franklin, ‘Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy?’ A republic, replied the Doctor, if you can keep it.”

Constitution Daily Blog

The purpose of the observance week is to promote study and education about the United States Constitution which was originally adopted by the American Congress of the Confederation on September 17, 1787. Specifically, the Daughter's of the American Revolution state the purpose as:

- Emphasize citizens' responsibilities for protecting and defending the Constitution.
- Inform people that the Constitution is the basis for America's great heritage and the foundation for our way of life.
- Encourage the study of the historical events which led to the framing of the Constitution in September 1787.

Iowa schools first recognized Constitution Day in 1911. In 1917, the Sons of the American Revolution formed a committee to promote Constitution Day. The committee included members such as Calvin Coolidge, John D. Rockefeller, and General John Pershing.

'American Day' Origin (BROADCASTING Telecasting magazine, Jun 28, 1948)


Gray Gordon And His Tic-Toc Rhythm – I Am An American (Shout Wherever You May Be); released on Bluebird Records in June 1940. Arthur Pine had the song introduced on NBC, Mutual, & ABC radio, arranged for an "I Am an American Day" at the 1939 New York World's Fair.




In 1940, Congress designated the third Sunday in May as I Am an American Day. The holiday was promoted through the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service. A 16-minute film, I Am an American, was featured in American theaters as a short feature. In 1947 Hearst Newsreels featured the event on News of the Day. By 1949, governors of all 48 states had issued Constitution Day proclamations. On February 29, 1952, Congress moved the "I am an American Day" observation to September 17 and renamed it "Citizenship Day".

Constitution Week runs annually from September 17 — proclaimed as Constitution Day and Citizenship Day in the United States — through September 23. Constitution Week was officially enacted on August 2, 1956, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower from a congressional resolution petitioned by the Daughters of the American Revolution. The tradition of issuing a Presidential Proclamation designating Constitution Week continues to this day.

Jon McNaughton's "Speak the Truth" painting, featuring Charlie Kirk, was first shared on March 5, 2025. The original was released in June 2023.


More info on the people in the painting and you can purchase a 16x24 framed or frameless print here and different sizes here.


Sept 17, 1862: American Civil War: George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac halts the first invasion of the North by Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia in the single-day Battle of Antietam.

Dawn approached slowly through the fog on September 17, 1862. As soldiers tried to wipe away the dampness, cannons began to roar and sheets of flame burst forth from hundreds of rifles, opening a twelve hour tempest that swept across the rolling farm fields in western Maryland. A clash between North and South that changed the course of the Civil War, helped free over four million Americans, devastated Sharpsburg, and still ranks as the bloodiest one-day battle in American history with a tally of 22,727 dead, wounded, or missing on both sides.

President Lincoln and General McClellan after Battle of Antietam:



Tragedy struck on same day in Sept 17, 1862, the Allegheny Arsenal explosion in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania results in the single largest civilian disaster during the war.

By the time the fire was put out, the lab had been reduced to a pile of smoldering rubble. Seventy-eight workers, mostly young women, were killed. Fifty-four bodies were unidentified, and were buried in a mass grave in the nearby Allegheny Cemetery. Among those killed were 15-year-old munitions assembler Catherine Burkhart, and 17-year-old Margaret Turney.


Excerpt from The Tragedy at Allegheny Arsenal - "A Horrid Moment of a Most Wicked Rebellion":

Ten days after the burial of the unknown dead, Reverend Richard Lea of the Lawrenceville Presbyterian Church, an eyewitness to the violence of September 17, delivered a moving sermon to his congregation. Just as many families in the local community had been left with empty chairs in the home, the church pews there were vacant of three parishioners. Reverend Lea recalled the horrors of that day as if he were still there, hearing the cries of anguished victims and “conversing with so many dying persons in so short a space of time,” which left “a deep impression” on the elderly Lea. Many of the sights Lea encountered, however, were human remains that were “a short time before… life and beauty.” He pondered, in a foreboding tone, about the late devastation and its place within the larger national tragedy, “Who could foretell what the firing of the first gun at Fort Sumter would bring about? It brought about remotely, the catastrophe of Wednesday. And who can tell what more it may bring?

If interested here's a short but bloody gruesome detailed article:

The Tragedy at Allegheny Arsenal - "A Horrid Moment of a Most Wicked Rebellion"


Allegheny Arsenal 1862 Explosion

The western half of the arsenal remained in use through World War I but eventually became obsolete. It was sold to the H. J. Heinz Company in 1926 and subsequently used for various industrial and commercial purposes. The arsenal's former main gate was demolished in 1947 to make more room for delivery trucks, though it remained as a pile of rubble until the site was cleared for a new supermarket in 1961. Most of the western half of the arsenal site is now occupied by the Arsenal 201 condominium complex. Construction crews working on the condominiums uncovered caches of Civil-War-era cannonballs in 2017 and again in 2020.
Allegheny Arsenal wiki

Addon from yesterday's Twilight Zone post... "Creepy." Elizabeth Montgomery on making the TWILIGHT ZONE episode TWO. From a 1961 newspaper story.




Sept 17, 1978: "By your command!" Battlestar Galactica sci-fi ABC-tv series created by Glen A. Larson premiered.

Opening Credit Announcer: "There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe... with tribes of humans... who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians... or the Toltecs... or the Mayans. Some believe there may yet be brothers of man... who even now fight to survive - somewhere beyond the heavens!"

"After the destruction of the Twelve Colonies of Mankind, the last major fighter carrier leads a makeshift fugitive fleet on a desperate search for the legendary planet Earth."

The 3-hour premiere was interrupted partway through by the announcement of the Camp David peace accords, a pair of political agreements signed by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin.






The story was a complete rewrite, by Glen A. Larson, of a pilot he initially called "Adam's Ark", in which Earth was destroyed and the survivors shipped out into space. The Twelve Colonies of Kobol are all named after the signs of the Zodiac, and "Kobol" is a re-working of "Kolob", a star or planet from Mormon holy writings. Naturally, Mormon religion is quite evident in the series. Larson had developed this under the tutelage of Gene L. Coon, one of Star Trek (1966) most highly successful writers, created the Klingons for Star Trek and was the first to introduce the Star Trek Prime Directive, in the Star Trek The Original Series episode "The Return of the Archons". At over $1 million per Battlestar episode, much of that went to special effects, which were reused quite frequently.

The helmets of Colonial warriors were inspired by the headdresses of ancient Egyptian pharaohs. For Galactica pilots, they also featured a bird motif, a quiet homage to Star Trek (1966) creator Gene Roddenberry, who was nicknamed by cast and crew "the Great Bird of the Galaxy".

Glen A. Larson claimed that the series was in the works long before Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977), when a lawsuit was filed against him by 20th Century-Fox and George Lucas. However, Larson has a long history of copycatting successful films and making small screen "knock offs" of them. The writer Harlan Ellison even gave him the nickname "Glen A. Larceny" for the way in which he shamelessly stole ideas. The case was eventually settled out of court in 1983.

The synthesized robotic-sounding voices of the Cylon centurions were done by Michael Santiago using the EMS Vocoder 2000. This device has become extremely difficult to find and very expensive.


The British Electronic Music Studios (EMS) Vocoder 2000 designed by Tim Orr is a signal processing device, which takes two input signals and produces one output. These two signals are known as the 'speech' and the 'excitation'. The output from the Vocoder is a signal which contains a proportion of the harmonic structure of the excitation and the forrnant structure (the articulation) of the speech. Thus it is possible to make normally inarticulate sounds speak. For instance, if you were to take speech and an organ, it would be possible to make a 'talking organ'. Here's a Demo track of the EMS 2000 Vocoder if you want to hear the synthesized robotic sound.



Sept 17, 1987: CDR Philip Voss set a record for the longest flight of a carrier aircraft by flying an S-3 Viking 4,002 miles in 13 hours during Operation Goldenrod. The secret mission transported Fawaz Younis from USS Saratoga in the Mediterranean to the U.S. so that he could be arraigned in federal court for acts of terrorism. Younis had been captured on a yacht in international waters by undercover FBI agents who were working under new antiterrorism laws. Younis was the first overseas rendition of an international terrorist. He was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison. After serving 16 years in prison he was released and deported to Lebanon in March 2005.

The patch must have been designed by a spook because no credit for the Navy.


Viking Lore Post | Operation Goldenrod |  Retired agent Oliver “Buck” Revell reviews Operation Goldenrod

The daring capture is told & reenacted on an episode of The FBI Files