Good morning, Whitewater.
Sunday in the Whippet City will be mostly sunny, with a high of eighty-one, and just a one-in-five chance of afternoon showers. Sunrise is 5:28 AM and sunset 8:33 PM. The moon is in a waning gibbous phase with ninety-seven percent of its visible disk illuminated.
They’ve had a season of widespread forest fires in Canada, and the effects of these fires are so clear that they may be seen from space —
For more about the photograph and the fires, see Smoke From Canada’s Copious Wildfires As Seen From Space.
On this day in 1787, Congress under the Articles of Confederation passes the Northwest Ordinance:
The Northwest Ordinance (formally An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States, North-West of the River Ohio, and also known as the Freedom Ordinance or The Ordinance of 1787) was an act of the Congress of the Confederation of the United States, passed July 13, 1787. The primary effect of the ordinance was the creation of the Northwest Territory, the firstorganized territory of the United States, from lands south of the Great Lakes, north and west of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi River.
On August 7, 1789, President George Washington signed the Northwest Ordinance of 1789 into law after the newly created U.S. Congress reaffirmed the Ordinance with slight modifications under theConstitution. The Ordinance purported to be not merely legislation that could later be amended by Congress, but rather “the following articles shall be considered as Articles of compact between the original States and the people and states in the said territory, and forever remain unalterable, unless by common consent….”[1]
Arguably the single most important piece of legislation passed by members of the earlier Continental Congresses other than the Declaration of Independence, it established the precedent by which the federal government would be sovereign and expand westward across North America with the admission of new states, rather than with the expansion of existing states and their established sovereignty under the Articles of Confederation. It is the most important legislation that Congress has passed with regard to American public domain lands.[2]