Today in History: Unexpected Beginnings & Birthday Legends

On May twenty-fifth, nineteen seventy-seven, a movie called Star Wars opened in thirty-two theaters across the United States. The studio, 20th Century Fox, was so sure it would fail they bundled it with a more anticipated film, The Other Side of Midnight, forcing theaters to book both. They thought they were hiding a disaster. Instead, they accidentally launched a galaxy. And that’s the thing about looking back at any given day. The moments that will one day define an era almost never announce themselves. They arrive quietly, sometimes as a sci-fi movie no one believes in, or as a meeting that almost didn’t happen.

And sometimes, they arrive with the terrible, world-changing clarity of a knee on a neck. This single date, May twenty-fifth, holds all of that. It’s a day of beginnings, of endings, and of promises—both kept and catastrophically broken. Let’s sweep across the calendar for a moment. Because the day that gave us "A New Hope" also gave us so much more. One hundred and ninety years before Star Wars, on this exact date in 1787, the Constitutional Convention finally got started in Philadelphia. It was supposed to begin on May fourteenth, but for eleven days, not enough delegates had shown up.

They were just… trickling in. You can just imagine the frustration. James Madison, pacing around Independence Hall, wondering if this whole crazy idea of inventing a country was going to fizzle out because of bad roads and apathy. But on May twenty-fifth, a quorum was finally reached. The doors were shut, the windows nailed closed for secrecy, and the immense, improbable work of building America began. And just as one group was trying to define a new form of government, a man was born who would try to define a new form of American self. On May twenty-fifth, 1803, Ralph Waldo Emerson came into the world.

He’s the one who would later tell us to trust ourselves, that "to be great is to be misunderstood." It’s an idea that feels right at home with both rebellious Jedi and rebellious colonists. The day also holds these incredible moments of pure, distilled spectacle. On May twenty-fifth, 1935, a fading Babe Ruth, playing for the Boston Braves, hit the final three home runs of his career in a single game at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. The last one, number seven hundred and fourteen, was a monster shot—the first ball ever to be hit completely out of that ballpark.

It was the perfect, mythic ending. A final, titanic roar from the greatest player the game had ever known. Twenty-six years later, in 1961, another mythic promise was made. On this day, President John F. Kennedy stood before Congress and declared that America "should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." Think about that audacity! At the time, the U.S. had a grand total of fifteen minutes of human spaceflight experience. It was like a toddler promising to win a marathon.

But he said it. He put the target on the wall for everyone to see. And then there are the cultural endings. On May twenty-fifth, 2011, the final episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show aired after twenty-five seasons. For a quarter-century, she had been the country's therapist, its book club moderator, its conscience. The end of that show was the end of a certain kind of shared American conversation. But we have to come back to the promise of 1787. Because on May twenty-fifth, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a forty-six-year-old man named George Floyd was murdered by a police officer.

His death, filmed by a bystander, ignited a firestorm of protest that swept across the globe. It forced a brutal, long-overdue reckoning with the gap between the ideals written down in that secret room in Philadelphia and the reality lived by so many Americans. It was a moment of profound horror that became a beginning of its own—a global movement for justice that redefined our present. All on the same day. So let’s go back. Let’s put two of these moments side-by-side, because I think they speak to each other in a way that is just… wonderful and deeply revealing.

Philadelphia, 1787. And a movie theater, 1977. Both are stories about creating a new world. Imagine being in that room in Philadelphia. It’s hot. The windows are sealed to keep spies and reporters out. You have fifty-five men—all white, all men of property—trying to do something that has never been done. They’re trying to build a large-scale republic that isn’t doomed to collapse into tyranny or chaos, which is what every history book they’d ever read told them would happen. They weren’t gods. They were flawed, brilliant, biased men, arguing ferociously over every single detail.

They were creating a story. A national myth. "We the People." A government of checks and balances. A republic. They were writing the script for a nation. And the core tension in that script, the central conflict that they couldn't solve, was slavery. They kicked that can down the road, writing compromises and euphemisms into their document to hold their fragile union together. They built a foundational promise of liberty on a bedrock of profound unfreedom. And we have been living in the tension of that contradiction ever since. The story they told was powerful, but it was incomplete.

Now, jump forward one hundred and ninety years. May twenty-fifth, 1977. You’re sitting in a darkened theater. You’ve probably never heard of George Lucas. The movie starts. No gentle opening credits. Just a blast of John Williams’ score and the words, "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...." And then… that Star Destroyer. That enormous, triangular ship that just keeps coming, and coming, and coming, filling the entire screen. It’s a moment of cinematic awe that no one had ever experienced before. It completely redefined the scale of what a movie could feel like.

What was Star Wars, really? It was a fairy tale. A simple, powerful story about a farm boy, a princess, and a rogue who team up to fight an evil empire. It was about hope. It was about believing you could take on an impossibly powerful system and win. It was, in its own way, a revolutionary story. And it landed in an America that desperately needed it. The seventies were a decade of cynicism—Watergate, Vietnam, economic anxiety. The heroes of the complex, gritty films of the early seventies were anti-heroes. They were paranoid, they were defeated.

And then, here comes Luke Skywalker. A hero who is just… good! A story where the line between right and wrong is bright and clear. It was a story that America was starving for. A myth. Just like the one written in Philadelphia. A story that told us who we wanted to be: the scrappy rebels, the good guys, the ones fighting for freedom. Here’s the connection that I find so beautiful. Both the founders in 1787 and George Lucas in 1977 understood the power of a foundational myth. A story that gives you a world. The founders gave us a political vocabulary—federalism, separation of powers, liberty.

Lucas gave us a cultural vocabulary—the Force, Jedi, the Dark Side, Lightsabers. Both were acts of world-building that were so successful, we can’t imagine our world without them. But myths are not static. They have to be fought for. They have to be re-interpreted. The promise of "We the People" was not a finished product in 1787. It was an argument, just beginning. And the fight to expand the definition of "the People"—to include the enslaved, to include women, to include all citizens—is the central drama of American history. The events of May twenty-fifth, 2020, were not a departure from the American story; they were a direct and brutal confrontation with its oldest, most painful contradiction.

George Floyd’s death demanded that we ask what the words written on May twenty-fifth, 1787, actually mean. Right now. Looking back, we can see May twenty-fifth as a day that crystallizes this incredible human need to create new frameworks for living. To tell ourselves stories about who we are and what we believe in. Sometimes that story is a constitution, hammered out in a hot, secret room. Sometimes it’s a blockbuster film that gives us a new hope. And sometimes, a tragedy on a street corner forces us to confront the stories we’ve been telling ourselves, and to demand a better one.

The past isn't a collection of relics. It's a live wire. The arguments started in Philadelphia in 1787 are not over. The need for stories of hope we felt in 1977 is not gone. And the call for justice that rang out in 2020 is still echoing. All of it lives right here with us, now. History isn’t what was. History is what is.