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Lincoln and Douglas meet on an outdoor platform in Ottawa; 12,000 show up

Three hours of argument over slavery's spread west, with a Senate seat and a stenographer's pencil deciding what the nation reads tomorrow.

By August 1858, the fight over slavery in the western territories had split the old parties and made Stephen Douglas's doctrine of popular sovereignty the central question in Illinois politics. On August 21, in Ottawa, Douglas and Republican challenger Abraham Lincoln met for the first of seven debates for Douglas's U.S. Senate seat. Some 12,000 people stood in the afternoon heat as Douglas accused Lincoln of abolitionism and Lincoln answered that popular sovereignty would spread slavery rather than contain it. Runners rushed the stenographers' notes to trains bound for Chicago, and within hours the exchange was being telegraphed to newspapers across the country east of the Rockies…

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More from August 21

Eisenhower signs the proclamation: Hawaii is now the 50th state

The order follows a territorial vote in which 94 percent said yes to joining the Union.

Marine Corps' first Black Medal of Honor recipient is honored in Washington

Eighteen months after he smothered a grenade to save his platoon, James Anderson Jr.'s parents accept the medal in his place.

Delegates gather at a Georgetown estate to sketch the peace that follows the war

Cordell Hull opens the talks that will draft the blueprint for a new world body.

The spacecraft was set to switch on its transmitter for orbital insertion; it never called home.

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More from Expansion & Antebellum

The crevice gives way, and Drake's drill strikes oil at 69.5 feet

Townsfolk had been calling the operation Drake's Folly for over a year.

California enters the Union, skipping territorial status altogether

Fillmore's signature caps a two-year rush from Mexican territory to free state, no in-between step required.

Scott's cannon open on Chapultepec at dawn; the castle has nowhere to hide

A day-long bombardment of the hilltop fortress outside Mexico City sets up tomorrow's infantry assault.

Harriet Tubman slips away from a Maryland plantation, bound for Pennsylvania

Her brothers Ben and Henry start north with her, then turn back; she keeps walking alone.

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