“When I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor”
November 14, 1851, brought the publication of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, a classic chock-full of American themes from its opening pages: the urge to strike out for frontiers, the dignity of the common man, and a democratic spirit of equality.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul . . . I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. . . .

I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. . . . No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. . . . [Yet] however the old sea-captains may order me about – however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way – either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.
American History Parade
1851
Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick is published.
1910
Eugene Fly becomes the first pilot to take off from a ship, the USS Birmingham, anchored off Hampton Roads, Virginia.
1935
President Franklin D. Roosevelt declares the Philippine Islands to be a self-governing commonwealth (which gains full independence in 1946).
1972
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above 1,000 for the first time, ending the trading session at 1,003.16.