The cover-up is usually worse than whatever it is covering up, and, sometimes, the initial attempt at a cover-up is also minor, but the attempts to cover-up the first cover-up? Those are what breed suspicions. On this date in 1947, the Roswell (New Mexico) Daily Record published this front-page headline: “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.” The “RAAF” in the headline is “Roswell Area Air Force.”

Since a few weeks before, the entire country had been “flying saucer” crazy, so this was just one of many similar headlines from the spring and summer of 1947. But this headline, this story, involved the military, which simultaneously supplied the public with two mutually exclusive thoughts: 1. a sense that authorities are in charge and are telling us the truth, and 2. the feeling that authorities are hiding something and deciding for us what truths we can handle.
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Announcing: The Greatest Forward Step in the Baking Industry Since Bread was Wrapped—Sliced Kleen Maid Bread—an ad placed in Chillicothe, Missouri, newspapers announcing the newest greatest thing, to be sold starting July 7, 1928.

The Chillicothe Baking Company started selling loaves of sliced bread on this date in 1928. An inventor from Davenport, Iowa, Otto Rohwedder, had dedicated years of his life to perfecting a machine that would slice a loaf of bread. His invention solved problems that only someone who had spent years trying to invent a machine to slice loaves of bread would know needed to be addressed: slice uniformity; a means of holding the loaf together, now that slicing it has ruined the loaf’s structural integrity; protection from drying out, now that the loaf’s insides have been exposed. His machine sliced and wrapped the loaves.
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Why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
 
I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.
[…]
This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today?
 
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim. …—Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852, speech: “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

Frederick Douglass, born a slave, was by 1850 one of America’s most famous abolitionists. (In Europe, he was one of the most famous Americans, period.) On this date in 1852, the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society asked him to speak on the topic “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro.” Some two-thousand five hundred words followed, a speech that whose title is often rendered as “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

Here is James Earl Jones reading a section of the speech, at a 2004 dramatic reading of Howard Zinn’s The People’s History of the United States. Zinn introduces (video after the jump):
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