Oct 7, 1763: King George III drew a line down the spine of the Appalachian Mountains and told American colonists they couldn't cross it. Britain had just won the French and Indian War and taken control of everything east of the Mississippi. That spring, Native nations led by the Ottawa war chief Pontiac rose up across the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley and captured or attacked British forts all over the frontier. London wanted to stop the bloodshed and avoid paying for endless Indian wars. So the Proclamation of 1763 reserved all the land west of the mountains for Native peoples. Colonists already living out there were told to leave. Nobody could buy Native land except through the Crown. The colonists were furious. Many of them had fought in the war specifically to open up that land. Veterans had been promised land grants out there. Speculators had already staked claims. One of those speculators was George Washington, who privately called the proclamation a temporary measure and kept quietly surveying western land anyway. Thousands of settlers ignored it and crossed the mountains regardless. The line never really held. But it was one of the first times Americans felt London was deciding their future without them, and that feeling kept growing for the next 13 years.

Oct 6, 1683: Thirteen German families stepped off a ship called the Concord in Philadelphia and started the first German settlement in America. They came from Krefeld, along the Rhine, and they were Mennonites and Quakers looking for a place where they could practice their faith without being persecuted. William Penn had been recruiting settlers for his new colony, and he promised religious freedom. Their leader, a young lawyer named Francis Daniel Pastorius, laid out a town a few miles outside Philadelphia. They called it Germantown. Five years later, in 1688, Pastorius and three other men in Germantown wrote a petition against slavery and sent it to their Quaker meeting. They argued it was wrong to buy and sell human beings no matter their color. It was the first formal protest against slavery in the American colonies. The Quakers set it aside, and it wasn't rediscovered until over a century later. Millions of Germans followed. Today more Americans claim German ancestry than any other. In 1983, 300 years after the Concord landed, Oct 6 became German-American Day.