Man walked on the moon for the first time 55 years ago today, July 20, as America’s Apollo 11 mission achieved a dream bigger than Earth itself.  

The world was riveted by the event. 

An estimated 650 million people — nearly 20% of the entire human population at the time — watched the moon landing on July 20, 1969.

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"That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," proclaimed U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong as he stepped down the ladder of the Apollo 11 lunar module to become the first human to set foot on the moon. 

He was followed soon after by Buzz Aldrin. 

It was a landmark achievement in human history.

Meant for all humanity, it still stands as an undeniable example of American exceptionalism. It's an innate belief that no dream is too big, according to one noted historian.  

"Americans historically get up in the morning with the belief that they have the ability and they have the capacity, they have the notion and the gumption and the spit and the polish, that they can make the future better for their children," World War II scholar and Ronald Reagan biographer Craig Shirley told Fox News Digital.

"And then they’ll work to achieve that dream. I don’t think that’s true in other nations."

American exceptionalism doesn’t necessarily mean the U.S. is better than other nations, but it does mean "America is different," said Shirley. 

Here are 7 examples of exceptional American ideas and achievements that changed the world. 

Armstrong and Aldrin, both former American military pilots, were the first men to walk on the moon. 

But not the last. The U.S. completed five more manned moon-landing missions. 

Illinois native and Apollo 17 astronaut Eugene Cernan, who died in 2017, was the last man to set foot on the lunar surface.

"This was one of the proudest moments of my life," Cernan said after planting the last American flag on the moon in Dec. 1972.  

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A total of 12 human beings have set foot on the moon. 

All of them were Americans. 

The Declaration of Independence was more than just an audacious intellectual assault on the King of England’s authority. 

Its signature statement that "all men are created equal" was an exceptional call for independence and individual liberty that undermined the entire world order. 

Power since the dawn of human history had been claimed by hereditary rule or seized by the sword.

The Founding Fathers kicked sand in the face of those global bullies.

Human rights, they shouted, came from the Creator himself and His divine authority trumped the rule of king and tyrant.

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"All men are created equal" was the most radical and most exceptional statement of political defiance in human history. It created a geopolitical earthquake that toppled global monarchies and reshaped humanity's relationship with governments. 

"Since 1776, there have been approximately 120 declarations of independence made by different countries and different peoples," reports the website of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. 

The modern Olympiad was dusted off from Ancient Greece and emerged in 1896 "to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind," according to the Olympic charter.

The spirit of the games opposes outward displays of jingoistic patriotism. But one nation has easily dominated the international athletic competitions. 

You don’t need to wave the flag. Simply look at the results.

The United States has captured 3,105 Olympic medals in all games, including 1,229 golden honors, according to Olympedia.org. In both cases, the American medal count is well ahead of No. 2 Soviet Union/Russia (1,204 medals, 473 gold). 

America is at its best in the summer. The U.S. has topped the medal count in 16 of 28 Summer Olympics – including a streak of seven straight summer games heading into Paris. 

Germany and Japan fielded unstoppable armies in World War II that had conquered nearly all of Europe, Asia and North Africa by Dec. 1941. 

The calculus of combat changed when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The unprecedented industrial capacity of the United States came barreling overseas.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it America’s "Arsenal of Democracy."

The United States produced ships, tanks, artillery, trucks and every manner of food, supplies and equipment in numbers that overwhelmed the production of the Axis powers.

America also had the logistical capacity to ship equipment over land-sea supply lines up to 10,000 miles long and to feed, clothe and equip both Allied forces and hungry and homeless wartime refugees. 

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Germany's and Japan’s once fearsome armed forces were obliterated, conquered nations reclaimed, and the ruthless leadership of both nations toppled. 

"America fights away games, we don't fight home games. And that requires us to power across two great moats called the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans," John Curatola, PhD, senior historian at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, told Fox News Digital. 

The U.S. was the only nation with the ability to project dominant combat power across two oceans in World War II — and still the only nation with that capability today, said Curatola. 

Feelings of rage and revenge scarred the American psyche as the horrific human toll of the Civil War continued to climb. It’s still the deadliest war in U.S. history.

President Abraham Lincoln tempered the emotional fires with a concept that would prove unprecedented in the history of warfare. 

Victory should be followed by forgiveness and compassion, rather than plunder and punishment. 

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive … to bind up the nation's wounds," Lincoln said in his second inaugural address. 

The "deeply Christian concept" of war followed by forgiveness, said historian Shirley, shaped the Reconstruction Era after the Civil War, uniting a nation after unspeakable slaughter. 

It has guided U.S. foreign policy in the nearly 200 years to follow, most notably after World War II.

Curatola of the National World War II Museum cited a quote by Secretary of State Colin Powell to sum up the exceptional American concept of victory followed by charity and not malice.

"The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return," said Powell before a crowd in England. 

American innovation and entrepreneurship have made the United States the global leader of the digital age. 

The world’s six largest tech companies — Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Google, Amazon and Meta — were all founded by American entrepreneurs.

They have a combined market capitalization of nearly $15 trillion (with a "T") and impact the daily lives of billions of people around the world.

Late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs famously equated the advance of technology with a value at the heart of American exceptionalism: faith in the human spirit. 

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"Technology is nothing," Jobs said in an often-cited 1994 interview with Rolling Stone magazine. 

"What's important is that you have faith in people, that they're basically good and smart — and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them. Tools are just tools. They either work, or they don't work."

It took an American to propose the audacious idea that humans could harness time.

Humanity since the dawn of — well, time — kept time locally based upon the movement of the Earth around the sun. It was noon when the sun reached its highest point of the day – high noon. 

Charles Dowd, an education administrator from Saratoga Springs, New York, conceived a plan so radical it’s hard to believe there was an era when his vision for the world didn’t exist. 

He created time zones.

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He hatched the idea in 1883 as a way to bring sanity to train schedules as railroads began to sprawl across the vast North American continent. Each city kept its own time, with about 300 loosely regulated time zones across the United States.

Dowd's time zone concept quickly spread around the world. Time zones now regulate everything from airline schedules, to international commerce to the daily lives of 8 billion people.

"To regulate the time of this Empire Republic of the World is an undertaking of magnificent proportions," the Indianapolis Sentinel wrote in 1883. 

"The sun is no longer to boss the job. It is a revolt, a rebellion."

It's a rebellious example of audacious American exceptionalism: It's the belief that we can reach for the moon and tame time.

A Missouri woman who spent 43 years in prison after incriminating herself in a 1980 murder while she was a psychiatric patient has been freed from prison despite attempts in the last month by Missouri’s attorney general to keep her behind bars.

Sandra Hemme, 64, was the longest held wrongly incarcerated woman known in the U.S., according to her legal team at the Innocence Project, after she was found guilty of killing 31-year-old library worker Patricia Jeschke more than 40 years ago.

But a judge overturned the conviction last month, agreeing that her lawyers had established evidence of her innocence and that a former police officer was the likely killer.

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Hemme left a prison in Chillicothe on Friday and was embraced by family and supporters at a nearby park. She hugged her sister, daughter and granddaughter.

"You were just a baby when your mom sent me a picture of you," a smiling Hemme said to her granddaughter. "You looked just like your mamma when you were little and you still look like her."

Her granddaughter laughed and said, "I get that a lot."

Hemme declined to speak to reporters immediately after her release, which came despite Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, fighting her release in the courts. Bailey had argued that Hemme represents a safety risk to herself and others. 

Hemme received a 10-year sentence in 1996 for attacking a prison worker with a razor blade, and a two-year sentence in 1984 for "offering to commit violence", with Bailey arguing that Hemme should start serving those sentences now.

During a court hearing Friday, Judge Ryan Horsman threatened to hold the attorney general's office in contempt and said that if Hemme wasn’t released within hours, Bailey himself would have to appear in court Tuesday morning.

The judge also scolded Bailey’s office for calling the warden and telling prison officials not to release Hemme after he ordered her to be freed on her own recognizance. 

Hemme’s attorney, Sean O’Brien, criticized the delay of her release. 

"It was too easy to convict an innocent person and way harder than it should have been to get her out, even to the point of court orders being ignored," O’Brien said. "It shouldn’t be this hard to free an innocent person."

When Hemme was initially questioned about Jeschke's death, her lawyers say she was shackled in wrist restraints and so heavily sedated to the point that she "could not hold her head up straight" or "articulate anything beyond monosyllabic responses."

The lawyers said in a petition seeking Hemme's exoneration previously that authorities ignored her "wildly contradictory" statements and suppressed evidence implicating then-police officer Michael Holman, who attempted to use Jeschke's card. Holman died in 2015.

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The judge wrote that "no evidence whatsoever outside of Ms. Hemme's unreliable statements connects her to the crime."

"In contrast, this Court finds that the evidence directly ties Holman to this crime and murder scene," the judge wrote.

On Nov. 13, 1980, Jeschke missed work and her concerned mother climbed through a window in her apartment and discovered her nude body on the floor in a pool of blood. Jeschke's hands were tied behind her back with a telephone cord, a pair of pantyhose was wrapped around her throat and a knife was under her head.

Hemme was not being investigated in connection with the killing until she showed up nearly two weeks later carrying a knife at the home of a nurse who once treated her and refused to leave.

Police located Hemme in a closet and transported her back to St. Joseph’s Hospital. She had been hospitalized several times starting when she began hearing voices at the age of 12.

Hemme had been discharged from that same hospital the day before Jeschke's body was found, and arrived at her parents' house later that night after hitchhiking more than 100 miles across the state. The timing seemed suspicious to law enforcement, and Hemme was subsequently questioned.

Hemme was being treated with antipsychotic drugs that had triggered involuntary muscle spasms when she was first questioned. She complained that her eyes were rolling back in her head, according to her lawyers' petition.

Detectives said Hemme appeared "mentally confused" and not fully able to understand their questions.

"Each time the police extracted a statement from Ms. Hemme it changed dramatically from the last, often incorporating explanations of facts the police had just recently uncovered," her attorneys wrote in the petition.

Hemme eventually purported that she witnessed a man named Joseph Wabski kill Jeschke.

Wabski, whom Hemme met when they both stayed in the state hospital's detoxification unit, was initially charged with capital murder before prosecutors quickly learned he was at an alcohol treatment center in Topeka, Kansas, at the time and dropped the charges against him.

After learning Wabski was not the killer, Hemme cried and claimed she was the killer.

Police were also starting to look at Holman as a suspect. About a month after the killing, Holman was arrested for falsely reporting his pickup truck was stolen and collecting an insurance payout. The same truck was seen near the crime scene and Holman's alibi, in which he claimed to have spent the night with a woman at a nearby motel, could not be confirmed.

Holman, who was ultimately fired and has since died, had also attempted to use Jeschke's credit card at a camera store in Kansas City, Missouri, on the same day her body was discovered. Holman claimed he found the credit card in a purse that had been left in a ditch.

During a search of Holman's home, police found a pair of gold horseshoe-shaped earrings in a closet, which Jeschke's father said he recognized as a pair he bought for her. Police also found jewelry stolen from another woman during a burglary earlier that year.

The four-day investigation into Holman then ended abruptly, and Hemme's attorneys said they were never provided many of the details uncovered.

Hemme wrote to her parents on Christmas Day in 1980, saying she might as well change her plea to guilty.

"Even though I’m innocent, they want to put someone away, so they can say the case is solved," Hemme wrote.

"Just let it end," she added. "I'm tired."

The following spring, Hemme agreed to plead guilty to capital murder in exchange for the death penalty being taken out of consideration.

But the judge initially rejected her guilty plea because she failed to share enough details about the incident.

Her attorney told her that her chance to avoid being sentenced to death relied on having the judge to accept her guilty plea. Following a recess and some coaching, she gave the judge more details.

The plea was later thrown out on appeal, but she was convicted again in 1985 after a one-day trial in which jurors were not provided details of what her current attorneys say were "grotesquely coercive" interrogations.

The system "failed her at every opportunity," Larry Harman said in her lawyers' petition. Harman, now a judge, previously helped Hemme have her initial guilty plea thrown out.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.