March 5th is

Absinthe Day

Cheese Doodle Day

Mercator Day *

Namesake Day

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MORE! Louise Pearce, Lilli Jahn and Annie Oakley, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Australia:  Western Australia – Labour Day

British Virgin Islands:
Hamilton-Lavity-Stout Day

French Polynesia – Arrvée de l’Evangile
(Gospel Day/First Missionaries)

Guam – History/Chamorro Heritage Day

Iraq – ’91 Rebellion Anniversary

United Kingdom – Cornwall:
St. Piran’s Day (Cornwall’s patron saint)

Vanuatu – Custom Chief’s Holiday

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On This Day in HISTORY

1046 – Nasir Khusraw, Persian poet-philosopher-scholar, begins the seven-year Middle Eastern journey which he will later describe in his book Safarnama (Book of Travels)– widely regarded as the most authentic account of the Muslim world in the mid-11^th century, it is still required reading in Iran today

1496 – King Henry VII of England issues letters of patent to John Cabot and his sons, authorizing them to explore unknown lands

1512 – Mercator Day * – Gerardus Mercator born, Flemish mathematician-geographer-cartographer-philosopher; creator of the Mercator projection, a 1569 world map based on sailing course projections with constant bearings (rhumb lines, still used on nautical charts); also maker of astrolabes, astronomical rings, and terrestrial and celestial globes

1616 – Nicolaus Copernicus’s book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres is added to the Index of Forbidden Books 73 years after it was first published

1623 – The first alcohol temperance law in America is enacted in the Virginia colony:  “The proclamations for swearing and drunkenness sett out by the governor and counsell are confirmed by this Assembly . . . Ministers shall not give themselves to excess in drinking, or riott, or spending their tyme idellye day or night”

1624 – The Virginia Company charter is revoked by King James I, and the Virginia colony is transferred to royal authority as a crown colony; in Virginia, the upper class are exempted from whipping, passed by a legislative body comprised of landed gentry

1637 – Jan van der Heyden born, Dutch painter and engineer

View of Delft, by Jan van der Heyden

1748 – William Shield born, English violinist and composer

1750 – The first Shakespearean play is presented in America, Richard III, in NYC

1766 – Antonio de Ulloa, first Spanish governor of Louisiana, arrives in New Orleans

1770 – The Boston Massacre: a squad of British troopers, sent to support a sentry being heckled and hit with snowballs by a crowd, fire on the civilians, killing five people, one of them Crispus Attucks, an escaped slave; Captain Thomas Preston, the officer in charge, and eight of his men are arrested for manslaughter, but only two soldiers are found guilty, the rest are acquitted. The conflict was made inevitable by the large number of British troops in Boston – 4,000 men in a city of 20,000 – sent to enforce the Townsend Acts of 1767 which imposed duties on many imports to the colonies; the Quartering Act of 1774 made the colonies responsible for housing all troops sent from Britain; regarded as ‘Intolerable Acts’ by the colonists, they would lead to the American Revolution; 1841 – The first continuous filibuster in the U.S. Senate begins, lasting until March 11^th, when several Senators object to the hiring of Senate printers and refuse to yield the floor

The Boston Massacre, a Paul Revere print

1842 – Mexican General Rafael Vasquez invades the Republic of Texas with over 500 men, occupies San Antonio, raises the Mexican flag and declares the city under the laws of Mexico, but returns to Mexico on March 7, presumably with plunder

1845 – U.S. Congress appropriates $30,000 to create the U.S. Camel Corps, an experiment in using camels as pack animals in the Southwest; the Army declines to adopt them for military use; then the Civil War diverts Congressional attention, so the project is abandoned, and the camels are sold at auction

1852 – Lady Augusta Gregory born, Irish writer, folklorist and playwright; co-founder of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, a leader of the Irish Literary Revival

1853 – Howard Pyle born, American author and illustrator

1868 – U.S. Senate becomes a court of impeachment to decide charges against President Andrew Johnson for his resistance to implementing reconstruction policies passed by Congress, and his firing of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (the War Department being the federal agency responsible for carrying out reconstruction programs in the war-ravaged South)

1867 – A Fenian uprising against British rule in Ireland is put down

1870 – Frank Norris born, American journalist and author

1871 – Rosa Luxemburg born, Polish-Russian economist, philosopher, feminist and anti-war activist; co-founder of Spartakusbund (the Spartacus League), an anti-war group, and its newspaper, Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag); she was captured and murdered by Freikorps troops during the Spartacist uprising of 1919, which had begun as a general strike

1872 – George Westinghouse patents the air brake

1882 – Dora Marsden born, English radical feminist, literary modernist journal editor

1885 –Louise Pearce born, one of the foremost pathologists of the early 20th century, found a cure for trypanosomiasis in 1919, researched African sleeping sickness, awarded the Order of the Crown of Belgium

1887 – Heitor Villa-Lobos born, Brazilian composer-guitarist

1874 – Arthur van Schendel born in the Dutch East Indies, prolific Dutch novelist and short-story writer; Het fregatschip Johanna Maria (The Frigate Johanna Maria)

1876 – Édouard Belin born, French photographer-engineer; inventor of the Bélinographe, for transmitting photos by wire

1900 – Two U.S. battleships leave for Nicaragua to halt revolutionary disturbances

1900 – Lilli Jahn born, German-Jewish physician; in 1943, after she had separated from her husband and moved Kassel from Immenhausen, she was denounced for an improper name card on her doorbell – Jewish women were required to add Sara to their name, and all Jews were forbidden to use the title Doctor. She was arrested, interrogated and sent to the Breitenau labor camp, while her underage children were left on their own; the letters she smuggled out to her children were later published posthumously, but she was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, and died there, the exact date unknown

1901 – Germany and Britain begin negotiations with hopes of creating an alliance

1902 – In France, the National Congress of Miners decide to call for a general strike to demand an 8-hour workday

1907 – In St. Petersburg, Russia, the new Duma opens; 40,000 demonstrators are dispersed by troops

1910 – In Philadelphia PA, 60,000 people leave their jobs to show support for striking transit workers

1910 – The Moroccan envoy reluctantly signs the 1909 agreement between France and Germany, which confirms France’s political interests and German economic rights in Morocco, but which will lead to Moroccan tribal rebellion

1912 – The Italians are the first to use dirigibles for military purposes, behind Turkish lines west of Tripoli on reconnaissance flights

1918 – The Soviets move the capital of Russia from Petrograd to Moscow

1922 – Annie Oakley (Phoebe Ann Moses) breaks all existing records for women’s trap shooting, hitting 98 out of 100 targets

1923 – Old-age pension laws are enacted in the states of Montana and Nevada

1931 – Geraldyn (Jerrie) Cobb born, record-setting aviator, first woman to pass all qualifying exams for astronaut training (1959); not allowed to train because she’s a woman

1933 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt orders a four-day bank holiday to stop a panic in which large amounts of money are withdrawn from U.S. banks

1933 – The Nazi Party wins 44 percent of the vote in German parliamentary elections; in alliance with the Nationalists, they gain a slim majority in the Reichstag

1935 – Letizia Battaglia born, Italian photojournalist, notable for her work documenting the Sicilian Mafia; a member of the Green Party, she served on the city council of Palermo (1985-1991) and as a Deputy at the Sicilian Regional Assembly (1991-1996); a feminist, she co-founded Mezzocielo (Half-the-Sky), a women’s journal

1938 –Lynn Margulis born, American biologist and theorist on Symbiogenesis, the evolution of eukaryotic cells (cells with a nucleus)

1943 – Germany calls up 15- and 16-year-olds for military service due to war losses

1946 – Winston Churchill delivers his famous “Iron Curtain Speech” at Westminster College in Fulton MO

1946 – The U.S. protests the USSR on incursions into Manchuria and Iran

1953 – Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin dies, after being in power for 29 years

1953 – Katarina Frostenson born, a leading Swedish poet

1956 – The U.S. Supreme Court affirms the ban on segregation in public schools

1960 – Elvis Presley ends his 2-year hitch in the U.S Army

1963 – President Kennedy welcomes the National Congress of Indians to Washington DC, at the White House

1969 – Gustav Heinemann is elected as West German President

1970 – A nuclear non-proliferation treaty goes into effect after 43 nations ratify it

1974 – Candide opens on Broadway

1976 – The British pound falls below the equivalent of $2 USD for the first time ever

1977 – U.S. President Jimmy Carter appears on CBS News with Walter Cronkite for the first “Dial-a-President” radio talk show

1984 – U.S. Supreme Court rules that cities may use public money for Nativity scenes as part of their Christmas display

1984 – The U.S. accuses Iraq of using poison gas

1984 – Six thousand miners in the UK begin their strike at Cortonwood Colliery

1992 – “Rubbergate” – U.S. House Ethics Committee votes to reveal congresspersons who were allowed to bounce checks without penalty by the House Bank, which was unregulated and unaudited; members of both houses now use either the House or Senate credit unions, which are regulated and give them no special privileges

1995 – The graves of Tsar Nicolas II and his family are found in St. Petersburg

1997 – North Korea and South Korea meet for first time in 25 years for peace talks

1998 – NASA announces that an orbiting craft found enough water on the moon to support a human colony and rocket fueling station

1998 – Air Force Lt. Col. Eileen Collins is announced as the leader of Columbia’s crew on a mission to launch a large X-ray telescope, the first woman to command a space shuttle

2004 – Author, TV Host and Entrepreneur Martha Stewart is convicted of obstructing justice and committing perjury in testimony about selling her Imclone Systems Inc. stock just before the price plummeted; she spent five months in prison, followed by a two-year term of supervised release

2009 – It is revealed that the CIA destroyed 92 interrogation tapes documenting harsh treatment of two Al Qaeda suspects detained in Thailand during the aftermath of 9-11. According to a 2014 Amnesty International report, no one, at any level of office, has been charged or brought to trial for the crimes under international law that are known to have been committed . . . former President George W. Bush has admitted to authorizing “enhanced interrogation techniques” 

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