March 11th is

Spring Forward – Daylight Savings

Eat Your Noodles Day

National Promposal Day

Oatmeal Nut Waffles Day

World Plumbing Day *

Worship of Tools Day

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MORE! Mary Shelley, Wanda Gág and Lorraine Hansberry, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Lesotho –
King Moshoeshoe I Anniversary

Lithuania –
Independence Restoration Day

South Africa – Riviersonderend:
Altered States Lunar Music Fest

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On This Day in HISTORY

222 – Emperor Elagabalus, who became emperor at age 14 during a previous revolt, is assassinated, along with his mother, Julia Soaemias, by the Praetorian Guard because of  his attempts to replace Jupiter with the Syrian god Elagabal as the head of the Roman pantheon, and his bisexual excesses. Their mutilated bodies are dragged through the streets of Rome before being thrown into the Tiber

1302 – Romeo and Juliet are married on this day in Shakespeare’s play

Romeo and Juliet – by Raphael Tuck c. 1900

1665 – A new legal code is approved for the Dutch and English towns of  New York  guaranteeing all Protestants the right to continue religious observances unhindered 

1702 – The Daily Courant, England’s first national daily newspaper begins publication

1708 – Queen Anne withholds Royal Assent from the Scottish Militia Bill, fearing an armed Scottish military would not be loyal to the British crown; this is the last bill to be refused Royal Assent, now considered a formality

1785 – John McLean born, U.S. Supreme Court justice (1829-1861); one of the two justices who dissented in the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857 (the capitalized word in the quote is from the original)

1791 – Samuel Mulliken patents a threshing machine for corn and grain; he becomes the first person to receive more than one U.S. patent

1818 – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus, is published

1822 – Joseph Bertrand born, French mathematician; thermodynamics, statistical probability and theory of curves and surfaces

1824 – U.S. Secretary of War John C. Calhoun creates Bureau of Indian Affairs as a War Department division, without authorization from Congress; he appoints former Superintendent of Indian Trade, Thomas L. McKenney as bureau chief, but McKinney soon finds he has all the work while all the authority rests with Secretary Calhoun

1836 – Charles Eastlake born, British architect and furniture designer, leading exponent of Modern Gothic; his furniture designs became known as the Eastlake style, which also became the name of his architectural vision

1843 – ‘Pearl Rivers’ born as Eliza Jane Poitevent Holbrook Nicholson, southern American author, journalist and poet

1845 – The Flagstaff War: Unhappy with translational differences regarding the Treaty of Waitangi, chiefs Hone Heke, Kawiti and Māori tribe members chop down the British flagpole for a fourth time and drive settlers out of Kororareka, New Zealand

1848 – Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin become the first Prime Ministers of the Province of Canada to be democratically elected under a system of responsible government

1851 –Rigoletto by Giuseppe Verdi premieres in Venice

1854 – Jane Meade Welch born, American journalist, music critic, and lecturer-author on American history; first woman in Buffalo NY to be a professional journalist; the first American woman to lecture at Cambridge University

1860 – Thomas Hastings born, American architect; his firm designs the New York Public Library, and he designs the Arlington Cemetery Tomb of the Unknowns

1862 – During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln removes Gen. George B. McClellan as general-in-chief of the Union armies

1893 – Wanda Gág born, American artist, illustrator and author; noted for writing and illustrating the children’s book Millions of Cats, which won the 1928 Newbery award, and is the oldest American picture book still in print; her 1927 article, These Modern Women: A Hotbed of Feminists, published in The Nation; illustrated covers for the leftist magazines The New Masses and The Liberator

1900 – British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury rejects the peace overtures offered from the Boer leader Paul Kruger

1900 – Hanna Bergas born, German Jewish teacher; under the Nazi regime, she was fired from her job and barred from teaching in public schools; she was hired to work in a private school, and moved with the school’s founder, Anna Essinger, and most of the school’s staff to Kent, England in 1939, where the school was re-established. Bergas and three others from the school ran a reception camp at the seaside town of Dovercourt for mostly Jewish, unaccompanied refugee children in the Kindertransports, helping the children to adjust to life in a new country

Dovercourt camp

1901 – Britain rejects an amended treaty to the canal agreement with Nicaragua 

1901 – U.S. Steel formed when J.P. Morgan buys Carnegie Steel, making Andrew Carnegie the world’s richest man 

1903 – Dorothy Schiff born, American newspaper owner and publisher, philanthropist and reformer, buys the New York Post in 1939 and becomes its publisher in 1942

1904 – After 30 years of drilling, the north tunnel under the Hudson River is holed through, linking Jersey City NJ, and New York NY 

1904 – Hilde Bruch born, escaped from Nazi Germany in 1933 to England and then America, pioneer and leading expert in eating disorders, especially anorexia nervosa

1905 – The Paris Métro subway system officially inaugurated 

1907 – U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt induces California to revoke its anti-Japanese legislation

1907 – Anarchist kills Bulgarian Premier Nicolas Petkov 

1909 – John Melville Burgess born, first African American diocesan bishop in the Episcopal Church

1911 – Edward R. Dudley born, member of the NAACP legal team 1943-1945; appointed as Minister to Liberia by President Truman in 1948, and promoted to Ambassador to Liberia on March 18, 1949, serving as ambassador until 1953; appointed as NY City Domestic Relations judge in 1955; justice of the NY State Supreme Court (1964-1985)

1917 – Robert L. Carter born, civil rights activist, attorney and judge; worked as legal assistant to Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in 1944; general counsel for the NAACP (1956-1968) winning 21 of 22 cases he argues or co-argues before the U.S. Supreme Court; appointment as a judge of U.S. District Court in 1972

1921 – Charlotte Friend born, microbiologist, in 1950s at Sloan-Kettering Institute discovered a link between defective maturation and tumor growth in mice, discoveries critical in establishing the role of viruses in some cancers

1922 – Vinette J. Carroll born, director and actress, first African American woman to direct a show on Broadway in 1972, Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope, nominated for 4 Tony Awards, including her nomination for Best Director of a Musical; nominated again for a Best Director Tony for Your Arms Too Short to Box with God in 1976

Vinette Carroll, a rare film appearance in Up the Down Staircase

1925 – Margaret Oakley Dayhoff born, American physical chemist and pioneer in bioinformatics; professor at Georgetown University Medical Center, and research biochemist at the National Biomedical Research Foundation, where she developed the application of mathematics and computational methods to biochemisty, including the creation of protein and nucleic acid databases; tools to interrogate the databases, and one of the first substitution matrices, point accepted mutations (PAM); develops one-letter code for amino acids, an attempt to reduce data file size describing amino acid sequences in an era of punch-card computing

1926 – Ralph Abernathy born, American pastor, Civil Rights movement leader; Montgomery Improvement Association, Montgomery Bus Boycott, co-founder Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC president after ML King assassination)

1927 – Samuel Roxy Rothafel opens the famous Roxy Theatre in New York City

1927 – Freda Meissner-Blau born, Austrian politician, founder of the Austrian Green Party, and a leading figure in the Austrian Anti-Nuclear and environmental movements

1929 – Kermit D. Moore born, African American cellist, composer and conductor

1930 – U.S. President Howard Taft becomes the first U.S. president buried in the National Cemetery in Arlington VA 

1935 – The German Air Force becomes an official department of the Third Reich 

1941 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease Act into law, which provides war supplies to the Allies 

1946 – Pravda denounces Winston Churchill as anti-Soviet and a warmonger 

1949 – Griselda Pollock born in South Africa; after a childhood in Canada, she moved to Britain in her teens, and went on to be a highly influential cultural analyst and scholar of modern and contemporary art, and a respected feminist theorist in art history and gender studies

1950 – Bobby McFerrin born, American jazz vocalist; 10-time Grammy winner

1952 – Douglas Adams, beloved British author and dramatist; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

1959 – Lorraine Hansberry’s drama A Raisin in the Sun opens at New York’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre

1969 – Levi-Strauss starts selling bell-bottomed jeans 

1985 – Mikhail Gorbachev is named the new chairman of the Soviet Communist Party 

1986 – Popsicle announces its twin-stick frozen treat is changing to a one-stick model 

1988 – Cease-fire declared in the war between Iran and Iraq 

1990 – Lithuania declares its independence from the USSR,  the first Soviet republic to break from Communist control 

1990 – In Chile, Patricio Aylwin is sworn in as the first democratically elected president since 1973 

1992 – Former U.S. President Nixon says the Bush administration is not giving enough economic aid to Russia 

1993 – Janet Reno is unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the first woman attorney general 

1993 – North Korea withdraws from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty refusing to open sites for inspection 

1994 – In Chile, Eduardo Frei is sworn in as President, the first peaceful transfer of power in Chile since 1970 

2002 – Two columns of light are pointed skyward from ground zero in New York as a temporary memorial to the victims of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 

2006 – Michelle Bachelet Jeria is elected as first female president of Chile

2010 – World Plumbing Day * is launched, sponsored by the World Plumbing Council

2011 – Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signs measure eliminating most union rights for public employees, after three weeks of protests against it

2015 – The Texas state legislature names Phil Collins an honorary Texan as a “thank you” for donating his extensive collection of Alamo and Texas Revolution-related artifacts to the Alamo, part of the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park,  a UNESCO World Heritage Site

2016 – National Promposal Day is launched to encourage high schools to ask their prospective date for the prom early; inspiring stories are shared on social media: #MyUltimatePromposal 

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