Tidbits of History

March 7 is:

National Cereal Day

322 BC – Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, died. He had been a student of Plato and a teacher of Alexander, the Great. His writings cover many subjects – including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theater, music, rhetoric, linguistics, politics and government – and constitute the first comprehensive system of Western philosophy.

In 1530, King Henry VIII‘s divorce request was denied by the Pope. Henry then declared that he, not the Pope, was supreme head of England’s church.

In 1644 Massachusetts established the first 2-chamber legislature in the colonies.

Captain James Cook first sighted the Oregon coast at Yaquina Bay in 1778.

Publication of Federalist Paper #65: The Powers of the Senate. This and all of the remaining Federalists Papers were written by Alexander Hamilton in 1788. In Paper #65 Hamilton explained why delegates to the Constitutional Convention decided that the power of impeachment belonged in the Senate. Articles of Impeachment would originate in the House and a trial would be held in the Senate.

Charles Miller patented 1st U.S. sewing machine to stitch buttonholes in 1854. In his patent specification, Miller describes the three different stitches, “button-hole stitch, whip stitch or herring-bone stitch,” that can be mechanically sewn to finish the buttonhole.

Baseball, in 1857, decided 9 innings constituted an official game, not 9 runs.

Birthday of Maurice Joseph Ravel (March 7, 1875), French composer of Bolero

Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for the telephone on March 7, 1876.

March 7, 1912 – Roald Amundsen announced that his Norwegian expedition successfully reached the South Pole on December 14 of the previous year.

1933 – The board game Monopoly was invented and trademarked by Charles Darrow in Atlantic City. From Today in Science, “it was preceded by other real estate games. The first, called The Landlord’s Game, was invented by Lizzie Magie of Virginia (patented 1904). In it, players rented properties, paid utilities and avoided “Jail” as they moved through the board. Darrow set about creating his own version, modeled on his favorite resort, Atlantic City. He made numerous innovations for his game, which had a circular, cloth board. He color-coded the properties and deeds for them, allowing them to be bought, not just rented. The playing pieces were modelled on items from around his house. It was mass marketed by Parker Brothers in 1935.”

March 6, 2024 is:

National Shortbread Day
National Oreo Day

03-06-1475 -Birthday of Michelangelo (Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni), Italian sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer of the High Renaissance; famous for his statue of David and for painting the Sistine Chapel.Examples of his works may be viewed at Wikiart.

Birthday of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806), English poet and wife of Robert Browning, author of “How Do I Love Thee?”

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

1820 – The Missouri Compromise was signed into law by President James Monroe. The compromise allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state, brought Maine into the Union as a free state, and made the rest of the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase territory slavery-free.

1836 – Texas Revolution: Battle of the Alamo – After a thirteen day siege by an army of 3,000 Mexican troops, the 187 Texas volunteers, including frontiersman Davy Crockett and Colonel Jim Bowie, defending the Alamo were killed and the fort was captured.

1857 – The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case.

• Any person descended from Africans, whether slave or free, is not a citizen of the United States, according to the Constitution.
• The Ordinance of 1787 could not confer either freedom or citizenship within the Northwest Territory to non-white individuals.
• The provisions of the Act of 1820, known as the Missouri Compromise, were voided as a legislative act, since the act exceeded the powers of Congress, insofar as it attempted to exclude slavery and impart freedom and citizenship to non-white persons in the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase.

1899 – Bayer registered “Aspirin” as a trademark.

1951 – The trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg began. They were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage during a time of war and were executed.

1970 – An explosion at the Weather Underground safe house in Greenwich Village killed three. The Weather Underground was an American radical left organization founded on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan. Their goal was to create a clandestine revolutionary party for the overthrow of the US government. One of the leading members of the Weather Underground was Bill Ayers. On March 6, 1970, during preparations for the bombing of a Non-Commissioned Officers’ (NCO) dance at the Fort Dix U.S. Army base and for Butler Library at Columbia University, there was an explosion in a Greenwich Village safe house when the nail bomb being constructed prematurely detonated for unknown reasons.

February 28 is the 59th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar.

National Chocolate Souffle Day

The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was incorporated on February 28, 1827, becoming the first railroad in America offering commercial transportation of both people and freight.

1849 – Regular steamboat service from the east to the west coast of the United States began with the arrival of the SS California in San Francisco Bay, 4 months 22 days after leaving New York Harbor. Left New York on October 6, 1848; arrived at Rio de Janerio on November 2nd; navigated the Straits of Magellan December 7–12, 1848. The SS California wrecked and sank in the Pacific Ocean near Pacasmayo Province, Peru in 1895. There were no deaths. At the time, she had been reconstructed as a bark and engaged in hauling coal and lumber. On her last run, she had left Port Hadlock in Washington state with a cargo of lumber valued at $3,000.

1861 The Territory of Colorado was organized in the wake of the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush of 1858–1861 which brought the first large concentration of white settlement to the region. It existed between February 28, 1861, and August 1, 1876. Its boundaries were identical to the current State of Colorado. The territory ceased to exist when Colorado was admitted into the Union as the 38th U.S. state on August 1, 1876.

The first vaudeville theater opened in Boston on February 28, 1883.

1953 Scientists James D. Watson and Francis H.C. Crick announced they had discovered the double-helix structure of DNA, the molecule that contains the human genes, at Cambridge University.

The first color television sets using the NTSC standard (analog television system), are offered for sale to the general public in 1954.
They cost about $1000 each. Only 5000 were sold. In 1954 the average Annual Salary was $3,960. By comparison, one could buy a car for $1,750; a house for $8,650. Gasoline was 21 cents per gallon, bread was 17 cents a loaf; milk was 92 cents a gallon, and a postage stamp cost 3 cents. You could go to a movie for 70 cents.
See more at Pop History for 1954

1993 – Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents raided the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas with a warrant to arrest the group’s leader David Koresh. Four BATF agents and five Davidians died in the initial raid, starting a 51-day standoff.

February 27 is:

National Chili Day
National Strawberry Day
National Kahlua Day

Publication of Federalist Paper #62: The Senate written by James Madison in 1788.
Madison names five areas to be considered in regards to the Senate: Qualifications, Selection, Equality of Representation, Number of Senators and Term of office, and the powers of the Senate.
In Federalist #62 he addresses the first four of these concerns.

Quotes from Federalist #62:

“It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow.”
“No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable; nor be truly respectable, without possessing a certain portion of order and stability.”
“Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue; or in any manner affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change and can trace its consequences; a harvest reared not by themselves but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the few not for the many.”

1801 The District of Columbia Organic Act was placed under the jurisdiction of Congress. Article One, Section Eight, of the Constitution permits the establishment of a “District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States”. However, the Constitution does not specify a location for the capital. In what is now known as the Compromise of 1790, Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson came to an agreement that the federal government would pay each state’s remaining Revolutionary War debts in exchange for establishing the new national capital in the southern United States. Formed from land donated by the states of Maryland and Virginia, Congress passed the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1801 that officially organized the District and placed the entire territory under the exclusive control of the federal government. Further, the unincorporated area within the District was organized into two counties: the County of Washington to the east of the Potomac and the County of Alexandria to the west. After the passage of this Act, citizens living in the District were no longer considered residents of Maryland or Virginia, which therefore ended their representation in Congress. The portion of the District of Columbia ceded by Virginia was returned to that state in 1846-47.

Birthday of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807), American poet, author of Paul Revere’s Ride, The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

On February 27, 1864, American Civil War: The first Northern prisoners arrive at the Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia.

Birthday of John Steinbeck , (February 27, 1902), author of Tortilla Flat (1935), Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Red Pony (1937) as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939),

1951 – The Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution, limiting Presidents to two terms, is ratified.

Section 1. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.

Section 2. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission to the States by the Congress.

In 1991 U.S. President George H. W. Bush announced that “Kuwait is liberated”.