321: Emperor Constantine I issues a decree for a universal day for the worship of the sun. The edict was carefully designed to give pagans and Christians a common day for worship of Sol Invictus, who was Constantine’s monotheistic “spiritual patron” before he became a Christian. The sun-day was the also the first day of the Roman week. Constantine’s personal life straddled both camps; the edict effectively confirmed and formalized the Christian transition of the traditional Lord’s Day Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday in honor of the Resurrection.
1394: Birth in Lisbon of Prince Henry the Navigator (d.1460).
1475: Birth of the Renaissance Master, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (d.1564). Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance. Born in the Republic of Florence, his work was inspired by models from classical antiquity and had a lasting influence on Western art.
1493: Christopher Columbus arrives in Lisbon aboard his carrack Nina, thus completing his first of three voyages of discovery to the New World.
1496: With news of Christopher Columbus’ recent discoveries spreading throughout Europe, English King Henry VII issues a letter of patent to Venetian sea captain Giovanni Caboto, anglicized to John Cabot, authorizing him to explore unknown lands in the name of the Crown. Making three voyages westward from the northern latitudes of England, he is acknowledged as the first European to set foot on the North American continent since the Viking Lief Ericson nearly five hundred years earlier.
1512: Birth of Gerardus Mercator (d.1594), the Flemish cartographer best known for his development of a projection of the earth’s surface that allows for straight-line plotting of a rhumb line course across the oceans. It’s a real problem to try to accurately present a spherical surface on a flat sheet of paper, and the Mercator projection.
1519: Hernando Cortez lands in Mexico, looking for Aztec gold.
1702: Birth of Anne Bonney (d. circa 1733) an Irish-American pirate. Sometimes Ann Fulford, was an Irish pirate operating in the Caribbean, and one of the few female pirates in recorded history. What little that is known of her life comes largely from Captain Charles Johnson’s 1724 book A General History of the Pyrates.
1726: Birth of Admiral Richard Howe (d.1799), brother of General Sir William Howe. The siblings commanded the British navy and army forces respectively during the opening hostilities of the American Revolution. Admiral Howe was nominally sympathetic to the American cause. When a peace initiative with the Continental Congress failed, he resigned his commission, but it was not accepted before the French Revolution broke out in 1789, and Howe was assigned to command the Channel Fleet. He led several notable victories against the French, but his greatest victory came at home, when he almost single-handedly ended the Great Mutiny in 1797. His swarthy complexion earned him the nickname of “Black Dick” Howe.
1770: In Boston, British troops fire on a group of protesters, killing five of them, including a young boy and a black freeman named Crispus Attackus. Of note during the subsequent trial was their defense lawyer, noted Bostonian John Adams, cousin of the rabble-rouser revolutionary instigator Samuel Adams and one of the leading lights of the soon-to-be widespread revolution against British rule in the American colonies. It didn’t take long for the event to be memorialized as the Boston Massacre, in the process becoming a cultural touch point for the larger revolutionary movement.
1776: The Continental Navy’s Continental Marines storm ashore in Nassau, Bahamas, under the command of Captain Samuel Nicholas. The attack is the Marines’ first amphibious assault. No surprise, they successfully occupied Nassau, spending two weeks loading British guns and powder into the little Navy fleet. For some reason the island’s governor, who so hospitably did not offer significant resistance to the Americans, complained later that the American officers drank their way through the occupation, completely draining his liquor supply.
1776: Fortified by the dramatic and unexpected arrival of artillery from Fort Ticonderoga, General George Washington captures Dorchester Heights, thus dominating the British occupied port of Boston. Realizing the weakness of their now-untenable position, the British return control of the city to its citizens and begin a strategic withdrawal to New York.
1791: The French Republic, in response to an urgent need to deal with persistent English threats along the coast, builds the first of a tightly interlaced series of semaphore towers, or “optical telegraphs,” to rapidly communicate between the frontiers and the capital in Paris. The towers in France used a series of rotating and articulated arms to create coded characters. Other countries used different types of open and closed panels or different types of arms, but the principle remained the same: the most distant lookout would spot some kind of listed activity offshore and immediately report it to the next tower along the line. The towers themselves made excellent targets for military and naval raids.
1792: Birth of British polymath Sir John Herschel (d.1871), astronomer, chemist, mathematician and early adapter to the new science of photography.
1820: President James Monroe signs into law the Missouri Compromise, passed after months of bitter debate in both the House and Senate. As a political compromise, it did not meet any party’s view of actually solving the festering problem of slavery’s expansion into the new territories of the Louisiana Purchase. The terms of this law prohibited slavery in the western Territories north of 36-30N, except for Missouri, which would be admitted to the Union as a slave state, balancing the concurrent admission of Maine as a free state. Thomas Jefferson despised the compromise: “I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.” Debate quickly shifted to Kansas-Nebraska divide, highlighted over the next thirty years by sporadic violence and hardening positions between Northern abolitionists and Southern slaveholders. Congress would engage again with the Compromise of 1850.
1836: The Alamo may have still been under siege, but the Texas Convention of 1836 on this day declared the independence of the Texas Republic from Mexico.
1836: Death of William Travis, James Bowie, Davy Crockett, and 184 other Texans, after 13 days of relentless siege of the Alamo mission-fortress by the Mexican army under President General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Travis’s stirring plea for help riveted the nation and led to the rallying cry of “Remember the Alamo!” that finally swept Mexican forces out of the Texas territory and back south of the Rio Grande.
1847: Birth of Scottish-American inventor Alexander Graham Bell (d.1922). He is credited with patenting the first practical telephone. He also co-founded the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1885.
1849: Birth of American botanist Luther Burbank (d.1926), who invented, via cross-fertilization, grafting and hybridization, over 800 new plant species.
1850: Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts rises on the floor of the Senate to give an impassioned speech in support of the developing Compromise of 1850. As the debate raged on, this speech is often referred back to as his “Seventh of March Speech.” — California being admitted as a free state and the borders of Texas being settled, with areas ceded by Texas becoming the recognized territories of New Mexico and Utah.
1861: Tsar Alexander I abolishes serfdom in Russia. It was a good start, but the edict left the budding revolutionary movement wanting more.
1862: The Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia (ex- USS Merrimack) sorties from the Gosport Navy Yard in Portsmouth and attacks the Union fleet blockading the mouth of the James River. Her first target is USS Cumberland, which she sinks by ramming. Virginia then attacks USS Congress, which puts up a stiff fight, damaging Virginia’s stack and two cannons, but without creating appreciable damage to her iron cladding. Congress’ captain intentionally runs the ship aground and surrenders. While offloading prisoners, a Union shore battery at Newport News Point suddenly opens fire on Virginia. In reply, Virginia fires red-hot shot into the stricken Congress, which explodes and burns to the waterline As Virginia begins her transit back to Norfolk for battle damage repairs, she commences a third attack, this time against USS Minnesota, whose captain tried to escape but ran aground on a sandbank. Being late in the day, Virginia left her quarry for the night and continued down the Elizabeth River, with plans to complete the destruction of the Union fleet the next morning. Meanwhile, the newly-commissioned USS Monitor is enroute under tow from New York, and about to enter the Chesapeake at Cape Charles.
1890: The longest bridge in Great Britain (at 1710 feet), the Forth Railway Bridge in Scotland, is opened by the Prince of Wales, who later became King Edward VII of the United Kingdom.
1895: Birth of American General Matthew Ridgway (d.1993), best remembered for his command of U.S. 8thArmy in Korea, where he revitalized a demoralized and retreating army and put them on the attack against the communist onslaught from the North. When General MacArthur was relieved of command by President Truman in the Spring of 1951, Ridgway was awarded his fourth star and took over as Supreme Commander of the UN forces engaged in Korea.
1905: In an attempt to build on his assassinated predecessor’s reforms, and to placate nascent agitation by unionists and communists, Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II agrees to create a representative legislature, the Duma.
1912: The National Biscuit Company introduces the Oreo cookie to the mass market.
1912: Norwegian Antarctic explorer Roald Amundsen re-establishes contact with the outside world, with the report that he and his expedition reached the South Pole on the 18th of December, 1911.
1918: Only months after completing their overthrow of the Tsar, the new communist government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics sues for peace with the Central Powers and signs the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ending Russian participation in the Great War. Party Leader Vladimir Lenin and his henchmen thence turn their attention to waging war on their own people. [The Principals at the table. Germans on the left, dictating terms, communists on the right, taking what they can get and issuing propaganda statements to control the narrative.
1925: Calvin Coolidge becomes the first President to have his inauguration broadcast over radio.
1938: After five years of dry holes, Standard Oil of California finally discovers oil near Dahran in Saudi Arabia. The American oil consortium who did the exploration and development of the oil industry there went through several iterations, finally becoming the Arabian-American Oil Company, more commonly known as Aramco.
1946: Hanoi native, anti-Japanese guerrilla, anti-colonial nationalist and nascent communist dictator Ho Chi Minh signs an agreement with the exhausted and soon-to-be-post-colonial French government, confirming Vietnam as an autonomous state within the Indochinese Federation and the larger French Union. The postwar stage thus set, “Uncle Ho” commences a reinvigorated guerrilla campaign to forcibly evict France from this now former colony.
1949: A USAF B-50 Superfortress, under the command of Captain James Gallagher, arrives at Carswell AFB in Fort Worth after completing a 94 hour, non-stop circumnavigation of the globe. The crew performed four aerial refuelings, meeting Air Force tankers over Lajes airfield in the Azores, Dahran Airfield in Saudi Arabia, Clark AFB in the Philippines, and Hickam AFB in Hawaii.
1951: Opening arguments in the treason trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were the only spies executed during the Cold War. They were the first American civilians to be executed for conspiracy to commit espionage and the first to suffer that penalty during peacetime.
1953: Death of, Joseph Stalin. Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a Soviet revolutionary and politician who was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union.
1981: Long-time CBS Radio and television correspondent Walter Cronkite, signs off on his last broadcast of the CBS Evening News.
2005: Adventurer and aviation dynamo Steve Fossett (1944-2007) lands at the old Air Force base in Salina, Kansas, to complete the world’s first solo, non-stop, unrefueled powered flight around the world, 67 hours,1 min 13 seconds after takeoff from that same 12,300 foot runway. The plane was a carbon-fiber wonder designed and built by the great Burt Rutan.
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Rosenbergs were found to be not guilty of this not too long ago .