Category: Today

On March 22, 1312, in the papal bull Vox in excelso, Pope Clement V dissolved the Order of the Knights Templar, after five years of suppression, torture and executions that began with the events of Friday the 13th, October 1307.

March 22nd marks some sad days for Americans, too:

1622 — Algonquians killed 347 English settlers around Jamestown, Virginia, a third of the colony’s population, during the Second Anglo-Powhatan War.

1631 — The Massachusetts Bay Colony outlawed the possession of cards, dice, and gaming tables.

1638 — Anne Hutchinson was expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony for religious dissent.

1765 — The British Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which levied taxes directly on its American colonies.

On a brigher note, on March 22, 1621, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, led by governor John Carver, signed a peace treaty with Massasoit, sachem of the Wampanoags; Squanto served as an interpreter between the two sides.

On March 21, 1921, the Bolshevik Party — responding to the disaster that war communism had wrought — implemented the New Economic Policy. And controversy about this seems never to end.

Among the reforms was a re-introduction of money into the economy, going so far as to produce gold-backed “chervonets.”

On March 20, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly was published. By the end of the nineteenth century it had become the country’s second best-selling book, after the Bible.

On March 19, 1649, England’s House of Commons passed an act abolishing the House of Lords, declaring it “useless and dangerous to the people of England.”

This was during Oliver Cromwell’s rule as Lord Protector, after the execution of Charles I. The House of Lords did not again meet until the Convention Parliament of 1660, under the Restoration of the monarchy.

On March 19, 1979, the United States House of Representatives began broadcasting its day-to-day business via the cable television network C-SPAN.

On March 17, 1941, the U.S. Selective Service held its first lottery for the draft, in preparation for World War II. (Image, above, from the Morning Oregonian, from that year.)

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On March 17, 1780, General George Washington granted the Continental Army a holiday “as an act of solidarity with the Irish in their fight for independence.”

On March 16, 1995, the state of Mississippi formally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last state of the Union to approve the abolition of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment had been officially ratified in 1865, one hundred thirty years earlier.

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James Madison, fourth President of the United States and “Father of the Constitution,” was born on this date in 1751.

March 15 was “the Ides of March” in the Roman calendar. On that date in 44 BC, Julius Caesar, Dictator of the Roman Republic, was stabbed to death by a handful of prominent senators.

On the same date in AD 1783, General George Washington eloquently entreated his officers not to support the Newburgh Conspiracy. His plea was successful: the threatened coup d’état never took place.

The Truce of Ulm was signed in Ulm, Baden-Württemberg, on March 14, 1647, between France, Sweden, and Bavaria. This treaty was developed after France and Sweden invaded Bavaria during the Thirty Years’ War.

1781 — William Herschel discovered Uranus.
1809 — Sweden’s King Gustav IV Adolf was deposed in the Coup of 1809, a political result of the disastrous Finnish War with the Russian Empire.
1814 — The Congress of Vienna declared Napoleon an outlaw following his escape from Elba.
1930 — News of the discovery of Pluto was announced by the Lowell Observatory. Then called the Ninth Planet, it was the result of a long search for “Planet X,” a theorized planet influencing the orbit of Neptune, the ice giant planet beyond Uranus. Clyde W. Tombaugh had discovered it the month before, on February 18. In 2006, in a grand gesture of logomachy, the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto to “dwarf planet.” Pluto and its moons — Charon; Styx; Nix; Kerberos; and Hydra — are also now officially considered “trans-Neptunian objects.”
1969 — Apollo 9 returned safely to Earth after testing NASA’s $2.29 billion Lunar Excursion Module, overseen by Grumman.

On March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted his proposal to CERN for an information management system, which subsequently developed into the World Wide Web.