Category: Today

On March 29, 1990, the Czechoslovak parliament proved unable to reach an agreement on what to call the country after the “Velvet Revolution” — in which the Communist Party was booted from power. This sparked the “Hyphen War,” a tongue-in-cheek moniker for the dispute between Czechs and Slovaks about official recognition of the two nations’ equal status. (The Slovak representatives wanted to insert a hyphen into the name, to make the Slovak part stand out.) Eventually, the dispute was resolved with the “Velvet Divorce,” in which the two countries split up, on New Year’s Day, 1993, the two countries now being named:

Czech Republic, also known as Czechia;

Slovakia, officially the Slovak Republic (Slovak: Slovenská republika).

The Twenty-Eighth of March just so happens to mark three occasions of political life in imperial Rome:

• A.D. 37 — Roman emperor Caligula accepted the titles of the Principate, bestowed on him by the Senate.
• A.D. 193 — After assassinating the Roman Emperor Pertinax, his Praetorian Guards auctioned off the throne to Didius Julianus.
• A.D. 364 — Roman Emperor Valentinian I appointed his brother Flavius Valens co-emperor.

On March 27, 1782, the Second Rockingham ministry assumed office in Great Britain and began negotiations to end the American War of Independence.

On 1794 on this day of the month, the United States Government established a permanent navy and authorized the building of six frigates.

On March 26, 1991, local self-government in South Korea was restored after three decades of centralized control.

On March 25, 1965, civil rights activists led by Martin Luther King, Jr., successfully completed their four-day, 50-mile march from Selma to the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama.

On March 24, 1765, the Kingdom of Great Britain passed the Quartering Act, which required the Thirteen Colonies to house British troops.

On the same date in 1855, slavery was abolished in Venezuela.

On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry delivered his “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!” speech at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia.

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.