Category: Today

On March 31, 1717, a sermon on “The Nature of the Kingdom of Christ,” by Benjamin Hoadly, the Bishop of Bangor, provoked the Bangorian Controversy.

The sermon’s text was John 18:36, “My kingdom is not of this world,” and from that Hoadly deduced — supposedly at the request of King George I himself, who was present in the assembly — that there was no Biblical justification for any church government. Hoadly identified the church with the kingdom of Heaven, noting that Christ had not delegated His authority to any representative.

King George’s preference for the Whig Party, and for latitudinarianism in ecclesiastical policy, is widely thought to have been a strategic maneuver to degrade church power in political government.

On March 30, 2017, SpaceX conducted the world’s first reflight of an orbital class rocket.

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).

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.