Category: Today

On March 10, 1922, Mahatma Gandhi was arrested in India, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years in prison, only to be released nearly two years later for an appendicitis operation.

March 9 marks the 1763 birthday of British pamphleteer and activist William Cobbett. Cobbett was known for his lifelong opposition to authority, and his later-in-life “radicalism,” which included his opposition to Britain’s protectionist Corn Laws, and his support for Catholic Emancipation. Cobbett died in 1835.

In 1776 on this date, Scottish philosopher Adam Smith first published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which became the first widely accepted landmark work in the field of economics. It was not the first general treatise on the subject, however; that designation almost certainly belongs to banker Richard Cantillon’s Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général, cited by Smith in his more famous book. It is also worth noting that Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s systematic treatise, Le Commerce et le Gouvernement, also saw publication in 1776.

On March 9, 1862, the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia fought to a draw in the Battle of Hampton Roads, the first battle between two ironclad warships. The Virginia was built on the remains of the USS Merrimack, and the battle is often referred to as between “the Monitor and the Merrimack.”

On March 7, 1644, Massachusetts established the first two-chamber legislature in the American colonies. One hundred thirty years later, to the day, British forces close the port of Boston to all commerce.

On March 6, 1967, Joseph Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva defected to the United States.

| The March 6 date also marks term limits advocate and initiative organizer Paul Jacob’s birthday. He was born on the anniversary of the births of Michaelangelo, Cryano de Bergerac, and Alan Greenspan.

| On this day in 1820, 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.

On March 5, 1616, Nicolaus Copernicus’s book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, was placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books. This censorship notwithstanding, the Earth continued to revolve around the Sun. The book had been first published in 1543 in Nuremberg.

| In 1770, the Boston Massacre took place on March 5.

| March 5 is magician Penn Jillette’s birthday. He turns 60 today, beginning his 61st year of life.

On March 4, 1789, the first Congress of the United States met in New York, New York, in accordance with the new Constitution. Two years later on the same date, Vermont was admitted as the fourteenth state of the union.

| In a twist in World War II allegiances, Finland declared war on Nazi Germany on March 4, 1945, beginning the Lapland War.

On March 3, 1991, an amateur videographer captured the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers, thus ushering in the age of citizen surveillance of the state.

On February 27, 1830, American economist and free trade advocate Arthur Latham Perry was born.

| The Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution, limiting Presidents to two terms, was ratified on February 27, 1951.