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.
March 11, 2010 — minutes before being sworn in as President of Chile, economist and businessman Sebastián Piñera is shaken as an earthquake hits central Chile and aftershocks disturb the ceremony.
On March 10, 1922, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948), activist and theorist of non-violent revolution, 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.
On March 9, 1776, Scottish philosopher Adam Smith 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.
The Wealth of Nations (as it is usually cited) 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 8, 1775, “African Slavery In America,” often described as the first known essay advocating the abolition of slavery in America, was published anonymously in the Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser. Thomas Paine is believed to be the essay’s author.
The first anti-slavery society was formed in Philadelphia weeks after publication, and Paine was a founding member.
Exactly 120 years earlier, a court in Northampton County of the Virginia Colony ruled that John Casor, then working as an indentured servant to Robert Palmer, must be returned to Anthony Johnson as Johnson’s “lawful” slave for life. Johnson himself was one of the original indentured servants brought to Jamestown, had completed his indenture to become a “free Negro,” and became the first African landowner in the colony. The case marked the first person of African descent to be legally recognized as a lifelong slave in England’s North American colonies. In summary: the first official chattel slave in English-speaking North America was of African descent and was owned by a man also of African descent.
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 closed the port of Boston to all commerce.
On March 6, 1967, Soviet Premiere Joseph Stalin’s only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva (February 28, 1926 – November 22, 2011), defected to the United States. She later took the name Lana Peters, upon marriage to William Wesley Peters. The marriage was short-lived.
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. He is also, obviously, the main reason that this site,