On March 18, 1992, South Africans voted against the color bar by electing a new government. “Today we have closed the book on apartheid,” Mr de Klerk said in Cape Town as he also celebrated his 56th birthday.
White electors had not only voted by a 2-1 majority to abolish the racial exclusion policies and double standard, but also to lose their own power.
On March 17, 1780, George Washington granted the Continental Army a holiday “as an act of solidarity with the Irish in their fight for independence.”
On March 16, 1751, James Madison was born. He went on to architect the Constitution of the United States, wrote as “Publius” in The Federalist Papers, and served as the fourth President of the United States, where his administration’s record was marred by the war with Great Britain, in which Washington, DC, suffered conquest and conflagration.
According to the Roman calendar, today is the Ides of March. Toga parties on this date? Not advised.
On March 15, 1820, Maine became the 23rd U.S. state.
In 1990 on this date, Mikhail Gorbachev was elected as the first President of the Soviet Union, a position he did not long hold — the government was pulled out from under him in late 1991.
On March 14, 1900, the Gold Standard Act was ratified, placing United States currency on a gold standard. Thus ended the country’s weird experiments in bimetallism, established in 1792 when Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton urged Congress to fix the ratio of gold and silver at 15:1.
The gold standard itself ended on April 25, 1933, and its last vestiges were scrapped when President Richard Nixon closed the foreign gold exchange window in 1971, thereby ending the Bretton-Woods international monetary system.
On March 13, 1868, the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson began in the United States Senate. It is the first impeachment of a U.S. president in the nation’s history.
“Uncle Sam” made his debut as a cartoon character, sixteen years earlier, in the New York Lantern.
On March 12, 1776, a public notice appeared in Baltimore newspapers recognizing the sacrifice of women to the cause of the revolution.
On March 12, 1930, in a bold act of civil disobedience against British rule in India, independence leader Mohandas Gandhi began a 241-mile march to the sea in protest of the British monopoly on salt. Britain’s Salt Acts prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt, a staple in the Indian diet. Citizens were forced to buy salt from the British, who heavily taxed the mineral in addition to holding a monopoly over its manufacture and sale. Gandhi was arrested in May and served in prison until January of the following year, but the protests continued throughout India.
On March 11, 1936, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was born.
March 10, 1762: Jean Calas, a Huguenot, died after torture, after having been wrongly convicted of killing his son; the event inspired Voltaire to begin a campaign for religious tolerance and legal reform.
On March 9, 1954, the CBS show “See It Now” reviewed Wisconsin Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy’s anti-Communism campaign.