Category: Today

April 16 marks the 1859 death of Alexis de Tocqueville, French historian and sociologist, author “Democracy in America.”

On April 16, 1945, the United States Army liberated Nazi high security prisoner-of-war camp Oflag IV-C (better known as Colditz).

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., penned his Letter from Birmingham Jail while incarcerated in Birmingham, Alabama, for protesting against segregation, on April 16, 1963.

A sermon on “The Nature of the Kingdom of Christ” by Benjamin Hoadly, the Bishop of Bangor, provoked the Bangorian Controversy in the Anglican Church. The sermon was delivered on March 31, 1717, to George I of Great Britain, with the text being John 18:36, “My kingdom is not of this world,” and from that Hoadly deduced, supposedly at the request of the king himself, that there was no Biblical justification for any church government of any sort.

March 31, 1979 is remembered in the Maltese calendar as Freedom Day (Maltese: Jum il-Ħelsien). This is the anniversary of the withdrawal of British troops and the Royal Navy from Malta. On taking power in 1971, the Labour Government indicated it wanted to re-negotiate the lease agreement with the United Kingdom. Following protracted and sometimes tense talks, a new agreement was signed whereby the lease was extended till the end of March 1979 at a vastly increased rent. On March 31, 1979 the last British Forces left Malta. For the first time in millennia, Malta was no longer a military base of a foreign power and it became independent de facto as well as de jure.

March 30 is Spiritual/Shouter Baptist Liberation Day in Trinidad and Tobago. The holiday commemorates the repeal on March 30, 1951, of the 1917 Shouter Prohibition Ordinance that prohibited the activities of the Shouter or Spiritual Baptist faith.

On March 29, 1916, Eugene McCarthy, American political maverick, was born.

On March 28, 1936, Mario Vargas Llosa was born. Vargas Llosa became a leading Peruvian author with an international reputation, a politician and winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature.

On March 27, 1981, Poland’s Solidarity movement staged a warning strike, in which at least 12 million Poles walked off their jobs for four hours. This began the decade-long process of overcoming Soviet communist rule in the satellite countries, leading eventually to the fall of the USSR as well.

The word gerrymander (originally written Gerry-mander) was used for the first time in the Boston Gazette on March 26, 1812. The word was created in reaction to a redrawing of Massachusetts state senate election districts under the then-governor Elbridge Gerry. In 1812, Governor Gerry signed a bill that redistricted Massachusetts to benefit his Democratic-Republican Party. When mapped, one of the contorted districts in the Boston area was said to resemble the shape of a salamander. The term was a portmanteau of the governor’s last name and the word salamander.

Appearing with the term, and helping to spread and sustain its popularity, was a political cartoon depicting a strange animal with claws, wings and a dragon-like head satirizing the map of the odd-shaped district.

On March 25, 1774, the British Parliament passed the Boston Port Act, closing the port of Boston and demanding that the city’s residents pay for the tea dumped into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773. The cost of the tea was equivalent to $1 million in today’s currency. The Boston Port Act was the first and easiest to enforce of four acts that together were known as the Coercive Acts. The other three were a new Quartering Act, the Administration of Justice Act and the Massachusetts Government Act.

On March 25, 1955, U.S. Customs seized 520 copies of Allen Ginsberg’s book Howl, which had been printed in England. Officials alleged that the book was obscene. The poem created an earthquake in the literary world and still stands as an icon of the ’50s and ’60s counter-culture.

On March 25, 1967, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., led a march of 5,000 antiwar demonstrators in Chicago. In an address to the demonstrators, King declared that the Vietnam War was “a blasphemy against all that America stands for.”

American Federalist politician, diplomat, and Constitutional delegate Rufus King was born on March 24, 1755.

American economist Robert Heilbroner was born on this date in 1919. Heilbroner was a career-long socialist who, after the fall of the Soviet Union, admitted that “Mises was right” about the unworkability of socialism.

Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was also born on the same day as Heilbroner.