Category: Today

On Apr 2, 1917, Jeannette Rankin took her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as the first woman ever elected to Congress, representing Montana. Four days later, she would be one of only 50 representatives to vote against U.S. entry into the First World War. In 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Rankin would cast the only dissenting vote against the country’s entry into World War II.

On April 1, 1787, James Madison, father of the Constitution, removed the General Welfare clause from his draft of the U.S. Constitution, telling friends that, “I fear future big-government-loving politicians will undoubtedly abuse the clause’s vague concept to drown the people in federal overreach.”

On April 1, 1918, Woodrow Wilson became the first and only President of the United States to be impeached and removed from office for lying about munitions being aboard the Lusitania in an effort to whip up war fever against Germany and push the nation into World War I.

On April 1, 2002, the U.S. Congress refused to grant President George W. Bush’s request for a declaration of war against Iraq.

On March 31, 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry signed the Treaty of Kanagawa with Japan, opening the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to American trade.

On March 31, 1959, the Dalai Lama fled the Chinese military suppression of the revolt in Tibet, crossing the border into India, where he was granted political asylum. Thirty years later, in 1989, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for his nonviolent campaign to end the Chinese domination of Tibet.

On March 31, 1990, an anti-poll tax rally in London led to the city’s worst riots in a century, with 113 people injured, including 45 policemen, and 340 people arrested. The violence erupted after 70,000 people took to the streets in protest of the new government levy.

On March 30, 1775, King George III formally endorsed the New England Restraining Act, requiring New England colonies to trade exclusively with Great Britain and banning colonists from fishing in the North Atlantic.

On March 30, 1870, the 15th Amendment, granting African-American men the right to vote, was formally adopted into the U.S. Constitution. One day later, the first African-American male voted in New Jersey.

On March 30, 1867, U.S. Secretary of State William Seward signed a treaty with Russia purchasing Alaska for $7 million. Despite the price of approximately two cents an acre, the purchase was ridiculed in the press as “Seward’s folly.”

On March 29, 1918, Walmart founder Sam Walton was born in Kingfisher, Oklahoma.

On March 29, 1945, Gen. George S. Patton’s 3rd Army captured Frankfurt, Germany. Patton’s troops then crossed through southern Germany and into Czechoslovakia, only to encounter an order not to take the capital, Prague, as it had been reserved for the Soviets.

On March 29, 1971, Lt. William Calley was found guilty of premeditated murder at My Lai by a U.S. Army court-martial at Fort Benning, Georgia. Though investigators of the massacre produced a list of 30 people who knew of the atrocity, only 14 were charged with crimes, and all eventually had their charges dismissed or were acquitted by courts-martial except Calley.
Calley was sentenced to life imprisonment, but his sentence was reduced to 20 years by the Court of Military Appeals and further reduced later to 10 years by the Secretary of the Army. He was paroled in 1974 after having served about a third of his 10-year sentence.

On March 29, 1973, the last U.S. combat soldiers left Vietnam.

On March 28, 1774, the British Parliament adopted the Coercive Acts, a series of four acts aimed at restoring order in Massachusetts and punishing Bostonians for the Tea Party, in which the Sons of Liberty boarded three British ships in Boston Harbor and dumped 342 crates of tea—valued at nearly $1 million in today’s money—into the water to protest the Tea Act. Rather than abandon Bostonians to a kind of martial law, the other colonies rushed to the city’s defense and began to discuss British misrule, leading to the First Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia in September 1774.

On March 27, 1941, Yugoslavian Air Force officers launched a bloodless coup toppling the pro-axis government. Two days before the coup, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia succumbed to pressure from Hitler to join the Tripartite Pact, a move that was deeply unpopular amongst the anti-Axis Serbian public and military.

On March 27, 1981, the Polish Solidarity movement staged a strike, in which at least 12 million Poles walked off their jobs for four hours.

On March 26, 1776, Samuel Ward, a colonial Governor of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations and a delegate to the Continental Congress, died. Ward was the only colonial governor to oppose the Stamp Act, threatening his position, but bringing him recognition as a great patriot.

On March 26, 1929, Tom Foley was born in Spokane, Washington. Foley would serve in Congress for 30 years and become Speaker in the House. But after suing the people of his Washington state to overturn the term limits initiative they passed in 1992, Foley became the first House Speaker in 132 years, since 1862, to be defeated for re-election.

On March 24, 1765, Parliament passed the Quartering Act, ordering the American colonies to provide housing for British soldiers in barracks, or if necessary to accommodate the soldiers in local inns, livery stables, ale houses, and the houses of sellers of wine. The popular belief that the Redcoats tossed colonists from their homes or moved into private homes was not the intent of the law or the practice. The New York colonial assembly refused to comply with the law, leading to Parliament enacting the New York Restraining Act in 1767. The Restraining Act prohibited the royal governor of New York from signing any further legislation until the assembly complied with the Quartering Act.

On March 24, 1958, Elvis Presley was conscripted into the U.S. Army.

On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry gave his famous speech exclaiming “Give me liberty or give me death!” at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, where more than 100 Virginia patriots, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Richard Henry Lee, and Peyton Randolph gathered after leaving the colonial capitol of Williamsburg to avoid the wrath of Royal Governor Lord Dunmore. Less than a month later, the American Revolution began at Lexington and Concord with the shot heard ‘round the world.