Category: Today

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.

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

| Joseph Stalin, the longest serving leader of the Soviet Union, died at his Volynskoe dacha in Moscow on this date in 1953, after a cerebral hemorrhage.

| Composer Sergei Prokofiev died on the same day as Stalin, but it took a while for anyone to take notice, so big was the news of the demise of the dictator. Prokofiev wrote seven symphonies, two violin and five piano concerti, nine piano sonatas and many other works, including operas, ballets, and film scores.

| March 5 is magician Penn Jillette’s birthday.

On March 4, 1933, newly inaugurated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his customary address. The speech “brought a decidedly favorable reaction in the Italian press, especially his declaration that he will seek extraordinary powers to deal with the situation if necessary,” wrote The New York Times the next day. The Times went on to quote “Premier Mussolini’s Milan newspaper, Popolo d’Italia,” which stated that “The American people place their hope in decisive action by the new President and his speech truly satisfied public opinion.”

The Italian newspaper “said the bank moratorium in New York contributed perhaps more than any other factor in convincing even the most reluctant of the urgent necessity for the whole nation to rally around Mr. Roosevelt.” A Turin paper succinctly stated its appreciation for FDR: “Mr. Roosevelt is following the great principles established by the Fascist revolution and the genius of Il Duce.”

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On March 4, 1789, the first bicameral 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, 1924, the 407-year-old Islamic caliphate collapsed when Caliph Abdülmecid II of the Ottoman Caliphate was deposed. The last remnant of the old regime gave way to the reformer Kemal Atatürk.

As the Democratic machine was consolidating its support around Joe Biden on March 2, 2020, in his (ultimately successful) bid for the presidency, the man himself was showing his level of eloquence with a speech in which he demonstrated some trouble regurgitating the most memorable words from the Declaration of Independence:

It’s time for America to get back up on its feet and once again fight for the proposition that “We hold these truths to be self-evident”! Sounds corny; not a joke: think about it. We hold these truths to be self[la]-evident. All men and women created, by the, go, you know, you know the thing! You know how we talk about it.

Joe Biden, in Houston, Texas, March 2, 2020.

On Leap Year Day 1796, the Jay Treaty between the United States and Great Britain came into force, facilitating ten years of peaceful trade between the two countries.

On February 28, 1646, Roger Scott, of Lynn, Massachusetts, was tried for sleeping in church. Awakened in church by a tithingman’s long, knobbed staff hitting him on the head, he struck back at the man, and garnered a whipping as punishment, as well as the dark designation as “a common sleeper at the publick exercise.”

The Twenty-second Amendment (Amendment XXII) of the United States Constitution, which sets a term limit for election and overall time of service to the office of President of the United States, was ratified by the requisite 36 of the then-48 states of the union on February 27, 1951.

Congress had passed the amendment on March 21, 1947.

February 26th marks the Dominican Republic’s Independence Day.

On February 25, 1870, the first African-American entered Congress to serve in the U. S. Senate.

Hiram Rhodes Revels (Sep 27, 1827 – Jan 16, 1901) was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a Republican politician, and college administrator. Born free in North Carolina, he later lived and worked in Ohio, where he voted before the Civil War. Revels (pictured above) was elected as the first African American to serve in the United States Senate, and was the first African American to serve in the U.S. Congress. He represented Mississippi in the Senate in 1870 and 1871 during the Reconstruction era.

On February 24, 1803, the Supreme Court, in Marbury v. Madison, established the principle of judicial review. William Marbury was a businessman appointed as a “midnight judge” by lame duck president John Adams. He became the plaintiff in Marbury v. Madison.

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On February 24, 1917, United States ambassador to the United Kingdom, Walter Hines Page, was shown the intercepted Zimmermann Telegram, in which Germany offered to give the American Southwest back to Mexico were Mexico to declare war on the United States.