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 nations.
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 26 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 (pictured) was a businessman appointed as a “midnight judge” by lame duck president John Adams. He became the plaintiff in Marbury v. Madison.
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.
February 19, 1455, is the traditional date of the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed with movable type. Thus began a new era in human civilization, eventually bringing literacy, information, and entertainment to the masses.
On February 22, 1632, Ferdinando II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, received the first printed copy of Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i Due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo). The Grand Duke was the dedicatee.
Galileo’s Dialogo is a witty and entertaining defense of the Copernican system, where the Sun is at the center of “the universe.” This was opposed to the traditional view — held by Aristotle and Ptolemy — of an Earth-centered armillary sphere.
Only two systems appear in the Dialogo; Galileo pitting what we now call the Ptolemaic system with the Copernican, nowhere mentioning the Tychonic system then favored by most astronomers, one in which the Sun and Moon and stars revolve around Earth, but the planets revolve around the Sun.
Once published, Pope Urban VIII gave orders for the Dialogo to be recalled and summoned Galileo to Rome for trial.