Category: Today

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.

On the same day, the Free State of Fiume was annexed by the Kingdom of Italy.

On March 3 of 1931, the United States adopted The Star-Spangled Banner as its national anthem.

Mohandas K. Gandhi began his hunger strike in Bombay to protest at the autocratic rule in British India on this day in 1939.

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Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari (pictured above) was born on March 3, 1819. Associated with French laissez-faire economists Frédéric Bastiat and Yves Guyot, he was the longest-serving editor of Guillamin’s Journal des économistes. While today chiefly known in the English-speaking world for his authorship of one article, “The Production of Security” (1849), he was, as Ludwig von Mises described, the most productive economist in his school. Despite this, and his worldwide recognition, only one of his many books was translated from the French into English during his lifetime, The Society of To-morrow (1904), his final book.

In the book he advanced the idea of “the free constitution of nationality.”

Molinari died on January 28, 1912.

On March 2, 1793, Sam Houston (pictured above) was born.

On March 2, 1926, American economist and political theorist Murray N. Rothbard was born.

As President of the Republic of Texas, Houston (pictured above) cut the size of the Republic’s budget by a whopping amount, including selling the navy for scrap. Rothbard theorized about even more daring — and more permanent — cuts to (and limits upon) government.

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On March 2, 1781, the Second Continental Congress convened as the new Congress of the Confederation, under the Articles of Confederation, ratified the day before. The congress elected no new president upon adoption of the Articles. This Confederation Congress oversaw the conclusion of the American Revolution.

March 1st Firsts (and a 17th and a 37th):

| The first United States census was authorized, in 1790.

| Ohio was admitted as the 17th U.S. state, in 1803.

| President John Tyler [pictured above] signed a bill authorizing the United States to annex the Republic of Texas, in 1845.

| The state of Michigan formally abolished capital punishment, 1847.

| Nebraska became the 37th of the United States, in 1867.

On March 1, 1781, the Continental Congress of the United States adopted the Articles of Confederation. With this, the governing body became known, officially, as United States of America in Congress Assembled, more commonly as the Congress of the Confederation. The first session of this newly styled Confederation Congress took over without a break from the Second Continental Congress, adjourning on November 3. Samuel Huntington and Thomas McKean served as presidents during this first session.

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 January 29, 1968, Ukrainian-American lawyer and “Volokh Conspiracy” blogger, Eugene Volokh, was born. Other “leaplings” include Ann Lee (1736), founder of the Shakers; Gioachino Rossini (1792), Italian composer, best known for his many successful operas, including Il barbiere di Siviglia and Guillaume Tell; and American fantasy novelists Patricia A. McKillip (1948) and Tim Powers (1952).
Pictured: American ‘founding father’ John Jay.

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.”

On February 27, 1830, American economist and free trade advocate Arthur Latham Perry (pictured above) was born.

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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.

February 25, 1805, saw the birth of Angelina Emily Grimké Weld, American abolitionist and feminist. She was the younger sister of the equally famed Sarah Moore Grimké.

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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.

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In Law #46 of February 25, 1947, the Allied Control Council formally proclaimed the dissolution of Prussia.

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.

On February 24, 1803, the Supreme Court, in Marbury v. Madison, established the principle of judicial review.

On February 23, 1898, Émile Zola was imprisoned in France after writing J’accuse, a letter accusing the French government of anti-Semitism and wrongfully imprisoning Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Zola was a leading force in extending realism to the novel.

Fifty-eight years earlier, Austrian economist Carl Menger was born.

Menger [shown above] would go on to contribute to the development of the theory of marginal utility, which supplanted cost-of-production theories of value in economics, in his first book, translated into English as Principles of Economics. Though expert in mathematics (he served as tutor in economics and statistics to Archduke Rudolf von Habsburg, the Crown Prince of Austria, starting not long after the publication of the Principles), his approach to marginal theory was the least mathematical of his famous “co-discovers” of the principle, William Stanley Jevons and Leon Walras. Rooted in a subjective theory of value, it was the most realistic and least model-based of the marginalist revolutionaries, and he was most interested in price formation, not “price determination,” which focused almost exclusively on equilibrium conditions. He developed an evolutionary theory of money, as well. In his second book, he expanded upon invisible hand processes in society — made most famous in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) and contributed the opening salvo in what came to be known as the Methodenstreit, in which he attacked the misuse of historical method in economics by the technocratic “socialists of the chair” in the German-speaking world. Menger’s approach could be considered a kind of theoretical realism, as opposed the operationalism that was made famous a century later by Milton Friedman.

Zola died in 1902; Menger died in 1921.