28 March: This Date in History

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Events, deaths, births, of MAR 28 v.5.26
[For Mar 28 Julian go to Gregorian date: 1583~1699: Apr 07 — 1700s: Apr 08 — 1800s: Apr 09 — 1900~2099: Apr 10]

ALTERNATE SITES ANY DAY OF THE YEAR IN HISTORY ART “4” MAR 28 wikipedia

• Arabs offer peace to Israel... • Painter Chagall dies... • British bomb Lubeck... • Gorky is born... • Maine enters the Union... • Virginia Woolf dies... • Ford's Willow Run plant... • Near meltdown at 3–Mile–Island… • Nuclear control plan... • Mario Vargas Llosa is born... • San Francisco is founded... • US to buy UNIVAC cheap... • Adobe Acrobat wins support... • Electronic publishing royalties... • Diem's popular support questioned... • US Senate censures President... • Italian fleet incapacitated...

On a 28 March:
2004 Second and decisive round of elections in the 26 regions of France, including the 4 overseas regions (1st round was on 21 March 2004). The left gets 50% of the votes, the right 37% and the extreme right 13%. As a result the left will govern 23 regions (it headed 9 since 1998), the right only 3 (down from 17). This is seen as a repudiation of the austerity economics of unpopular rightist (UDF = Union pour la Démocratie Française) Jean-Pierre Raffarin [03 Aug 1948~], prime minister elected on 27 October 1999, who, after the election, is bitterly criticized by the officials of his own party. The regions are Alsace, Aquitaine, Auvergne, Basse-Normandie, Bourgogne, Bretagne, Centre, Champagne-Ardenne, Corse, Franche-Comté, Haute-Normandie, Ile-de-France, Languedoc-Roussillon, Limousin, Lorraine, Midi-Pyrénées, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Pays de la Loire, Picardie, Poitou-Charente, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, Rhône-Alpes, Guadeloupe, Guyane, Martinique, Réunion.
2003 The previous evening, Lifecore Biomedics (LCBM) announced that it suspended global marketing and sales of its ferric hyaluronan adhesion prevention product, Gynecare Intergel Adhesion Prevention Solution in order to assess information obtained from postmarketing experience with the device, as requested by the distributor, Johnson & Johnson. The gel, which is used to help heal wounds caused by gynecological surgery, accounts for about 10% of LCBM's annual sales of $40 million, but investors hoped that it would become dominant in a potential $500 million market. On the NASDAQ, 3.5 million of the 13 million SCBM shares are traded, dropping from their previous close of $6.09 to an intraday low of $3.01 and close at $3.55. They had traded as high as $11.75 as recently as 19 April 2002, and $22.50 on 10 January 2000. [5~year price chart >]

^ 2002 Arabs offer peace to Israel.
At the conclusion of its two-day meeting in Beirut, the Arab League unanimously adopts the following::
The Council of the League of Arab States at the summit level, at its 14th ordinary session:
REAFFIRMING the resolution taken in June 1996 at the Cairo extraordinary Arab summit that a just and comprehensive peace in the Middle East is the strategic option of the Arab countries, to be achieved in accordance with international legality, and which would require a comparable commitment on the part of the Israeli government.
HAVING LISTENED to the statement made by His Royal Highness Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, the crown prince of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in which his highness presented his initiative, calling for full Israeli withdrawal from all the Arab territories occupied since June 1967, in implementation of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, reaffirmed by the Madrid Conference of 1991 and the land-for-peace principle, and Israel's acceptance of an independent Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital, in return for the establishment of normal relations in the context of a comprehensive peace with Israel.
EMANATING FROM the conviction of the Arab countries that a military solution to the conflict will not achieve peace or provide security for the parties, the council:
1. Requests Israel to reconsider its policies and declare that a just peace is its strategic option as well.
2. Further calls upon Israel to affirm:
a. Full Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied since 1967, including the Syrian Golan Heights to the lines of 04 June 1967, as well as the remaining occupied Lebanese territories in the south of Lebanon.
b. Achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194.
c. The acceptance of the establishment of a sovereign, independent Palestinian state on the Palestinian territories occupied since 04 June 1967, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
3. Consequently, the Arab countries affirm the following:
a. Consider the Arab-Israeli conflict ended, and enter into a peace agreement with Israel, and provide security for all the states of the region.
b. Establish normal relations with Israel in the context of this comprehensive peace.
4. Assures the rejection of all forms of Palestinian patriation which conflict with the special circumstances of the Arab host countries.
5. Calls upon the government of Israel and all Israelis to accept this initiative in order to safeguard the prospects for peace and stop the further shedding of blood, enabling the Arab countries and Israel to live in peace and good neighborliness and provide future generations with security, stability and prosperity.
6. Invites the international community and all countries and organizations to support this initiative.
7. Requests the chairman of the summit to form a special committee composed of some of its concerned member states and the secretary general of the League of Arab States to pursue the necessary contacts to gain support for this initiative at all levels, particularly from the United Nations, the Security Council, the United States of America, the Russian Federation, the Muslim states and the European Union.

2002 Juliusz Paetz, 67, Catholic archbishop of Poznan, Poland, resigns, while denying the allegations that he had made homosexual advances to teenaged seminarians.
2001 It is announced that US President Bush (Jr.) will not implement the Kyoto climate treaty (signed by the US on 12 November 1998), which requires the US to cut emissions about a third by 2012. This goes contrary to the advice given three weeks earlier by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christie Whitman. One week after that Bush announced that he would go back on a campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide. [6 March 2000 Report to US Congress on the treaty] [Share of Greenhouse warming due to various gases >]
2001 Ivan Boroughs, 76, is released from prison in Jamaica, where he had been since December 1972 after he broke a pane of glass at a bank, a charge which carries a maximum sentence of three years, but he had never been brought to trial, as we was considered mentally ill by court officials. and thus unfit to stand trial. Commissioner of Corrections John Prescod said officials had known that Boroughs was in prison, but had to wait on the court, which did not order the release until 27 March 2001. The Legal Aid Council plans to seek justice for Boroughs.
2001 La 'comandante' Esther, miembro de la dirección política del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), se dirige a los diputados y senadores mexicanos desde la tribuna de oradores del Congreso para defender los derechos de la comunidad indígena.
2000 La policía israelí solicita el procesamiento de Benjamín Netanyahu y de su esposa por supuestos delitos de malversación de caudales públicos, soborno y apropiación ilegal de 700 regalos oficiales.
2000 In a unanimous ruling, the US Supreme Court sharply curtails police power to rely on anonymous tips to stop and search people.
1999 El presidente paraguayo Raúl Alberto Cubas Grau presenta su dimisión.
1998 Leo Jones is convicted of murdering a police officer in Jacksonville, Florida. Jones had signed a confession after several hours of police interrogation, but the confession was coerced. In the mid-1980s, the policeman who arrested Jones and the detective who took his confession were forced out of uniform for ethical violations. The policeman was later identified by a fellow officer as an "enforcer" who had used torture. Many witnesses came forward pointing to another suspect in the case.
1996 US Congress passed the line-item veto, giving the president power to cut government spending by scrapping specific programs.

^ 1996 Atlantic Monthly settles intellectual property suit
Atlantic Monthly agrees to settle an intellectual property lawsuit brought by a professor who accused the magazine of illegally posting his work in electronic format on the LEXIS-NEXIS database system. A writer's group had sued six publishing companies, including Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times, for reusing freelancers' work in electronic format without purchasing electronic rights. Electronic property rights became a hot issue as more and more publications began reprinting their content on the Web.

^ 1995 Adobe Acrobat wins support.
Adobe's quest to establish a common standard for sharing documents on the Internet gained momentum when IBM and Netscape agreed to support Adobe Acrobat on 28 March 1995. The new software allowed users to view documents in their original page layout and design regardless of the users' platform. IBM announced it would ship the new Acrobat software with its personal computers, and Netscape promised to build Acrobat into its Web browser. Acrobat succeeded in its attempt to become an industry standard and is frequently used today to transmit research reports, user manuals, and other long documents.

1994 El magnate Silvio Berlusconi y sus aliados derechistas ganan las elecciones parlamentarias en Italia.
1991 Tens of thousands of supporters of Boris N. Yeltsin marched in Moscow in defiance of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's ban on rallies.
1991 Former President Reagan declared his support for the "Brady Bill" requiring a seven-day waiting period for handgun purchases.
1990 El Parlamento de Israel reafirma a Jerusalén como capital del Estado.
1983 El volcán Etna entra en erupción.

^ 1979 Nuclear accident at 3-Mile-Island power plant.
      At 04:00, the worst accident in the history of the US nuclear power industry begins when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor fails to close at Three Mile Island. Cooling water, contaminated with radiation, drained from the open valve into adjoining buildings, and the core began to dangerously overheat. The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant was built in 1974 on a sandbar on Pennsylvania's Susquehanna River, just 16 km downstream from the state capitol in Harrisburg [photo >]. In 1978, a second state-of-the-art reactor began operating on Three Mile Island, which was lauded for generating affordable and reliable energy in a time of energy crises. After the cooling water began to drain out of the broken pressure valve on the morning of 28 March 1979, emergency cooling pumps automatically went into operation. Left alone, these safety devices would have prevented the development of a larger crisis. However, human operators in the control room misread confusing and contradictory readings and shut off the emergency water system. The reactor was also shut down, but residual heat from the fission process was still being released. By early morning, the core had heated to over 4000ºF, just 1000 degrees short of meltdown. In the meltdown scenario, the core melts, and deadly radiation drifts across the countryside, fatally sickening a potentially great number of people. As the plant operators struggled to understand what had happened, the contaminated water was releasing radioactive gases throughout the plant. The radiation levels, though not immediately life-threatening, were dangerous, and the core cooked further as the contaminated water was contained and precautions were taken to protect the operators.
      Shortly after 08:00, word of the accident leaked to the outside world. The plant's parent company, Metropolitan Edison, downplayed the crisis and claimed that no radiation had been detected off plant grounds, but the same day inspectors detected slightly increased levels of radiation nearby as a result of the contaminated water leak. Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh considered calling an evacuation. Finally, at about 20:00, plant operators realized they needed to get water moving through the core again and restarted the pumps. The temperature began to drop, and pressure in the reactor was reduced. The reactor had come within less than an hour of a complete meltdown. More than half the core was destroyed or molten, but it had not broken its protective shell, and no radiation was escaping. The crisis was apparently over. Two days later, however, on 30 March, a bubble of highly flammable hydrogen gas was discovered within the reactor building. The bubble of gas was created two days before when exposed core materials reacted with super-heated steam.
      On 28 March, some of this gas had exploded, releasing a small amount of radiation into the atmosphere. At that time, plant operators had not registered the explosion, which sounded like a ventilation door closing. After the radiation leak was discovered on 30 March, residents were advised to stay indoors. Experts were uncertain if the hydrogen bubble would create further meltdown or possibly a giant explosion, and as a precaution Governor Thornburgh advised "pregnant women and pre-school age children to leave the area within a five-mile radius of the Three Mile Island facility until further notice." This led to the panic the governor had hoped to avoid; within days, more than 100'000 persons had fled surrounding towns.
      On 01 April, President Jimmy Carter arrived at Three Mile Island to inspect the plant. Carter, a trained nuclear engineer, had helped dismantle a damaged Canadian nuclear reactor while serving in the US Navy. His visit achieved its aim of calming local residents and the nation. That afternoon, experts agreed that the hydrogen bubble was not in danger of exploding. Slowly, the hydrogen was bled from the system as the reactor cooled. At the height of the crisis, plant workers were exposed to unhealthy levels of radiation, but no one outside Three Mile Island had their health adversely affected by the accident. The 600'000 persons living within 30 km of the plant got no more than minor radiation doses. Nonetheless, the incident greatly eroded the public's faith in nuclear power. The unharmed Unit-1 reactor at Three Mile Island, which was shut down during the crisis, did not resume operation until 1985. Cleanup continued on Unit-2 until 1990, but it was too damaged to be rendered usable again. For more than two decades following the accident at Three Mile Island, not a single new nuclear power plant would be ordered in the United States. The business-corrupted environment-unfriendly regime of USurper “Dubya” Bush would push for legislation promoting the building of new nuclear power plant, but the US Senate, though controled by a Republican majority, would demur.

^ 1961 Diem's popular support is questioned.
A US national intelligence estimate prepared for President John F. Kennedy declares that South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and the Republic of Vietnam are facing an extremely critical situation. As evidence, the reports cites that more than half of the rural region surrounding Saigon is under communist control and points to a barely failed coup against Diem the preceding November. Not only were Diem's forces losing to the Viet Cong on the battlefield, the report alleged that he had not effectively dealt with the discontent among a large segment of South Vietnamese society, which had given rise to the coup against him. The report questioned Diem's ability to rally the people against the communists. Kennedy wondered what to do about Diem, who was staunchly anticommunist but did not have a lot of credibility with the South Vietnamese people because he was Catholic while the country was predominantly Buddhist. Kennedy and his advisers tried to convince Diem to put in place land reform and other measures that might build popular support, but Diem steadfastly refused to make any meaningful concessions to his opponents. He was assassinated in November 1963 during a coup by a group of South Vietnamese generals.

1960 Pope John XXIII raises the first Japanese, first African and first Filipino cardinal.
1957 Los ingleses ponen en libertad al arzobispo Makarios III, dirigente de Chipre.

^ 1946 Nuclear control plan.
The US State Department releases the so-called Acheson-Lilienthal Report, which outlines a plan for international control of atomic energy. The report represented an attempt by the United States to maintain its superiority in the field of atomic weapons while also trying to avoid a costly and dangerous arms race with the Soviet Union. The March 1946 report had been instigated by a rather hastily assembled proposal put forward by Secretary of State James Byrnes at the Moscow Conference in December 1945. Byrnes presented a hazy plan for some sort of United Nations control of atomic energy; Soviet leader Joseph Stalin agreed to the idea. President Harry S. Truman was livid when he learned of Byrnes's proposal. By the time of the meeting in Moscow, Truman had come to the conclusion that the Soviets were dangerous adversaries who must be met with force. Giving up America's nuclear monopoly was not appealing. Nevertheless, he ordered the Department of State to put together a preliminary plan, assuming that America had such a huge head start in atomic power that the Soviets could never really catch up. In addition, perhaps an international body could help avert a potentially dangerous arms race with the Soviets. Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, administrator of the Tennessee Valley Authority David Lilienthal, and others hammered out a proposal by March 1946. The Acheson-Lilienthal Report suggested that an international body-such as the United Nations-have control over atomic materials and the means of producing nuclear energy. Information on atomic energy would be shared, research facilities would be divided among the nations involved, and the international body would conduct inspections. In the meantime, while this organization was being established, the United States would maintain its atomic monopoly. In June 1946, Truman selected businessman Bernard Baruch to present the plan at the United Nations. Baruch, however, changed many of the key points of the plan and insisted that the United States would have an ultimate veto power on any issues arising in connection with the plan. The Soviets quickly rejected the idea so the vote was never held in the United Nations. The United States and the Soviet Union would go their own ways in developing their nuclear arsenals. In 1949, the Soviets exploded an atomic device and the nuclear arms race was on.

^ 1946 US Government to buy UNIVAC computer for $225'000.
The Census Bureau and the National Bureau of Standards meet to discuss the purchase of a computer. The agencies agreed to buy UNIVAC, the world's first general all-purpose business computer, from Presper Eckert and John Mauchly for a mere $225,000. But UNIVAC cost far more than that to develop. Eckert and Mauchly's venture foundered as the company continued to build and program UNIVACs for far less than the development cost. Eventually, the company was purchased by Remington Rand.

1945 Last V-1 (buzz bomb) attack on London

^ 1942 British bomb Lubeck
234 British bombers strike the German port of Lubeck, an industrial town of only "moderate importance." The attack was ordered (according to Sir Arthur Harris, head of British Bomber Command) as more of a morale booster for British flyers than anything else, but the destruction wreaked on Lubeck was significant: Two thousand buildings were totaled, 312 German civilians were killed, and 15'000 Germans were left homeless.
In retaliation for the British raid on Lubeck, starting on 23 April 1942, German bombers would strike Exeter and later Bath, Norwick, York, and other "medieval-city centers." Almost 1000 English civilians are killed in the bombing attacks nicknamed "Baedeker Raids." As an act of reprisal, the Germans attacked cathedral cities of great historical significance. The 15th-century Guildhall, in York, as an example, was destroyed. The Germans called their air attacks "Baedeker Raids," named for the German publishing company famous for guidebooks popular with tourists. The Luftwaffe vowed to bomb every building in Britain that the Baedeker guide had awarded "three stars."

1942 British naval forces raid Nazi occupied French port of St Nazaire.

^ 1941 Construction of Ford’s Willow Run Plant begins.
Due both to his admiration of the German people and his philosophical alignment as a pacifist, Henry Ford was reluctant to convert all of his production facilities to war manufacturing. Compounding his anxiety was the fact that one of his former employees, William Knudsen, who had defected to General Motors, headed the bureau in Washington in charge of administrating Detroit’s war effort. But with the US declaration of war in 1941, Ford had no choice but to participate. He contributed with his usual sense of competitive ambition. Before the war, Ford had boasted nonchalantly that Ford could produce 1000 airplanes per day provided there was no interference from stockholders or labor unions. So when Ford was asked by Knudsen to build subassemblies for Consolidated Aircraft, it was no surprise that Ford lieutenant Charles Sorensen pushed for a deal that would allow Ford to construct the entire B-24 Liberator bomber. The contract included $200 million toward the construction of a new production facility. In exchange, Sorensen promised Ford would manufacture 500 planes per month, a quote nearly ten times what Consolidated Aircraft was then capable of producing. Ground was broken on a vast piece of land in Ypsilanti, Michigan to begin a plant called Willow Run. Over the course of the next few years Willow Run would be a source of problems for the Ford Motor Company. Squabbling within Ford over control of the company, government interference, the loss of much of the company’s labor force to the draft, and other problems deterred Ford’s war effort. By the end of 1942, Willow Run had only produced 56 B-24 bombers and the plant had been saddled with the nickname "Willit Run?" The government considered taking over the operations at Willow Run. Just when it seemed that Sorensen’s project would fail, Willow Run began rolling out B-24’s at a remarkable rate. The plant produced 190 bombers in June of 1943, 365 in December. By the middle of 1944, Willow Run churned out a plane every 63 minutes. "Willow Run looked like a city with a roof on it," remembered Esther Earthlene, one of the many women who worked there during the war. Willow Run was the largest factory of its day. Its workers built planes around the clock, rotating three eight-hour shifts. They were provided with housing and entertainment. Willow Run had a twenty-four hour movie theater. By the end of the war, Willow Run had produced more than 8500 bombers, and it had become a symbol of the American economy’s successful response to war.

1939 The Spanish Civil War ends as Madrid fell to the forces of Francisco Franco
1933 German Reichstag confers dictatorial powers to Adolph Hitler
1930 Constantinople and Angora change names to Istanbul and Ankara.
1925 Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer y Albás [09 Jan 1902 – 26 Jun 1975] is ordained a Catholic priest. In 1928 he would found the Opus Dei. Escrivá would be beatified in 1992 by Pope John Paul II.
1917 Jews are expelled from Tel Aviv and Jaffa by Turkish authorities
1899 Guglielmo Marconi [25 Apr 1874 – 20 Jul 1937] establece por primera vez comunicación radiotelegráfica entre las dos orillas del Canal de la Mancha.
1898 The US Supreme Court rules that a child born in the United States to Chinese immigrants is a US citizen, and therefore may not be deported under the Chinese Exclusion Act.
1895 Los hermanos Lumiére presentan en el Fomento de la Industria Nacional, de París, su invento llamado cinematógrafo.
1892 Charles Duryea and Erwin Markham sign a contract to design and finance the construction of a gasoline-powered automobile.
1865 Siege of Spanish Fort, Alabama, continues.
1862 Battle of Glorieta Pass, New Mexico Territory.
1854 Crimean War starts as Britain and France declared war on Russia. — Francia y Gran Bretaña declaran la guerra a Rusia por el ataque de este país a los principados turcos, hecho que da comienzo de la Guerra de Crimea. 1856 Concluding the Crimean War, the Treaty of Paris is signed between Russia (which occupied the Danubian principalities, modern Romania, on the Russo-Turkish border in July 1853) on one side and, on the other, Turkey (which had declared war on Russia on 04 October 1853),
1854 France and Great Britain declare war on Russia, thus joining the Crimean War, which started on 04 October 1853 when Turkey declared war on Russia, in response to the July 1853 occupation by Russia of the Danubian principalities (modern Romania) on the Russo-Turkish border.
Sardinia-Piedmont would declare war on Russia on 26 January 1855. After defeats and after Austria threatens to join the allies, Russia would accept preliminary peace terms on 01 February 1856. The Congress of Paris would work out the final settlement from 25 February 1856 to 30 March 1856 when the resulting Treaty of Paris would be signed.
1844 Real Decreto de Isabel II de España por el que se crea la Guardia Civil, que fue completado por otro del 12 de abril del mismo año.

^ 1834 US Senate censures President Jackson
The US Senate adopts a resolution, introduced by Andrew Jackson's archenemy Henry Clay [12 Apr 1777 – 29 Jun 1852], which censures the President for removing funds from the Second Bank of the United States in the fall of 1833. An ardent supporter of states' rights, Jackson [15 Mar 1767 – 08 Jun 1845], along with help from Treasury Secretary Robert Taney, who was also censured by the Senate, transferred chunks of the money from the national bank to state institutions. Though Jackson claimed that the transfer was a response to the bank's putatively partisan position during the 1832 elections, he was seemingly making a bald-faced play to kill the bank. Following the censure, the pugnacious president marshaled his forces and attempted to overturn the Senate's ruling. Though his initial efforts were rebuffed, Jackson eventually won the day. Thanks in large part to Senator Thomas Hart Benton [14 Mar 1782 – 10 Apr 1858], the censure was stripped from the Senate records in early 1837. More importantly, Jackson successfully blocked the bank from renewing its charter. Defeated bank leader Nelson Biddle instead opted to obtain a state banking license from Pennsylvania.

^ 1820 Maine enters the Union
     As part of the Missouri Compromise between the North and the South, Maine is admitted into the Union as the twenty-third state.
      Administered as a province of Massachusetts since 1647, the entrance of Maine into the United States as a free state helps maintain the balance in the US Senate that would have been disrupted by the entrance of Missouri Territory into the Union as a slave state.
      French explorer Samuel de Champlain visited the coast of Maine in 1604 and claimed it as part of the French province of Acadia. However, further French settlement was prevented after British forces under Sir Samuel Argall destroyed a colony on Mt. Desert Island in 1613. Sir Ferdinando Gorges, a leading figure in the Plymouth Company, initiated British settlement in Maine after receiving a grant and royal charter, and in 1647, the Massachusetts Bay Colony claimed jurisdiction.
      Three decades later, Massachusetts purchased proprietary rights from Gorges’s heirs. As part of Massachusetts, Maine developed early fishing, lumbering, and shipbuilding industries, and in 1820, was granted statehood. In the nineteenth century, the promise of jobs in the timber industry lured many French Canadians to Maine from the Canadian province of Quebec, which borders the state to the west.
      With 90% of Maine still covered by forests, Maine is known as the "Pine Tree State," and is the most sparsely populated state east of the Mississippi River.

1774 Britain passes Coercive Act against Massachusetts.
1767 Se firma en Marrakech el primer tratado de paz y de amistad entre España y Marruecos.
1661 Scottish Parliament passed the Rescissory Act, which repealed the whole of the legislation enacted since 1633. Its effect was to overthrow Presbyterianism and to restore the Anglican episcopacy to Scotland.
1556 En Valladolid, Felipe II es proclamado solemnemente rey de España.
1556 Origin of Fasli Era (India)
1480 Una pragmática de los Reyes Católicos autoriza a los campesinos a trasladarse libremente con todos sus bienes.

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^ Deaths which occurred on a 28 March:
2005 Yurisman Halawa, 20, and some 2000 persons in and after magnitude 8.7 earthquake at 23:10 (16:10 UT) with epicenter in the Andaman Sea, 30 km deep at 2º04'N 97º01'E, 245km SW of Medan, Sumatra, Indonesia, and close to the small Nias Island (SSW of the red star on the map below, and just above the date 1861), which has 700'000 inhabitants (mostly Christians), and whose main town, Gunungsitoli (1º16'N 97º34'E), 111 km from the epicenter (30'000 inhabitants), is the worst hit. Many of the deaths occur in the following days among those trapped under rubble. Thousands more are injured. Some 20% of the dead are on Simeuluë Island and other Banyak islands (population 5000), north of Nias and even closer to the epicenter, The main reason why there are not more casualties is that no significant tsunami is caused. Also the region affected has been partially depopulated as a result of the 26 December 2004 magnitude 9.0 earthquake (epicenter at at 3º19'N 95º51'E) and tsunami, which collapsed many buildings which are therefore no longer a hazard. Today's is the 7th strongest earthquake in the world since 1900.

2003 Some 60 persons, by a misguided US bomb which, at 18:00, hits the al-Nasr market in the working-class al-Shoala neighborhood of Baghdad, Iraq. Some 100 are injured.
2003 Eight persons in Baath party headquarters in Baghdad, Iraq, bombed by the US.
2003 British Cpl. Matty Hull, in combat in Iraq, possibly shot from his own side.
2003 Mohammed Ghanem, 24, Palestinian, shot by Israeli troops in Tul Karm refugee camp, West Bank.
2002:: 29 workers as a wall of water floods into a giant dry dock in Dubai. Dubai DryDocks employs some 3500 workers, most of them Asians, mainly Indians, Filipinos, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans and is one of the largest facilities in the world for ship repairs.
2002 Rachel Gavish and David Gavish, 50, their son Avraham Gavish, 20, his maternal grandfather Yitzhak Kanner, 83; and, after midnight, Ahmed Abdel Jawad, a Hamas member, who had shot them in their home in the Jewish enclave settlement of Elon Moreh, West Bank, south of Nablus, and is killed by Israeli soldiers.
2001 Palestinian boy, 9, by explosion of unexploded Israeli shell with which he was playing with three others, who are injured, in Rafah, Gaza Strip.
2001 Palestinian suicide bomber and 2 Jewish teen-agers of a group waiting near the Sdeh Hemed kibbutz (close to Qalqiliya) for an armored bus to their seminary in West Bank settlement of Kedumim, shortly after 07:30. Two other seminarians are severely injured.
1997 Treinta y nueve componentes de la secta religiosa Higher Source se suicidan colectivamente al creer que, tras la cola del cometa Hale-Bopp, viajaba una nave extraterrestre que los recogería.
1996 Kanemaru Shin, 81, of a stroke stemming from diabetes. Before he was indicted in 1993 for tax evasion he was Japan's most powerful politician, though the highest position he held in the Liberal Democratic Party was that of vice president. His trial was to have begun earlier in March 1996, but it was suspended because of his poor health.
1994 Eugène Ionesco, dramaturgo francés de origen rumano.
1985 Marc Chagall, French painter and designer born on 07 July 1887 in Vitebsk, Russia (now Belarus). Distinguished for his surrealistic inventiveness, he is recognized as one of the most significant painters and graphic artists of the 20th century. — MORE ON CHAGALL AT ART “4” MARCH with links to images.
1985 All 40 passengers and 6 crew members aboard a Fokker F-8 Fellowship 3000 of Satena airline which had stopped at San Vicente del Caguán after leaving Bogotá and, in rain and fog, crashes into a mountain as it attempts to land at Florencia, Colombia.
1969 Dwight David Eisenhower, 78, the 34th US president (1953-1961), in Washington. He was born on 14 October 1890.
1957 Jack Butler Yeats II, Irish artist born on 29 August 1871. — MORE ON YEATS AT ART “4” MARCH with links to images.
1950 Hellinger, mathematician.
1944 Rabbi Chayyim Most, Maggid of Kovono, killed by nazis
1943 Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff composer, in Beverly Hills, California. — compositor, pianista y director de orquesta ruso.
1942 Miguel Hernández, poeta español.
1942: 768 Italian soldiers and sailors, in sinking of liner Galilea, transporting troops from North Africa back to Italy, by a British sub, near Antipaxo.

^ 1941:: 2303 Italian sailors in sinking of 3 battleships and 2 cruisers.
Andrew Browne Cunningham, Admiral of the British Fleet, commands the British Royal Navy's destruction of three major Italian battleships and two destroyers in the Battle of Cape Matapan in the Mediterranean. The destruction, following on the attack on the Italian Fleet at Taranto by the British in November 1940, effectively put an end to any threat the Italian navy posed to the British. Admiral Cunningham was one of Britain's most distinguished naval officers, having served as Gen. Dwight Eisenhower's naval deputy. As Commander in Chief Mediterranean, he had a clear-cut goal: to disable the Italian navy. When the war began, Britain's ships were generally older than Italy's. By the fall of 1940, with the surrender of the French to the Germans the previous June, Britain was alone and shaky in the Mediterranean. Admiral Cunningham knew he had to confront the Italian navy soon and considered an offensive while the Italian Fleet was still in harbor the most prudent strategy. On 11 November 1940, the British aircraft carrier Illustrious was 275 km southeast of the Italian navy port at Taranto in southern Italy. Twenty-one Swordfish aircraft took off from the Illustrious and launched a raid against the Italian Fleet. The Italians lost three battleships, sending a shockwave through the Italian navy.
The next major engagement between the Royal and Italian fleets was at Cape Matapan, off Greece's southern tip. On 25 March 1941, British air reconnaissance picked up increased Italian naval activity off Greece and Crete, and further intelligence confirmed an Italian plan to attack a British convoy in the area. Two days later, Admiral Cunningham put his battle fleet to sea to meet up with Vice-Admiral Pridham-Wippell's cruiser force. The element of surprise was crucial, given that the Italian fleet was larger, faster, better armed, and more modern. The Italian battleship Vittorio Veneto spotted Pridham-Wippell's cruisers and opened fire. The Italians missed and the Brits got away; the RAF followed up with an air attack, but this time it was the Vittorio Veneto that got away. But, on 28 March the British battleship Warspite proved a better shot, firing five 15-inch shells at the Italian battleship Fiume, crippling it. Another Italian battleship, the Zara, was hit broadside by the Brits' Valiant and Barham and suffered a similar fate. The Pola was also struck by an 18-inch torpedo; it caught fire and lay dead in the water. Once the crew was taken off, torpedoes sank it. On top of these crushing losses, two escorting destroyers, the Alfieri and the Carducci, were also sunk by the Royal Navy. In total, the Italians lost 2303 men from the five ships. The long-term effect on the Italian navy was to effectively render it impotent.

^ 1941 Virginia Woolf London, author (Jacob's Room, To the Lighthouse).
Virginia Adeline Woolf was born on 25 January 1882. Her novel To the Lighthouse (1927) is one of her most successful and accessible experiments in the stream-of-consciousness style. The three sections of the book take place between 1910 and 1920 and revolve around various members of the Ramsay family during visits to their summer residence on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. A central motif of the novel is the conflict between the feminine and masculine principles at work in the universe. With her emotional, poetical frame of mind, Mrs. Ramsay represents the female principle, while Mr. Ramsay, a self-centered philosopher, expresses the male principle in his rational point of view. Both are flawed by their limited perspectives. A painter and friend of the family, Lily Briscoe, is Woolf's vision of the androgynous artist who personifies the ideal blending of male and female qualities. Her successful completion of a painting that she has been working on since the beginning of the novel is symbolic of this unification.
WOOLF ONLINE: Monday or Tuesday — Monday or Tuesday — Night and Day — Night and Day — The Voyage Out — The Voyage Out. In her writing, Virginia Woolf attempted to reveal the truth of human experience, emotion, and thought: which are what the couples in a play (also made into a movie) by Edward Alby try to cover up when they sing “Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?”.

1940 José María Salaverría, escritor español.
1933 Henri Émilien Rousseau, French artist born on 17 December 1875. — MORE ON ROUSSEAU AT ART “4” MARCH with links to images.
1931 Derwent Lees, British artist born in 1885.
1918 Bernhard Wiegandt, German artist born on 13 March 1851.
1917 Albert Pinkham Ryder, US painter born on 19 Mar 1847. — MORE ON RYDER AT ART “4” MARCH with links to images.
1917 Joe Nowling, Black, lynched in Mitchell County, Georgia.

^ 1881 (16 March Julian) Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, Russian composer born on 21 March (09 March Julian) 1839. He is famous for his opera Boris Godunov (final version first performed 1874), his songs, and his piano piece Pictures from an Exhibition (1874). Mussorgsky, along with Aleksandr Borodin [12 Nov 1833 – 27 Feb 1887], Mily Balakirev [02 Jan 1837 – 29 May 1910], César Cui [18 Jan 1835 – 24 Mar 1918], and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov [18 Mar 1844 – 21 Jun 1908], was a member of The Five, a group of Russian composers bound together in the common goal of creating a nationalist school of Russian music.
      Mussorgsky was the son of a landowner but had peasant blood, his father's grandmother having been a serf. According to his autobiographical sketch, written in 1881, Mussorgsky learned about Russian fairy tales from his nurse. “This early familiarity with the spirit of the people, with the way they lived, lent the first and greatest impetus to my musical improvisations.” His mother, herself an excellent pianist, gave Modest his first piano lessons, and at seven he could play some of Franz Liszt's simpler pieces.
      In August 1849 his father took Modest and his other son, Filaret, to St. Petersburg, where Modest attended the Peter-Paul School in preparation for a military career. At the same time, mindful of Modest's musical bent, their father entrusted the boys to Anton Gerke, future professor of music at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.
      In 1852 Mussorgsky entered the School for Cadets of the Guard. There, in his first year he composed his Podpraporshchik (Porte-Enseigne Polka), published at his father's expense. Although not the most industrious of students, he gave proof of tremendous curiosity and wide-ranging intellectual interests.
      In 1856, by now a lieutenant, Mussorgsky joined the Preobrazhensky Guards, one of Russia's most aristocratic regiments, where he made the acquaintance of several music-loving officers who were habitués of the Italian theater. During this same period he came to know Aleksandr Borodin, a fellow officer who was to become another important Russian composer. Borodin has provided a very vivid picture of the musician:
     There was something absolutely boyish about Mussorgsky; he looked like a real second-lieutenant of the picture books … a touch of foppery, unmistakable but kept well within bounds. His courtesy and good breeding were exemplary. All the women fell in love with him. … That same evening we were invited to dine with the head surgeon of the hospital. … Mussorgsky sat down to the piano and played … very gently and graciously, with occasional affected movements of the hands, while his listeners murmured, “charming! delicious!”
      During the winter of 1856 a regimental comrade introduced Mussorgsky into the home of the Russian composer Aleksandr Dargomyzhsky [14 Feb 1813 – 17 Jan 1869]. At one of the musicales there, Mussorgsky discovered the music of the seminal Russian composer Mikhail Glinka [01 Jun 1804 – 03 Feb 1857], and this quickened his own Russophile inclinations. Three years later, in June 1859, he saw the Moscow Kremlin for the first time, an important experience that represented his first “physical” communion with Russian history. Through Dargomyzhsky, Mussorgsky met another composer, Mily Balakirev, who became his teacher. Since the death of their father (in 1853), the Mussorgsky brothers had seen their poorly administered patrimony decrease substantially. With the freeing of the serfs in 1861, it vanished. Having decided to devote himself to music, Modest Mussorgsky had quit the army three years earlier and since 1863 had been working as a civil servant in the Ministry of Communications. His distressing financial troubles date from that time, and he had to seek the help of moneylenders.
Boris Godunov

      Mussorgsky achieved artistic maturity in 1866 with a series of remarkable songs about ordinary people such as “Darling Savishna,” “Hopak,” and “The Seminarian,” and an even larger series appeared the following year. Another work dating from this time is the symphonic poem Ivanova noch na Lysoy gore (1867; Night on Bald Mountain). In 1868 he reached the height of his conceptual powers in composition with the first song of his incomparable cycle Detskaya (The Nursery) and a setting of the first few scenes of Nikolay Gogol's Zhenitba (The Marriage).
      In 1869 he began his great work Boris Godunov to his own libretto based on the drama by Aleksandr Pushkin [06 Jun 1799 – 10 Feb 1837]. The first version, completed in December 1869, was rejected by the advisory committee of the imperial theatres because it lacked a prima donna role. In response, the composer subjected the opera to a thorough revision and in 1872 put the finishing touches to the second version, adding the roles of Marina and Rangoni as well as several new episodes. The first production of Boris Godunov took place on 08 February 1874, at St. Petersburg and was a success.
      In 1865, after the death of his mother, he lived with his brother, then shared a small flat with the Russian composer Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov until 1872, when his colleague married. Left very much alone, Mussorgsky began to drink to excess, although the composition of the opera Khovanshchina perhaps offered some distraction (left unfinished at his death, this opera was completed by Rimsky-Korsakov). Mussorgsky then found a companion in the person of a distant relative, Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov. This impoverished 25-year-old poet inspired Mussorgsky's two cycles of melancholy melodies, Bez solntsa (Sunless) and Pesni i plyaski smerti (Songs and Dances of Death). At that time Mussorgsky was haunted by the specter of death, he himself had only seven more years to live. The death of another friend, the painter Victor Hartmann [1834-1873], inspired Mussorgsky to write the piano suite Kartinki s vystavki (Pictures from an Exhibition; orchestrated in 1922 by the French composer Maurice Ravel [07 Mar 1875 – 28 Dec 1937]). One of the ten pictures is The Great Gate of Kiev.
      The last few years of Mussorgsky's life were dominated by his alcoholism and by a solitude made all the more painful by Golenishchev-Kutuzov's marriage.

Nonetheless, the composer began his opera Sorochinskaya yarmarka (unfinished; Sorochintsy Fair), inspired by Gogol's tale. As the accompanist of an aging singer, Darya Leonova, Mussorgsky departed on a lengthy concert tour of southern Russia and the Crimea. On his return he tried teaching at a small school of music in St. Petersburg.
On 24 February 1881, three successive attacks of alcoholic epilepsy laid him low. His friends took him to a hospital where for a time his health improved sufficiently for one of the leading Russian artists of the day, Ilya Repin [05 Aug 1844 – 29 Sep 1930], to paint a famous Portrait of Mussorgsky (574x480, 49kb _ detail 781x600pix, 264kb). (Mussorgsky did NOT compose the music for Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer}. Mussorgsky's health was irreparably damaged, however, and he died within a month, shortly after his 42nd birthday.
Mussorgsky's importance to and influence on later composers are quite out of proportion to his relatively small output. Few composers were less derivative, or evolved so original and bold a style. The 65 songs he composed, many to his own texts, describe scenes of Russian life with great vividness and insight and realistically reproduce the inflections of the spoken Russian language.

Mussorgsky's operas Boris Godunov and to a lesser extent Khovanshchina display his dramatic technique of setting sharply characterized individuals against the background of country and people. His power of musical portrayal, his strong characterizations, and the importance he assigned to the role of the chorus establish Boris Godunov as a masterpiece. From a technical standpoint, Mussorgsky's unorthodox use of tonality and harmony and his method of fusing arioso and recitative provide Boris Godunov with great dramatic intensity.
Shortly after Mussorgsky's death, Rimsky-Korsakov prepared Mussorgsky's works for publication, in the process purging them of what he considered to be their harmonic eccentricities and instrumental weaknesses. Rimsky-Korsakov's widely performed edition of Boris Godunov is the best known of these works. From roughly 1908, however, after the production of Rimsky-Korsakov's version of Boris Godunov at the Paris Opera, there was a growing demand for the original versions of Mussorgsky's works, which were made available beginning in 1928 in a collected edition edited by Paul Lamm. This edition displayed Mussorgsky's original orchestration for Boris Godunov, which is as stark and economical as his unorthodox harmony.

1850 Holmboe, mathematician.
1840 Lhuilier, mathematician.
1839 Pieter Gerardus van Os, Dutch artist born on 08 October 1776. — more with links to images.
1712 Jan van der Heyden (or Hyde) [not Jekyll at times?], Dutch painter born in 1637. — MORE ON VAN DER HEYDEN AT ART “4” MARCH with links to images.
1678 Dechales, mathematician.
1673 (burial) Adam Pynacker, Dutch painter and merchant born on 15 February 1622. — more
1584 (18 March Julian) Ivan IV Vasilyevich “Grozniy” (“The Terrible”), born on 25 August 1530, Grand Prince of Moscow from the death of his father Grand Prince Vasily III [1479 – 03 Dec 1533], and first tsar of Russia from 16 January 1547 until his death. His politics led to territorial expansion of Russia, consolidation of the central power, structural reorganization of the institutions of power; increasing of political and trade relations with England, and Netherlands in Europe, with Kabarda, and Kakhetya in the Caucasus, Bukhara in the East. At the same time the strengthening and toughening of the serfdom led to future economical failure of Russia. He was a quick-tempered, irascible person, very hard to deal with. On 16 November 1581, Ivan IV walked into the apartment of his son Ivan Ivanovich [1554–], the tsarevich, and started criticizing Ivan's seven month pregnant wife about her dress. Ivan the Terrible was so enraged by her unacceptabe dress, that he started to hit her and kick her, resulting in the death of her unborn child. His son heard her screaming and ran in. He tried to stop his father. Ivan the Terrible was so furious that he took his staff and struck his son in the temple, killing him. Ivan the Terrible was then horrified by what he had just done. — See the painting Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581 (1885) by Ilya Repin.
0193 Roman Emperor Publius Helvius Pertinax, assassinated by a small group of Praetorian Guards, after he tried to enforce unpopular economies in military as well as in civilian expenditures. The Guards auction off the imperial title to Marcus Didius Julianus. Born on 01 August 126, son of a freed slave, Pertinax taught school, then entered the army, commanded units in Syria, in Britain, and on the Danube and the Rhine. He earned distinction during the great invasion by German tribes in 169. Given senatorial rank and command of a legion, he was soon promoted to the consular commands of Moesia, Dacia, and Syria, but under the emperor Commodus (reigned 180–192) he fell from favor, together with the future emperor Lucius Septimius Severus [146 – Feb 211], during the ascendancy of the praetorian prefect Perennis. In the last years of Commodus' life, Pertinax became prefect of the city of Rome, while Severus commanded the armies of the upper Danube. After Commodus [31 Aug 161 – 31 Dec 192] was murdered, the Senate met before dawn on 01 January and proclaimed Pertinax (then senior marshal of the empire) emperor. After Severus was proclaimed emperor by his troops on 13 April 193, he declared himself the avenger of Pertinax, marched on Rome, and entered it without resistance a few days after Julianus was assassinated on 01 June 193. Later in the year, he decreed divine honors for Pertinax and added his name to his own, becoming Lucius Septimius Severus Pertinax.

^ Births which occurred on a 28 March:
1955 Julio Alonso Llamazares, poeta y novelista español.
1946 Alejandro 'Cholo' Toledo, político peruano.

^ 1936 Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian novelist and unsuccessful presidential candidate.
Vargas Llosa, who built his fame as a writer on works ranging from novels to plays to critical essays, was educated in Bolivia, where he grandfather was Peruvian consul. He attended military school in Lima and began to publish short stories in the early 1950s. At San Marcos University in Lima, he became an avid Communist, but his later politics became increasingly conservative.
From 1959 to 1966, he lived in Paris and published his first novel, The Time of the Heroes (1963). In 1966, he published The Green House and the following year produced The Cubs and Other Stories. After 1966, he lived in England, the US, and Spain and returned to Peru in 1974, where he wrote several bestsellers. In 1990, he ran unsuccessfully for president of Peru. In 1994, he received the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious international award for Spanish-language literature.

1933 Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, cardenal of Guadalajara, born in Yahualica. He was ordained a priest on 27 October 1957, and consecrated a bishop on 30 April 1988 foc Ciudad Juárez. He became archbishop of Guadalajara on 30 October 1994 and was made a cardinal on 26 de November 1994.
1928 Zbigniew Brzezinski national security advisor to US President Carter
1928 Grothendieck, mathematician.
1923 Yitz Herstein, mathematician. He died in 1988.
1914 Edmund S Muskie (Sen-D-Me), US Sec of State (1980), candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination (but he weeped).
1905 Radio fax “a system for transmitting intelligence” is patented by Cornelius Ehret of Rosemont, Pennsylvania. Faxing would not become a practical mode of communication until the 1920s, and high-speed faxes not be available until the 1940s.
1899 August Anheuser Busch, Jr., US businessman who built Anheuser-Busch into the world's largest brewery, owner of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. He died on 29 September 1989.
1888 Zelda Viola Strongman (future Mrs. McCague), in Canada, who would die on 06 August 2001.
1871 Frederick John Mulhaupt, US artist who died in 1938. — links to images.

^ 1868 (16 March Julian) Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov “Maksim Gor'kiy”
100 let so dnya rozhdeniya

      Soviet novelist, playwright, and essayist, who was a founder of socialist realism. Although known principally as a writer, he was also prominent in the Russian revolutionary movement. Gorky was born in Nizhniy Novgorod (renamed Gorky in his honor from 1932 to 1991), into a peasant family. He was self-educated. Compelled to earn his own living from the age of nine, Gorky worked for many years at menial jobs and tramped over a great part of European Russia. During this time he shot himself through a lung in an attempted suicide, later developing tuberculosis, which left him in ill health for the rest of his life. Bitter experiences, thence his pen name (gor'kiy = bitter).
[commemorative stamp “100 let so dne rozhdeniya” >]
      Gorky's first short story was published in a Tbilisi newspaper in 1892, and thereafter he wrote stories and sketches frequently for publication in various newspapers. His collected Sketches and Stories (1898) was an instantaneous success and made him famous throughout Russia. He had thrown off his earlier romanticism and wrote realistically although optimistically of the harshness of the life of the lower classes in Russia. He was the first Russian author to write knowledgeably and sympathetically about workers and such people as tramps and thieves, emphasizing their courageous fight against overwhelming odds. Twenty-Six Men and a Girl (1899; translated 1902), a tale of sweatshop conditions in a bakery, is considered by many his finest short story.
      In 1899 Gorky became associated with the revolutionary activities of the Marxists. In 1901 Gorky was arrested for publishing the poem Song of the Stormy Petrel (Pesnya o Burevestnike), a call for and a prediction of a stormy revolution. But he was released shortly thereafter. In 1906 he went abroad to raise funds for the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. In 1907, because of failing health, he settled on the Italian island of Capri. He returned to Russia in 1915. Gorky supported the Russian Revolution of 1917 and was active in literary organizations in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Compelled by illness to leave the country in 1922, Gorky spent six years in Sorrento, Italy. On his return to the USSR, he was received with official honors. He died on 14 June 1936 after suffering from chronic health problems for many years. There is some mystery surrounding Gorky's death, which occurred while he was undergoing routine medical treatment. At the 1938 show trials staged by Stalin, police chief Grenrikh Yagoda confessed to having ordered Gorky's death, which is of no value whatsoever. Many historians believe that Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin may have ordered Gorky killed.
      Gorky's novels include Mother (Mat', 1907), an influential piece of propaganda about the revolutionary spirit of a religious peasant woman who joins the socialists after her son's arrest as a political activist, and the tetralogy The Life of Klim Samgin (1927-1936), a series on Russian history from 1880 to 1917. His best-known play is The Lower Depths (Na Dne 1902; translated 1912), which depicts men reduced to the ultimate depths of degradation but retaining positive qualities. Among Gorky's best works are his autobiographical and literary memoirs. The trilogy consisting of Childhood (1913-1914), In the World (1915-1916), and the ironically titled My University Days (1923; translated as Reminiscences of My Youth), is considered a major artistic achievement because it lacks the excessive philosophizing of his earlier works and because it contains numerous memorable characterizations. Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev (1920-1928), which avoids the worshipful approach to famous writers common among Russian literary critics up to that time, has been hailed as Gorky's masterpiece.
GORKY ONLINE:
Na dne — Na dne — Mat' — Mat' — Makar Chudra — Makar Chudra — Starukha Izergil' — Starukha Izergil' — Chelkash — Chelkash — Konovalov — Konovalov — Pesnya o sokole — Pesnya o burevestnike — Chelovek — Rozhdenie Cheloveka — Foma Gordeev — Foma Gordeev — Storozh
(in English translations): Creatures That Once Were Men — Creatures That Once Were Men — The Man Who Was Afraid — Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy — Through Russia — The Billionaire — (co author of:) Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov

1868 Cuno Amiet, Swiss artist who died on 06 July 1961. — more with links to images.
1864 Léopold Schmutzler, German artist who died in 1941.
1862 Aristide Briand France, premier 11 times (1909-1922) (Nobel 1926). He died on 07 March 1932.
1861 Alphonse Étienne Dinet, French painter specialized in Orientalism. who died on 24 December 1929. — MORE ON DINET AT ART “4” MARCH with links to images.
1860 José Moreno Carbonero, Spanish painter who died in 1942. — links to images.
1845 Don Juan Tenorio, de José Zorrilla y del Morral, la obra teatral más representativa del romanticismo español, se estrena en Madrid.
1818 Wade Hampton, Confederate war hero of the US Civil War. He died on 11 April 1902.
1811 St. John Neumann, Bohemian-born US bishop canonized the first American male saint in 1977. He died on 05 January 1860.
1810 Alexandre Herculano de Carvalho Araújo, narrador, historiador y político portugués.
1809 George Richmond, English painter who died on 19 March 1896. — MORE ON RICHMOND AT ART “4” MARCH with links to images.
1797 A washing machine is patented by Nathaniel Briggs of New Hampshire.
1793 Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, US explorer and ethnologist; discovered source of Mississippi River. He died on 10 December 1864.

^ 1776 San Francisco is founded.
      Juan Bautista de Anza, one of the great western pathfinders of the 18th century, arrives at the future site of San Francisco with 247 colonists. Though little known among Americans because of his Spanish origins, Anza's accomplishments as a western trailblazer merit comparison with those of Lewis and Clark, John Frémont, and Kit Carson. Born and raised in Mexico, Anza joined the army when he was 17 and became a captain seven years later. He excelled as a military leader, displaying tactical genius in numerous battles with the Apache Indians. In 1772, Anza made his first major exploratory mission, leading an arduous but successful expedition northwest to the Pacific Coast. Anza's expedition established the first successful overland connections between the Mexican State of Sonora and northern California.
      Impressed by this accomplishment, the Mexican viceroy commissioned Anza to return to California and establish a permanent settlement along the Pacific Coast at San Francisco Bay. Although seagoing Spanish explorers had sailed along the northern California coast during the 16th and 17th centuries, the amazing natural harbor of San Francisco Bay was only discovered in 1769. The Spanish immediately recognized the strategic importance of the bay, though it would be seven years before they finally dispatched Anza to establish a claim there. Anza and 247 colonists arrived at the future site of San Francisco on this day in 1776. Anza established a presidio, or military fort, on the tip of the San Francisco peninsula.
      Six months later, a Spanish Franciscan priest founded a mission near the presidio that he named in honor of St. Francis of Assisi-in Spanish, San Francisco de Asiacutes. The most northerly outpost of the Spanish Empire in America, San Francisco remained an isolated and quiet settlement for more than half a century after Anza founded the first settlement. It was not until the 1830s that an expansionist United States began to realize the commercial potential of the magnificent natural harbor.
      In the wake of the Mexican War, the US took possession of California in 1848, though San Francisco was still only a small town of 900 at that time. With the discovery of gold that year at Sutter's Fort, however, San Francisco boomed. By 1852, San Francisco was home to more than 36'000 persons. The founder of San Francisco did not live to see it flourish. After establishing the San Francisco presidio, Anza returned to Mexico. In 1777, he was appointed governor of New Mexico, where he eventually negotiated a critical peace treaty with Commanche Indians, who agreed to join the Spanish in making war on the Apache. In declining health, Anza retired as governor in 1786 and returned to Sonora. He died two years later, still only in his early 50s and remembered as one of greatest trailblazers and soldiers in Spain's northern borderlands.

1731 Ramón de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla, escritor y comediógrafo español.
1674 William Byrd, US planter, satirist, and diarist who died on 26 August 1744.
1660 Arnold Houbraken, Dutch painter and art writer who died on 14 October 1719. — a bit more with links to images.

^ 1515 Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada “Saint Teresa of Avila”, who died on 04 october 1582 (the last day of the Julian calendar).
      The third child of Don Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda by his second wife, Doña Beatriz Davila y Ahumada, who died when the saint was in her fourteenth year, Teresa was brought up by her saintly father, a lover of serious books, and a tender and pious mother. After her death and the marriage of her eldest sister, Teresa was sent for her education to the Augustinian nuns at Avila, but owing to illness she left at the end of eighteen months, and for some years remained with her father and occasionally with other relatives, notably an uncle who made her acquainted with the Letters of St. Jerome, which determined her to adopt the religious life, not so much through any attraction towards it, as through a desire of choosing the safest course. Unable to obtain her father's consent she left his house unknown to him on November 1535, to enter the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation at Avila, which then counted 140 nuns. The wrench from her family caused her a pain which she ever afterwards compared to that of death. However, her father at once yielded and Teresa took the habit.
      After her profession in the following year she became very seriously ill, and underwent a prolonged cure and such unskillful medical treatment that she was reduced to a most pitiful state, and even after partial recovery through the intercession of St. Joseph, her health remained permanently impaired. During these years of suffering she began the practice of mental prayer, but fearing that her conversations with some world-minded relatives, frequent visitors at the convent, rendered her unworthy of the graces God bestowed on her in prayer, discontinued it, until she came under the influence, first of the Dominicans, and afterwards of the Jesuits. Meanwhile God had begun to visit her with "intellectual visions and locutions", that is manifestations in which the exterior senses were in no way affected, the things seen and the words heard being directly impressed upon her mind, and giving her wonderful strength in trials, reprimanding her for unfaithfulness, and consoling her in trouble. Unable to reconcile such graces with her shortcomings, which her delicate conscience represented as grievous faults, she had recourse not only to the most spiritual confessors she could find, but also to some saintly laymen, who, never suspecting that the account she gave them of her sins was greatly exaggerated, believed these manifestations to be the work of the evil spirit. The more she endeavoured to resist them the more powerfully did God work in her soul. The whole city of Avila was troubled by the reports of the visions of this nun. It was reserved to St. Francis Borgia and St. Peter of Alcantara, and afterwards to a number of Dominicans (particularly Pedro Ibañez and Domingo Bañez), Jesuits, and other religious and secular priests, to discern the work of God and to guide her on a safe road.
      The account of her spiritual life contained in the Life written by herself (completed in 1565, an earlier version being lost), in the Relations, and in the Interior Castle, forms one of the most remarkable spiritual biographies with which only the Confessions of St. Augustine can bear comparison. To this period belong also such extraordinary manifestations as the piercing or transverberation of her heart, the spiritual espousals, and the mystical marriage. A vision of the place destined for her in hell in case she should have been unfaithful to grace, determined her to seek a more perfect life. After many troubles and much opposition St. Teresa founded the convent of Discalced Carmelite Nuns of the Primitive Rule of St. Joseph at Avila (24 Aug 1562), and after six months obtained permission to take up her residence there. Four years later she received the visit of the General of the Carmelites, John-Baptist Rubeo (Rossi), who not only approved of what she had done but granted leave for the foundation of other convents of friars as well as nuns. In rapid succession she established her nuns at Medina del Campo (1567), Malagon and Valladolid (1568), Toledo and Pastrana (1569), Salamanca (1570), Alba de Tormes (1571), Segovia (1574), Veas and Seville (1575), and Caravaca (1576). In the Book of Foundations she tells the story of these convents, nearly all of which were established in spite of violent opposition but with manifest assistance from above. Everywhere she found souls generous enough to embrace the austerities of the primitive rule of Carmel. Having made the acquaintance of Antonio de Heredia, prior of Medina, and St. John of the Cross (q.v.), she established her reform among the friars (28 Nov 1568), the first convents being those of Duruelo (1568), Pastrana (1569), Mancera, and Alcalá de Henares (1570).
      A new epoch began with the entrance into religion of Jerome Gratian, inasmuch as this remarkable man was almost immediately entrusted by the nuncio with the authority of visitor Apostolic of the Carmelite friars and nuns of the old observance in Andalusia, and as such considered himself entitled to overrule the various restrictions insisted upon by the general and the general chapter. On the death of the nuncio and the arrival of his successor a fearful storm burst over St. Teresa and her work, lasting four years and threatening to annihilate the nascent reform. The incidents of this persecution are best described in her letters. The storm at length passed, and the province of Discalced Carmelites, with the support of Philip II, was approved and canonically established on 22 June 1580. St. Teresa, old and broken in health, made further foundations at Villnuava de la Jara and Palencia (1580), Soria (1581), Granada (through her assistant the Venerable Anne of Jesus), and at Burgos (1582). She left this latter place at the end of July, and, stopping at Palencia, Valldolid, and Medina del Campo, reached Alba de Torres in September, suffering intensely. Soon she took to her bed and died on 04 October 1582 (last day of the Julian calendar), the following day, owing to the reform of the calendar, being 15 October (first day of the Gregorian calendar). After some years her body was transferred to Avila, but later on reconveyed to Alba, where it is still preserved incorrupt. Her heart, too, showing the marks of the Transverberation, is exposed there to the veneration of the faithful. She was beatified in 1614, and canonized on 12 March 1622 by Gregory XV [09 Jan 1554 – 08 Jul 1623], the feast being fixed on 15 October.
      St. Teresa's position among writers on mystical theology is unique. In all her writings on this subject she deals with her personal experiences, which a deep insight and analytical gifts enabled her to explain clearly. The Thomistic substratum may be traced to the influence of her confessors and directors, many of whom belonged to the Dominican Order. She herself had no pretension to found a school in the accepted sense of the term, and there is no vestige in her writings of any influence of the Aeropagite, the Patristic, or the Scholastic Mystical schools, as represented among others, by the German Dominican Mystics. She is intensely personal, her system going exactly as far as her experiences, but not a step further.

1472 fra Bartolommeo (Fattorino “Baccio della Porta”), Italian painter who died on 31 October 1517 — MORE ON FRA BARTOLOMMEO AT ART “4” MARCH with links to images.

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