Today in History

[Tamrin]

Saturday, 1 March
Ancient Rome: Matronalia (Feast of Juno)

1633 - Death of George Herbert, Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

1837 - Birth of William Dean Howells, US realist author and literary critic

1858 - Birth of Georg Simmel, German philosopher and sociologist

1880 - Birth of Giles Lytton Strachey, British writer (Eminent Victorians)

1914 - Birth of Ralph Ellison, US novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer

1927 - Birth of Harry Belafonte, Jamaican-American musician and actor

1939 - Birth of Tzvetan Todorov, French philosopher of Bulgarian origin

Robert Lowell IV, American poet
(Born this day 1917)

The light at the end of the tunnel is just the light of an oncoming train

[Tamrin]

Sunday, 2 March
Ancient Rome: Festival of Mars (god of war)

0055 - Birth of Juvenal, Roman poet (Satires)

1797 - Death of Horace Walpole, English art historian, man of letters, antiquarian and politician

1829 - Birth of Carl Schurz, German revolutionist, American statesman & Union Army general

1904 - Birth of Dr Seuss (Theodor Geisel), US children's book author (Green Eggs and Ham)

1930 - Death of David H Lawrence, English poet and novelist (Lady Chatterley's Lover)

1931 - Birth of Mikhail Gorbachev, last USSR Premier (“Perestroika” & “Glasnost”)

1953 - Birth of Russell D. Feingold, US politician, Senator from Wisconsin

Bro. Camille Desmoulins
French journalist, pamphleteer, revolutionary leader and Freemason
(Born this day 1760)

[On July 12, 1789 he leapt on a table outside one of the cafés in the garden of the
Palais Royal, and announced to the crowd the dismissal of the reformer [Jacques Necker]... he
addressed the passions of the public, calling them to "...take up arms and adopt cockades by
which we may know each other" and adding: "This dismissal is the tocsin of the St. Bartholomew
of the patriots!", claiming that a massacre of the partisans of reform was under preparation.]

Clemency is also a revolutionary measure

[Tamrin]

Monday, 3 March
Tibet: Festival of Ârya Târâ, Buddhist Bodhisattva, “Mother of Liberation”

1606 - Birth of Edmund Waller, FRS, English poet (Penshust) and politician

1756 - Birth of William Godwin, British “father of philosophical anarchism”

1845 - Birth of Georg Cantor, Russian-born mathematician and philosopher

1847 - Birth of Alexander Graham Bell, Scottish-American inventor (telephone)

1868 - Birth of Émile Chartier (commonly called Alain), French essayist and philosopher

1914 - Birth of Asger Jorn, Danish painter, sculptor, ceramic artist and author

1983 - Suicide of Arthur Koestler (& wife, Cynthia), Hungarian-British writer

Robert Hooke, FRS
English scientific genius
(Died this day 1703)

For the members of the assembly having before their eyes so many fatal instances of
the errors and falsehoods, in which the greatest part of mankind has so long wandered,
because they rely'd upon the strength of humane reason alone, have begun anew to correct
all hypotheses by sense, as seamen do their dead reckonings by celestial observations; and
to this purpose it has been their principal endeavour to enlarge and strengthen the senses
by medicine, and by such outward instruments as are proper for their particular works

[Tamrin]

Tuesday, 4 March
Celts: Feast day of Rhiannon, Moon/Dawn Goddess

1778 - Birth of Robert Emmet, Irish nationalist, Republican, orator and rebel leader

1878 - Birth of Peter D Ouspensky, Russian philosopher (Gurdjieff scholar)

1888 - Death of Amos Bronson Alcott, US teacher, writer, philosopher and reformer

1904 - Birth of George Gamow, Ukrainian-born physicist and cosmologist (Big Bang theory)

1916 - Birth of Hans Eysenck, British-German psychologist (intelligence & personality)

1932 - Birth of Miriam Makeba (“Mama Africa”), South African singer and civil rights activist

1963 - Death of William Carlos Williams, US physician and poet (Modernism & Imagism)

Saladin ('Salah Ad-din Yusuf Ibn Ayyub)
Muslim leader (Crusades)
(Died this day 1193)

When I am buried, carry my winding-sheet on the point of a spear,
and say these words: “Behold the spoils which Saladin carries with him!
Of all his victories, realms and riches, nothing remains to him but this”

(Last words)

[Tamrin]

Wednesday, 5 March
Ancient Egypt: Festival of Navigium Isis or “ship of Isis” (patron of navigation)

1792 - The Grand Lodge of Massachusetts was instituted

1871 - Birth of Rosa Luxemburg, Polish-born German Marxist, philosopher and revolutionary

1879 - Birth of William Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge KCB, British economist and social reformer

1893 - Birth of Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, French critic and historian

1934 - Birth of Daniel Kahneman, Israeli-American psychologist and economist

1950 - Death of Edgar Lee Masters, American poet, biographer, and dramatist

1955 - Birth of Penn Jillette, American illusionist, juggler and comedian (Penn & Teller)

Bro. James I of England / VI of Scotland
monarch, poet & author
(Died this day 1625)

I can make a lord, but only God can make a gentleman

[Tamrin]

Thursday, 6 March
Commemoration of Bro. Prince Hall’s Masonic Initiation (1775, Boston)

1475 - Birth of Michelangelo, Italian architect, painter, poet and sculptor

1616 - Death of Francis Beaumont, English dramatist (The Knight of the Burning Pestle)

1619 - Birth of Cyrano de Bergerac, French dramatist and soldier

1806 - Elizabeth Barrett Browning, English poet (Sonnets)

1888 - Death of Louisa May Alcott, US novelist (Little Women)

1928 - Birth of Gabriel García Márquez, Colombian journalist, novelist and short story writer

1973 - Death of Pearl S. Buck (Sai Zhenzhu), US Pulitzer Prize winning author

Martin Niemöller
German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor
(Died this day 1984)

In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up

[Tamrin]

Friday, 7 March
Ancient Rome: Junonalia, procession in honour of Juno (goddess and protector of women)

0322 - BCE - Death of Aristotle, student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great

1274 - Death of Thomas Aquinas, Italian scholastic philosopher

1792 - Birth of Sir John Herschel, English mathematician and astronomer

1849 - Birth of Bro. Luther Burbank, US horticulturist, freethinker and Freemason

1907 - Birth of Mircea Eliade, religious historian (Le Yoga)

1944 - Birth of Sir Ranulph Fiennes, 3rd Baronet, OBE, British soldier and explorer

1946 - Birth of Daniel Jay Goleman, US psychologist and author (Emotional Intelligence)

Alessandro Manzoni
Italian poet and novelist (The Betrothed)
(Born this day 1785)

When a friend, then, indulges in the joy of unburdening a secret on to another friend's
bosom, he makes the latter, in his turn, feel the urge to taste the same joy himself

[Tamrin]

Saturday, 8 March
International Women’s Day

1841 - Birth of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., US Supreme Court Justice

1859 - Birth of Kenneth Grahame, Scottish author (The Wind in the Willows)

1887 - Death of Henry Ward Beecher, American clergyman and social reformer

1925 - Birth of Warren G. Bennis, American scholar, organizational consultant and author

1931 - Birth of John McPhee, American Pulitzer Prize-winning writer (creative non-fiction)

1931 - Birth of Neil Postman, American educator, media theorist and cultural critic

1947 - Death of Carrie Chapman Catt, American suffragist

The Fox sisters: Kate, Leah and Margaret
(Margaret Fox, US spiritualist and self-confessed fraud, died this day 1893)

Margaret Fox's confession

"My sister Katie was the first one to discover that by swishing her fingers she could produce a certain noise with the knuckles and joints, and that the same effect could be made with the toes. Finding we could make raps with our feet — first with one foot and then with both — we practiced until we could do this easily when the room was dark. No one suspected us of any trick because we were such young children ... all the neighbors thought there was something, and they wanted to find out what it was. They were convinced someone had been murdered in the house. They asked us about it, and we would rap one for the spirit answer 'yes', not three, as we did afterwards. We did not know anything about Spiritualism then. The murder, they concluded, must have been committed in the house. They went over the whole surrounding country, trying to get the names of people who had formerly lived in the house. They found finally a man by the name of Bell, and they said that this poor innocent man had committed a murder in the house, and that these noises came from the spirit of the murdered person. Poor Bell was shunned and looked upon by the whole community as a murderer. As far as spirits were concerned, neither my sister nor I thought about it ... I have seen so much miserable deception that I am willing to assist in any way and to positively state that Spiritualism is a fraud of the worst description. I do so before my God, and my idea is to expose it ... I trust that this statement, coming solemnly from me, the first and most successful in this deception, will break the force of the rapid growth of Spiritualism and prove that it is all a fraud, a hypocrisy and a delusion."

New York World Newspaper, October 21, 1888

[Tamrin]

Sunday, 9 March
Strinennia, Slavic holiday of Spring

1763 - Birth of William Cobbett, English politician, agriculturist and journalist

1892 - Birth of Vita Sackville-West, English novelist and poet (The Land)

1931 - Death of Ida B Wells-Barnett, African-American journalist and anti-lynching campaigner

1934 - Birth of Yuri Gagarin, Russian cosmonaut, first human in space

1957 - Birth of P.Z. Myers, American biologist (Evolutionary Development)

1994 - Death Charles Bukowski, German-American novelist and poet

1996 - Death of George Burns, American centenarian comedian (b. 20 Jan. 1896)

Honore Mirabeau (comte de Mirabeau)
French writer, orator and statesman
(Born this day 1749)

To administer is to govern: to govern is to reign.
That is the essence of the problem

[Tamrin]

Monday, 10 March
Babylon: Feast Day of Ishtar
USA: Harriet Tubman Day

1748 - Christian conversion of English slave-ship Captain John Newton (Amazing Grace)

1772 - Birth of Friedrich von Schlegel, German romantic writer and critic (Lucinde)

1847 - Birth of Kate Sheppard, leader of New Zealand female suffrage movement

1913 - Death of Harriet Tubman, abolitionist, conductor on Underground RR

1920 - Masonic initiation of Bro. Sir Robert Menzies, Australian PM, (Austral Temple Lodge, Vic.)

1940 - Birth of Wayne Dyer, American psychologist (Universe Within You)

1957 - Birth of Osama bin Laden, Saudi-born former head of al-Qaeda, mass murderer

Georg Friedrich Creuzer
German philological historian (Idea und Probe)
(Born this day 1771)

A myth does not describe what happened in some obscure period before
human reckoning, but what happens always and repeatedly, it does not explain
the causal origins of our world, but rehearses its permanent spiritual significance