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March

20 Autumnal Equinox / Spring Equinox
20 Smile Rejuvenation Day
20 Astrology Day
21 Nowruz
21 Flower Day
21 Baha'i New Year
21 Single Parents Day
22 Sing Out Day
22 International Goof Off Day
22 Roller Coaster Day
22 World Water Day
23 Cuddly Kitten Day
23 Liberty Day
24 Chocolate Covered Raisins Day
24 Houdini Day
25 Pecan Day
25 Independence Day (Greece)
26 Birthday Of Robert Frost
27 Photography Day
27 Fly A Kite Day
27 World Theatre Day
28 Hot Tub Day
28 Respect Your Cat Day
30 Doctors' Day
31 Bunsen Burner Day

April

1 April Fools' Day
1 Firefighters Day
1 World Catfish Festival (Mississippi, USA)
1 Taro Festival (Hawaii, USA)
2 Great Lovers Day
2 Reconciliation Day
2 Peanut Butter And Jelly Day
3 Find A Rainbow Day
3 Chocolate Mousse Day
3 Circus Day
3 Workplace Napping Day
4 Tell A Lie Day
4 Vitamin C Day
4 Independence Day (Senegal)
5 Lady Luck Day
5 Thank Your School Librarian Day
5 Bell Bottoms Day
5 Tomb Sweeping Day
6 Animated Cartoon Day
6 California Poppy Day

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5508 BCE Some Byzantine Christians believed the universe was created on this day.   Source

1076 Death of Robert I, Duke of Burgundy.

1188 Accession to the throne of Japan by emperor Antoku.

1288 (Palm Sunday): In Rome, Pope Nicholas IV gave communion to Rabban Bar Sauma (Rabban Sawma; Rabban Çauma; c. 1230 - '94).

Bar Sauma, a Beijing-born Turkic diplomat of Nestorian faith, and his friend and colleague, Rabban Marcos, are widely believed to have been sent by the great Mongol emperor, Kublai Khan (1215 - '94), to communicate with Western rulers such as Kings Philip IV of France and Edward I of England (both of whom gave him an audience), to conclude a Mongol alliance with Christendom against the Muslims, in order to take Jerusalem. Bar Sauma was also instructed to take a message to the Pope, and to bring back Christian relics to China. Kublai Khan (grandson of Genghis Khan) had been exposed to Christianity through his mother, as he was the son of Tolui Khan, who was married to a Kerait princess, Sorghaghtani Beki, a fervent Christian and one of the most influential women in world history.

Bar Sauma's written account of his journeys (translated from the Syriac by EAWallis Budge), which occurred before the return to Europe of Marco Polo from the court of Kublai Khan, gives a picture of medieval Europe at the close of the period of the Crusades. As he arrived by sea in Italy, he witnessed and recorded the great eruption of Mount Etna on June 18, 1287.

"Although we don't actually have a document saying that they were the official envoys of Kublai Khan, most scholars who have studied this document believe that the only way these two monks could have travelled from China, first of all to Iran and Iraq and then later on into Europe, was because they had a peshar or a passport from Kublai Khan. And Kublai Khan must have known what they were doing.

"And also we have a parallel in that when the two senior Polos, i.e. Marco Polo's father and his uncle, first came to the court of Kublai Khan, he asked them to go back, to bring back 100 technicians or Christian missionaries, to help him build up the infrastructure of his empire, and also to bring some holy oil from the holy sepulchre in Jerusalem. Which shows that he knew enough from his mother about what precious relics are, and that they might have some efficacy as well, even in his new empire."   Source: Christian Emissary of Kublai Khan

Christianity in China Portal at Wikipedia

The Monks of Kublai Khan, Emperor of China: The History of the Life and Travels of Rabban Sawma ...

1306 Death of Robert II, Duke of Burgundy.

1413 Henry V became King of England.

1556 Thomas Cranmer (b. 1489), England's first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, was burnt at the stake as a heretic, by Queen Mary I (Bloody Mary). During Henry VIII's reign he supported the supremacy of the king. In Mary's reign he was duped into recanting, and burnt at Oxford.

1616 Pocahontas (Mataoke), a Native American of the Iroquois peoples, died in England (approximate date; sources vary).

Before she could set sail for her homeland, in March 1616, Mataoke died of pneumonia (some say smallpox), aged about 20, just one month before the demise of William Shakespeare on April 23. The much-misrepresented Mataoke/Pocahontas was buried at St George's Church, Gravesend, Kent, which operates a tourist facility and website that maintain the Pocahontas fictions, as does Hollywood – and not a few educators.

The only portrait known to have been made while she was alive was an etching made in England by Dutch engraver, Simon Van de Passe (used on an American stamp in 1907), prints of which were sold at the time to the curious. Over time, images of her (as in the case of Cleopatra) were beautified to suit contemporary tastes, but John Chamberlaine, a member of the English nobility, commented that she was "no fayre [beautiful] Lady".

1678 The London Gazette offered a reward to anyone who could reveal the author of the anti-monarchist tract, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, published anonymously by the poet, Andrew Marvell, in 1677.

"The London Gazette, which started life as the Oxford Gazette, first appeared in 1665. It was the first real newspaper and is still the official newspaper of record. It began during an era of rigorous press control. During the English Civil War there had been a breakdown of Royal press control. Matters gradually returned to a semblance of normality under the Long Parliament and the Rump, but after Charles I's death, Cromwell introduced savage controls on press freedom."   Source

Marvell poems

 

'To his Coy Mistress'

By Andrew Marvell

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

        But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

        Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

1795 Death of Giovanni Arduino (b. 1714), geologist.

1800 Cardinal Barnaba Chiaramonti (1740 - 1823) was crowned Pope Pius VII – with a temporary papier-mâché tiara. This unusual papal coronation occurred in a cramped monastery church, while the coffined corpse of his predecessor, Pope Pius VI (1717 - '99), dead seven months, remained unburied on the orders of pro-Napoleonic clergy, the late pontiff's coffin labelled simply "Citizen Braschi, exercising the profession of Pontiff".

1801 The Battle of Alexandria was fought between British and French forces near the ruins of Nicopolis in Egypt.

1804 The Code Napoléon was adopted as French civil law.

1821 First revolutionary act in Monastery of Agia Lavra, Kalavryta, Greek War of Independence.

1843 Death of Robert Southey, English Poet Laureate.

1870 "In loving memory of Ellen Shannon, aged 25,
Who was accidentally burned March 21, 1870,
By the explosion of a lamp filled with R.E. Danforth's
Non-explosive burning fluid.
– Epitaph in cemetery at Girard, Pa, USA"   Source

1871 A commune was begun in Lyons, France.

1871 First parliament of new German Reich was opened by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.

1884 Death of Ezra Abbot (b. 1819), American Bible scholar.

Hatfields

1891 USA: The Hatfields and the McCoys ended their famous feud with intermarriage. Between 1860 and 1891, the famous hillbilly feud claimed more than a dozen members of these families. On Monday, June 16, 2003, descendants of the Hatfield and McCoy families signed a truce in Pikeville, Kentucky. This was more of a publicity event than anything else as, in reality, the feud had ended more than a century earlier.

"The origins of the feud are lost in the mists of history; there were already bad feelings between the two families in 1878, when a dispute over the ownership of two razor-backed hogs in a Hatfield pigsty provoked the first recorded incident of violence. The McCoys, upset when a court decision over the pigs went against them, ambushed a group of Hatfields who were deer hunting. No one was killed, but a few days later Staton Hatfield fired on two brothers, Sam and Paris McCoy, injuring one before he himself was killed by a single shot through the head ...

"Perhaps the most appropriate epitaph to the sanguinary history of the two families was provided by John Spears, an early historian of the feud who in the late 1890s visited the long-abandoned cabin of Anse Hatfield on the east bank of the Tug Fork. Inside he found hanging over a fireplace a gaudy lithograph that read: THERE IS NO PLACE LIKE HOME. Another visitor, obviously someone familiar with local history, had scribbled in the white margin: 'Leastwise, not this side of hell'."   Source

1896 Britain's first cinema opened, Piccadilly Circus, London.

1908 The world's first air passenger flew over Paris with aviator Henri Farman.

1918 World War I: The First Battle of the Somme began.

1928 USA: Charles Lindbergh was presented the Congressional Medal of Honor for his first trans-Atlantic flight.

1931 The Southern Cloud, flagship of ANA airlines, disappeared on a Sydney-Melbourne flight: eight died.

1935 The incubator ambulance made its inaugural run, Chicago, USA.

1945 World War II: British troops liberated Mandalay, Burma.

1952 Alan Freed presented the Moondog Coronation Ball, the first rock and roll concert, in Cleveland, Ohio.

1953 According to Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (1931 - '90), he attained 'enlightenment' at 2 a.m., "while sitting beneath a maulshree tree in a garden at Bhanvortal, Jabalpur, India. He described it as 'an explosion of consciousness' ..."

Source: Strelley, Kate, The Ultimate Game: The Rise and Fall of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Harper & Row, 1987, p. 172.

1960 Apartheid: Massacre in Sharpeville, South Africa: Police opened fire on a group of unarmed black South African demonstrators, killing 69 and wounding 180.

1961 UK: The Beatles' first night-time appearance at the Cavern Club, Liverpool. The band was paid a mere $42.00 per night. Recalled Gerry Marsden (of Gerry and the Pacemakers) on a particular visit to the Cavern: "I couldn't believe how good they were. The energy, the way they shaped up to the microphone together, you know – Paul the left-handed bass player, John standing there, couldn't give a shit, the attitude of the man. I thought: 'They'll be the first band out of Liverpool to make it'."