Local mean solar time depends upon longitude; it is advanced by four minutes per degree eastward. In 1869 Charles F. Dowd, principal of a school in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., proposed the use of time zones, within which all localities would keep the same time. Others, including Sir Sandford Fleming, a Canadian civil engineer, strongly advocated this idea. Time zones were adopted by U.S. and Canadian railroads in 1883.
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0483 – St. Felix III began his reign as Pope.
0607 – The 12th recorded passage of Halley’s Comet occurred.
1519 – Cortez landed in Mexico.
1639 – Harvard University was named for clergyman John Harvard.
1660 – A statute was passed limiting the sale of slaves in the colony of Virginia.
1777 – The U.S. Congress ordered its European envoys to appeal to high-ranking foreign officers to send troops to reinforce the American army.
1781 – Sir William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus.
1852 – The New York “Lantern” newspaper published the first “Uncle Sam cartoon”. It was drawn by Frank Henry Bellew.
1865 – Jefferson Davis signed a bill authorizing slaves to be used as soldiers for the Confederacy.
1868 – The U.S. Senate began the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson.
1877 – Chester Greenwood patented the earmuff.
1878 – The first collegiate golf match was played between Oxford and Cambridge.
1884 – Standard time was adopted throughout the U.S.
1900 – In South Africa, British Gen. Roberts took Bloemfontein.
1901 – Andrew Carnegie announced that he was retiring from business and that he would spend the rest of his days giving away his fortune. His net worth was estimated at $300 million.
1902 – In Poland, schools were shut down across the country when students refused to sing the Russian hymn “God Protect the Czar.”
1902 – Andrew Carnegie approved 40 applications from libraries for donations.
1908 – The people of Jerusalem saw an automobile for the first time. The owner was Charles Glidden of Boston.
1911 – The U.S. Supreme Court approved corporate tax law.
1915 – The Germans repelled a British expeditionary force attack in France.
1918 – Women were scheduled to march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York due to a shortage of men due to wartime.
1925 – A law in Tennessee prohibited the teaching of evolution.
1930 – It was announced that the planet Pluto had been discovered by scientist Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory.
1933 – U.S. banks began to re-open after a “holiday” that had been declared by President Roosevelt.
1935 – Three-thousand-year-old archives were found in Jerusalem confirming some biblical history.
1940 – The war between Russia and Finland ended with the signing of a treaty in Moscow.
1941 – Adolf Hitler issued an edict calling for an invasion of the U.S.S.R.
1942 – Julia Flikke of the Nurse Corps became the first woman colonel in the U.S. Army.
1943 – Japanese forces ended their attack on the American troops on Hill 700 in Bougainville.
1946 – Reports from Iran indicated that Soviet tanks units were stationed 20 miles from Tehran.
1946 – Premier Tito seized wartime collaborator General Draja Mikhailovich in a cave in Yugoslavia.
1951 – Israel demanded $1.5 billion in German reparations for the cost of caring for war refugees.
1951 – The comic strip “Dennis the Menace” appeared for the first time in newspapers across the country.
1957 – Jimmy Hoffa was arrested by the FBI on bribery charges.
1963 – China invited Soviet President Khrushchev to visit Peking.
1969 – The Apollo 9 astronauts returned to Earth after the conclusion of a mission that included the successful testing of the Lunar Module.
1970 – Cambodia ordered Hanoi and Viet Cong troops to leave.
1970 – Digital Equipment Corp. introduced the PDP-11 minicomputer.
1972 – “The Merv Griffin Show” debuted in syndication for Metromedia Television.
1974 – The U.S. Senate voted 54-33 to restore the death penalty.
1974 – An embargo imposed by Arab oil-producing countries was lifted.
1980 – A jury in Winamac, IN, found Ford Motor Company innocent of reckless homicide in the deaths of three young women that had been riding in a Ford Pinto.
1988 – The board of trustees off Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, chose I. King Jordan to be its first deaf president. The college is a liberal arts college for the hearing-impaired.
1990 – The U.S. lifted economic sanctions against Nicaragua.
1991 – Exxon paid $1 billion in fines and for the clean-up of the Alaskan oil spill.
1995 – The first United Nations World Summit on Social Development concluded in Copenhagen, Denmark.
1997 – Sister Nirmala was chosen by India’s Missionaries of Charity to succeed Mother Teresa as leader of the Catholic order.
2002 – Fox aired “Celebrity Boxing.” Tonya Harding beat Paula Jones, Danny Banaduce beat Barry Williams and Todd Bridges defeated Vanilla Ice.
2003 – Japan sent a destroyer to the Sea of Japan amid reports that North Korea was planning to test an intermediate-range ballistic missile.
2003 – A report in the journal “Nature” reported that scientists had found 350,000-year-old human footprints in Italy. The 56 prints were made by three early, upright-walking humans that were descending the side of a volcano.
2006 – In New York, the official start of construction of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum began.
2012 – After 244 years of publication, Encyclopædia Britannica announced it would discontinue its print edition.
Women Who Ran for President
Who were the early women candidates for president? Hillary Clinton in her 2008 run for the Democratic nomination for US President came the closest so far that any woman has come to winning the nomination of a major political party in the United States. But Clinton is not the first woman to run for United States President, and not even the first to run for a major party’s nomination. Here’s a list of the female presidential candidates, arranged chronologically by each woman’s first campaign for the office. The list is current through the 2012 election; women running in 2016 will be added after that election’s over.
What woman ran for US president first? And which women have run since?
Equal Rights Party: 1872
Humanitarian Party: 1892
Victoria Woodhull was the first woman to run for president in the United States. Frederick Douglass was nominated as Vice President, but there’s no record that he accepted. Woodhull was also known for her radicalism as a woman suffrage activist and her role in a sex scandal involving noted preacher of the time, Henry Ward Beecher. More »
National Equal Rights Party: 1884, 1888Belva Lockwood, an activist for voting rights for women and for African Americans, was also one of the earliest women lawyers in the United States. Her campaign for president in 1884 was the first full-scale national campaign of a woman running for president. More »
Democratic Party, 1920Laura Clay, a Southern women’s rights advocate who supported state suffrage amendments so that the Southern states could limit suffrage to white women, had her name placed in nomination at the 1920 Democratic National Convention, to which she was a delegate. More »
Surprise Party: 1940Comedian and actress, partner with husband George Burns on the George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, Grace Allen ran for president in 1940 as a publicity stunt. She was not on the ballot — it was, after all, a stunt — but she did get write-in votes.
Republican Party: 1964She was the first woman to have her name placed in nomination for president at a major political party’s convention. She was also the first woman elected to serve in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. More »
Communist Party: 1968Nominated by the (tiny) Communist Party in 1968, Charlene Mitchell was the first African American woman nominated for president in the United States. She was on the ballot in two states in the general election, and received less than 1,100 votes nationally.
Democratic Party: 1972A civil rights and women’s rights advocate, Shirley Chisholm ran for the Democratic nomination in 1972 with the slogan, “Unbought and Unbossed.” Her name was placed in nomination at the 1972 convention, and she won 152 delegates. More »
Democratic Party: 1972She was the first Asian American to seek nomination as president by a major political party. She was on the Oregon primary ballot in 1972. She was at that time a member of the U.S. Congress, elected from Hawaii.
Democratic Party: 1972One of three women to seek the Democratic Party nomination for president in 1972, Abzug was at the time a member of Congress from the West Side of Manhattan. More »
Socialist Workers Party: 1972Underage for the Constitution’s requirements for the presidency, Linda Jenness ran against Nixon in 1972 and was on the ballot in 25 states. In three states where Jenness was not accepted for the ballot because of her age, Evelyn Reed was in the presidential slot. Their vote total was less than 70,000 nationally.
Madam C. J. Walker—entrepreneur, philanthropist, activist, patron of the arts—was born Sarah Breedlove in 1867 on the same Delta, Louisiana plantation where her parents had been enslaved. Orphaned at seven, married at 14 and widowed at 20 with a two-year-old daughter, she moved to St. Louis where three older brothers owned a barbershop. Throughout the 1890s—in the neighborhood where ragtime music was born—she worked as a laundress, sang in her church choir and began to aspire to a better life as she observed the educated, civic-minded women at St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church.
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