1618 – Johann Kepler discovered the third Law of Planetary Motion.

1702 – England’s Queen Anne took the throne upon the death of King William III.

1782 – The Gnadenhutten massacre took place. About 90 Indians were killed by militiamen in Ohio in retaliation for raids carried out by other Indians.

1853 – The first bronze statue of Andrew Jackson is unveiled in Washington, DC.

1855 – A train passed over the first railway suspension bridge at Niagara Falls, NY.

1862 – The Confederate ironclad “Merrimack” was launched.

1880 – U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes declared that the United States would have jurisdiction over any canal built across the isthmus of Panama.

1887 – The telescopic fishing rod was patented by Everett Horton.

1894 – A dog license law was enacted in the state of New York. It was the first animal control law in the U.S.

1904 – The Bundestag in Germany lifted the ban on the Jesuit order of priests.

1905 – In Russia, it was reported that the peasant revolt was spreading to Georgia.

1907 – The British House of Commons turned down a women’s suffrage bill.

1909 – Pope Pius X lifted the church ban on interfaith marriages in Hungary.

1910 – In France, Baroness de Laroche became the first woman to obtain a pilot’s license.

1910 – The King of Spain authorized women to attend universities.

1911 – In Europe, International Women’s Day was celebrated for the first time.

1911 – British Minister of Foreign Affairs Edward Gray declared that Britain would not support France in the event of a military conflict.

1917 – Russia’s “February Revolution” began with rioting and strikes in St. Petersburg. The revolution was called the “February Revolution” due to Russia’s use of the Old Style calendar.

1917 – The U.S. Senate voted to limit filibusters by adopting the cloture rule.

1921 – Spanish Premier Eduardo Dato was assassinated while leaving the Parliament in Madrid.

1921 – French troops occupied Dusseldorf.

1933 – Self-liquidating scrip money was issued for the first time at Franklin, IN.

1941 – Martial law was proclaimed in Holland in order to extinguish any anti-Nazi protests.

1942 – During World War II, Japanese forces captured Rangoon, Burma.

1943 – Japanese forces attacked American troops on Hill 700 in Bougainville. The battle lasted five days.

1945 – Phyllis Mae Daley received a commission in the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps. She later became the first African-American nurse to serve duty in World War II.

1946 – In New York City, the “Journal American” became the first commercial business to receive a helicopter license.

1946 – The French naval fleet arrived at Haiphong, Vietnam.

1948 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that religious instruction in public schools was unconstitutional.

1953 – A census bureau report indicated that 239,000 farmers had quit farming over the last 2 years.

1954 – France and Vietnam opened talks in Paris on a treaty to form the state of Indochina.

1954 – Herb McKenley set a world record for the quarter mile when he ran the distance in 46.8 seconds.

1957 – The International Boxing Club was ruled a monopoly putting it in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Law.

1959 – Groucho, Chico and Harpo made their final TV appearance together.

1961 – Max Conrad circled the globe in a record time of eight days, 18 hours and 49 minutes in the Piper Aztec.

1965 – The U.S. landed about 3,500 Marines in South Vietnam. They were the first U.S. combat troops to land in Vietnam.

1966 – Australia announced that it would triple the number of troops in Vietnam.

1973 – Two bombs exploded near Trafalgar Square in Great Britain. 234 people were injured.

1982 – The U.S. accused the Soviets of killing 3,000 Afghans with poison gas.

1985 – The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reported that 407,700 Americans were millionaires. That was more than double the total from just five years before.

1986 – Four French television crew members were abducted in west Beirut. All four were eventually released.

1988 – In Fort Campbell, KY, 17 U.S. soldiers were killed when two Army helicopters collided in midair.

1989 – In Lhasa, Tibet, martial law was declared after three days of protest against Chinese rule.

1999 – The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Timothy McVeigh for the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

1999 – The White House, under President Bill Clinton, directed the firing of nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee from his job at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The firing was a result of alleged security violations.

2001 – The U.S. House of Representatives voted for an across-the-board tax cut of nearly $1 trillion over the next decade.

2005 – In norther Chechnya, Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov was killed during a raid by Russian forces.

The Surprising History of International Women’s Day

Though International Women’s Day may be more widely celebrated abroad than in the United States, its roots are planted firmly in American soil.SARAH PRUITT

Activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman addressing a crowd, c. 1916. (Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images)

ontroversy clouds the history of International Women’s Day. According to a common version of the holiday’s origins, it was established in 1907, to mark the 50th anniversary of a brutally repressed protest by New York City’s female garment and textile workers. But there’s a problem with that story: Neither the 1857 protest nor the 50th anniversary tribute may have actually taken place. In fact, research that emerged in the 1980s suggested that origin myth was invented in the 1950s, as part of a Cold War-era effort to separate International Women’s Day from its socialist roots.

The historian Temma Kaplan revisited the first official National Woman’s Day, held in New York City on February 28, 1909. (The organizers, members of the Socialist Party of America, wanted it to be on a Sunday so that working women could participate.) Thousands of people showed up to various events uniting the suffragist and socialist causes, whose goals had often been at odds. Labor organizer Leonora O’Reilly and others addressed the crowd at the main meeting in the Murray Hill Lyceum, at 34th Street and Third Avenue. In Brooklyn, writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman (of “The Yellow Wall-paper” fame) told the congregation of the Parkside Church: “It is true that a woman’s duty is centered in her home and motherhood…[but] home should mean the whole country, and not be confined to three or four rooms or a city or a state.”

Source: history.com for the complete article

history.com The Surprising History of International Women’s Day

Women’s History Month

We celebrate a pioneering woman in the medical industry, Phyllis Mae Dailey. On March 8, 1945, Phyllis Mae Dailey was inducted into the United States Navy Nurse Corps. Dailey was the first African American sworn in as a Navy nurse on 8 March 1945, following changes in Navy recruitment and admittance procedures that had previously excluded black women from joining the Nurse Corps.

And although African-American nurses were not officially prohibited from entering the services after 1944, they were often “overlooked” in Army, Navy and Red Cross recruiting drives until early 1945.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Mable Keaton Staupers, executive secretary of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, were among the most vocal critics of the implicit ban on African-American nurses.

Roosevelt was a well known proponent for the change, and had also put pressure on the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve, WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), and SPARS (the women’s component of the Coast Guard) — all subsets of the Navy — to do the same. The SPARS would finally be integrated in October 1944, and the WAVES in December 1944.

A longtime advocate for racial equality in the nursing profession, Staupers wrote that military service was the responsibility for all citizens of the U.S., especially during a time of war.
A graduate of Lincoln School of Nursing in New York and student of public health at Teachers College, Columbia University, Dailey had previously been rejected from entering the U.S. Air Force. Determined to serve, Daley stated that she “knew the barriers were going to be broken down eventually and felt the more applicants, the better the chances would be for each person.”

Dailey’s path would be soon be followed by Edith Mazie Devoe, of Washington, D.C., Helen Fredericka Turner, of Augusta, Ga., and Eula Loucille Stimley, of Centreville, Miss.

Following the war all but Devoe would leave active duty. Devoe would later make history as the first African-American nurse in the regular Navy on Jan. 6, 1948. In 1950 she would become the first African-American Navy nurse to…

Today African-Americans comprise 30 percent of the nearly 3,000 men and women in the Navy Nurse Corps.
Under pressure from several directions, the Navy ended exclusion based on race in January 1945. Due to the Navy Nurse Corps being one of the last units to accept African Americans, it had the smallest representation of black women. By August 1945, when the war ended, there were just four active duty African American nurses in the Navy Nurse Corps, versus more than 6,000 that had served with the Women’s Army Corps during the war.

Posted on March 9, 2016T. Renee Causay

Women’s History Month