March 22 was the fourth day of Quinquatria in ancient Rome, honoring the goddess Minerva, but in 1818 it was Easter Sunday, the earliest date on which Easter Sunday can fall. Easter will come again on March 22 in the year 2285 so we have something to look forward to (in a future incarnation).
In fact, the 23rd century is filled with interesting events. For example, Pluto will be closer to the Sun than Neptune for about 20 years. The last time this occurred was from 1979-1999. And from 2238 to 2239, there is a triple conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn (the last triple conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn was in 1981).
On August 1, 2253, Mercury occults the star Regulus, which hasn't happened since 364 BC, when Athens and Thrace were slugging it out. ("Occult" in astronomical terms is the same thing as an eclipse, one heavenly body blotting out another.)
In 2281 and 2282 there is a Grand Trine of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. The last time this occurred was from 1769 to 1770, which saw among other things the arrival of the stream engine. A "Grand Trine" (of interest to astrologers) is when three or more planets are 120 degrees from each other. Yesterday, the steam engine; tomorrow, warp drive?
But there's more. On Sunday, August 28, 2287, the distance between Mars and Earth closes toward its minimum, the closest approach of the two planets since Wednesday, August 27, 2003. Prior to 2003, Mars hadn't been as close to Earth since the days of the Neanderthals.
Captain James Kirk, commander of the starship Enterprise, is/will be/was born March 22, 2233. Today is Captain Kirk's birthday (or it will be). For trivia buffs, Captain Kirk's full name is James Tiberius Kirk.
Montgomery Scott (of "beam me up, Scottie" fame) will be born in 2222. And Mr. Spock will be born (on Vulcan where Earth years may not apply) in 2230.
AD 238. Gordian I and his son Gordian III are proclaimed Roman emperors. Gordian the Elder was in his seventies when he donned the purple so at his request the Roman Senate made his son co-emperor. The story of their rise and fall is convoluted and hardly worth describing since their reign lasted a mere 36 days. Gordian I led an untrained army of militia against a rival and was killed in battle. Gordian II hanged himself with a belt.
1322. Thomas, 2nd Earl of Lancaster, one of the leaders of the baronial opposition to Edward II of England, is executed. After the disaster at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, Edward submitted to Lancaster, who in effect became ruler of England. He attempted to govern for the next four years, but was unable to keep order or prevent the Scots from raiding and retaking territory in the North. In 1318 a new faction of barons arose, and Lancaster was deposed from office.
Lancaster was tried by a tribunal consisting of, among others, the two Despensers, Edmund FitzAlan, 9th Earl of Arundel, and King Edward. Lancaster was not allowed to speak in his own defense, nor was he allowed to have anyone to speak for him. Because of their kinship and Lancaster's royal blood, the King commuted the sentence to mere beheading (as opposed to being drawn, quartered, and beheaded) and Lancaster was convicted of treason and executed near Pontefract Castle.
1621. The Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony sign a peace treaty with Massasoit, chief of the Wampanoags. Massasoit negotiated a treaty guaranteeing the English their security in exchange for their alliance against the Narragansett. Both parties promised to abstain from mutual injuries, and to deliver offenders; the colonists were to receive assistance if attacked, to render it if Massasoit should be unjustly assailed. Massasoit actively sought the alliance since two significant epidemics had devastated the Wampanoag during the previous six years while the rival Narragansett tribe had remained untouched.
1622. Algonquian Indians kill 347 English settlers around Jamestown, Virginia, a third of the colony's population, in what became known as the Jamestown Massacre.
1630. The Massachusetts Bay Colony outlaws the possession of cards, dice, and gaming tables.
1638. Anne Hutchinson is expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony for religious dissent. Anne Hutchinson was an early-17th century Puritan living in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Netherlands who became the leader of a dissident church discussion group. Hutchinson held Bible meetings for women that soon appealed to men as well. Eventually, she went beyond Bible study to proclaim her own theological interpretations of sermons. Some of these offended colony leadership and Hutchinson was accused of heresy.. A major controversy ensued and after a trial before a jury of officials and clergy, she was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1765. The Parliament of Great Britain passes the Stamp Act, which introduced a tax to be levied directly on its American colonies. The act was hugely unpopular and even though it was later repealed, it sparked revolutionary sentiment in the colonies, especially in Massachusetts where British tax collectors were tarred-and-feathered.
1784. The Emerald Buddha is moved with great ceremony to its current place in Wat Phra Kaew, Thailand. The Emerald Buddha, a dark green statue, is in a standing form, about 66 centimeters (26 in) tall, carved from a single jade stone (Emerald in Thai means deep green color and not the specific stone). It is carved in the meditating posture in the style of the Lanna school of the northern Thailand. Except for the Thai King, no other person is allowed to touch the statue. The King changes the cloak around the statue three times a year, corresponding to the summer, winter, and rainy seasons, an important ritual performed to usher good fortune to the country during each season.
1820. U.S. Navy officer Stephen Decatur, hero of the Barbary Wars, is mortally wounded in a duel with disgraced Navy Commodore James Barron at Bladensburg, Maryland. Although once friends, Decatur sat on the court-martial that suspended Barron from the Navy for five years in 1808 and later opposed his reinstatement, leading to a fatal quarrel between the two men.
1859. Quito, Ecuador, the site of many powerful earthquakes through the years, suffers one of its worst when a tremor kills 5,000 people and destroys some of the most famous buildings in South America.
At 8:30 a.m. on March 22, nearly six full minutes of violent shaking struck the city. Buildings, churches and homes throughout the city were demolished by the tremor. Some of the area's most prominent buildings collapsed, including the Government Palace, the Archepiscopal Palace, the Chapel of El Sagrario and the Temple of the Augustines. Despite the loss of so many structures, the death toll was not as high as it could have been. Coming at 8:30 in the morning, the quake was just late enough that most of the residents had left their homes, where they would have been most vulnerable.
1871. In North Carolina, William Woods Holden becomes the first governor of a U.S. state to be removed from office by impeachment.
1895. Motion pictures are first displayed at a private screening by Auguste and Louis Lumiere. Their first public screening of movies at which admission was charged was held on December 28, 1895, at Paris's Salon Indien du Grand Café.
Even though Max and Emil Skladanowsky, inventors of the Bioskop, had offered projected moving images to a paying public one month earlier (November 1, 1895, in Berlin), film historians consider the Grand Café screening to be the true birth of the cinema as a commercial medium. The reason is the Skladanowsky brothers' screening was not a motion pictures film but a slideshow of animated still photographs which is not cinematography.
1916. The last Emperor of China, Yuan Shikai, abdicates the throne and the Republic of China is restored.
1920. Azeri and Turkish army soldiers with participation of Kurdish gangs attack the Armenian inhabitants of Shushi. The Massacre of Shushi was a pogrom directed against the ethnicArmenian population of Shushi, a town in the region of Nagorno-Karabagh. The event took place between 22 and 26 March 1920, and had as its background a conflict over competing claims of ownership of the region by Armenia and Azerbaijan. It resulted in the complete destruction of the Armenian-populated quarters of Shusha and the elimination of the town's Armenian population.
1923. The first radio broadcast of an ice hockey game is made by Foster Hewitt.
1933. "Happy days are here again" as U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signs into law a bill legalizing the sale of beer and wine, ending the country's "noble experiment" with Prohibition.
1939. Germany takes Memel from Lith uania. Lithuania had lost control over the situation in the Territory. In the early hours of 23 March 1939, after an oral ultimatum had caused a Lithuanian delegation to travel to Berlin, the Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Juozas Urbšys and his German counterpart Joachim von Ribbentrop signed the Treaty of the Cession of the Memel Territory to Germany in exchange for a Lithuanian Free Zone for 99 years in the port of Memel, using the facilities erected in previous years.
Hitler had anticipated this aboard a Kriegsmarine naval ship, and at dawn sailed into Memel to celebrate the return heim ins Reich of the Memelland. This proved to be the last of a series of bloodless annexations of territories separated from the German or Austrian Empire by the Treaty of Versailles which had been perceived by many if not most Germans as a humiliation. German forces seized the territory even before the official Lithuanian ratification.
1941. Washington's Grand Coulee Dam begins to generate electricity.
1945. The Arab League is founded when a charter is adopted in Cairo, Egypt.
1954. Closed since 1939, the London bullion market reopens. The London bullion market is a wholesale over-the-counter market for the trading of gold and silver.
1955. Swedish actress Lena Olin is born Lena Maria Jonna Olin in Stockholm. Olin's international debut in a lead role on film was in the 1984 Swedish film After the Rehearsal. In 1988, Olin starred opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in her first English speaking and internationally produced film, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and became a respected actress outside of Europe as well. After this, Olin received offers from the US and Hollywood. (See pictures.)
In 1989, she earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her work in Enemies: A Love Story, in which she portrayed the survivor of a Nazi camp. In 1994 Olin starred in Romeo Is Bleeding and played her, perhaps, most extreme character to date; the outrangeous hit woman Mona Demarkov -- still one of the actresses most popular portrayals on film.
From 2002 to 2006, Olin appeared opposite Jennifer Garner in her first American television role ever; on the second season of the successful television series Alias. For her work on the series as Irina Derevko, Olin received an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in 2003.
1960. Arthur Leonard Schawlow and Charles Townes receive the first patent for a laser.
1963. Please Please Me, the first Beatles album, is released in the UK.
1972. The United States Congress sends the Equal Rights Amendment to the states for ratification. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution. The ERA was originally written by Alice Paul and, in 1923, it was introduced in the Congress for the first time. In 1972, it passed both houses of Congress and went to the state legislatures for ratification. The ERA failed to receive the requisite number of ratifications before the final deadline mandated by Congress of June 30, 1982 expired and so it was not adopted.
1978. Karl Wallenda of the Flying Wallendas dies after falling off a tight-rope between two hotels in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Karl Wallenda was the founder of The Flying Wallendas, an internationally known daredevil circus act famous for performing death-defying stunts without a safety net.
Despite being involved in several tragedies in his family's acts, Karl continued with his death-defying stunts. In 1978, at age 73, Karl attempted a walk between the two towers of the ten-story Condado Plaza Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on a wire stretched 121 feet (37 metres) above the pavement, but fell to his death when he was blown off the wire by high winds.
He was quoted as saying, "Life is being on the wire, everything else is just waiting."
1984. Teachers at the McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach, California are charged with Satanic ritual abuse of the children in the school. The charges are later dropped as completely unfounded.
1989. Clint Malarchuk of the Buffalo Sabres suffers a near-fatal injury when another player accidentally slits his throat.
1995. Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov returns to Earth after setting a record for 438 days in space.
1997. Tara Lipinski, age 14 years and 10 months, becomes the youngest champion women's World Figure Skating Champion.
2004. Ahmed Yassin, co-founder and leader of the Palestinian Sunni Islamist militant group Hamas, and bodyguards are killed in the Gaza Strip when hit by Israeli Air Force AH-64 Apache fired Hellfire missiles.
2011. Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi appears at his Bab al-Azizia compound and tells his followers "we will be victorious in the end."
Meanwhile. the former President of Israel, Moshe Katsav, is sentenced to seven years in prison, two years probation and payment of compensation to his victims on charges of rape, indecent assault, sexual harassment and obstruction of justice. Current President Shimon Peres says that "this is a sad day but everyone is equal before the law."
In fact, the 23rd century is filled with interesting events. For example, Pluto will be closer to the Sun than Neptune for about 20 years. The last time this occurred was from 1979-1999. And from 2238 to 2239, there is a triple conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn (the last triple conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn was in 1981).
On August 1, 2253, Mercury occults the star Regulus, which hasn't happened since 364 BC, when Athens and Thrace were slugging it out. ("Occult" in astronomical terms is the same thing as an eclipse, one heavenly body blotting out another.)
In 2281 and 2282 there is a Grand Trine of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. The last time this occurred was from 1769 to 1770, which saw among other things the arrival of the stream engine. A "Grand Trine" (of interest to astrologers) is when three or more planets are 120 degrees from each other. Yesterday, the steam engine; tomorrow, warp drive?
But there's more. On Sunday, August 28, 2287, the distance between Mars and Earth closes toward its minimum, the closest approach of the two planets since Wednesday, August 27, 2003. Prior to 2003, Mars hadn't been as close to Earth since the days of the Neanderthals.
Captain James Kirk, commander of the starship Enterprise, is/will be/was born March 22, 2233. Today is Captain Kirk's birthday (or it will be). For trivia buffs, Captain Kirk's full name is James Tiberius Kirk.
Montgomery Scott (of "beam me up, Scottie" fame) will be born in 2222. And Mr. Spock will be born (on Vulcan where Earth years may not apply) in 2230.
AD 238. Gordian I and his son Gordian III are proclaimed Roman emperors. Gordian the Elder was in his seventies when he donned the purple so at his request the Roman Senate made his son co-emperor. The story of their rise and fall is convoluted and hardly worth describing since their reign lasted a mere 36 days. Gordian I led an untrained army of militia against a rival and was killed in battle. Gordian II hanged himself with a belt.
1322. Thomas, 2nd Earl of Lancaster, one of the leaders of the baronial opposition to Edward II of England, is executed. After the disaster at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, Edward submitted to Lancaster, who in effect became ruler of England. He attempted to govern for the next four years, but was unable to keep order or prevent the Scots from raiding and retaking territory in the North. In 1318 a new faction of barons arose, and Lancaster was deposed from office.
Lancaster was tried by a tribunal consisting of, among others, the two Despensers, Edmund FitzAlan, 9th Earl of Arundel, and King Edward. Lancaster was not allowed to speak in his own defense, nor was he allowed to have anyone to speak for him. Because of their kinship and Lancaster's royal blood, the King commuted the sentence to mere beheading (as opposed to being drawn, quartered, and beheaded) and Lancaster was convicted of treason and executed near Pontefract Castle.
1621. The Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony sign a peace treaty with Massasoit, chief of the Wampanoags. Massasoit negotiated a treaty guaranteeing the English their security in exchange for their alliance against the Narragansett. Both parties promised to abstain from mutual injuries, and to deliver offenders; the colonists were to receive assistance if attacked, to render it if Massasoit should be unjustly assailed. Massasoit actively sought the alliance since two significant epidemics had devastated the Wampanoag during the previous six years while the rival Narragansett tribe had remained untouched.
1622. Algonquian Indians kill 347 English settlers around Jamestown, Virginia, a third of the colony's population, in what became known as the Jamestown Massacre.
1630. The Massachusetts Bay Colony outlaws the possession of cards, dice, and gaming tables.
1638. Anne Hutchinson is expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony for religious dissent. Anne Hutchinson was an early-17th century Puritan living in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Netherlands who became the leader of a dissident church discussion group. Hutchinson held Bible meetings for women that soon appealed to men as well. Eventually, she went beyond Bible study to proclaim her own theological interpretations of sermons. Some of these offended colony leadership and Hutchinson was accused of heresy.. A major controversy ensued and after a trial before a jury of officials and clergy, she was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1765. The Parliament of Great Britain passes the Stamp Act, which introduced a tax to be levied directly on its American colonies. The act was hugely unpopular and even though it was later repealed, it sparked revolutionary sentiment in the colonies, especially in Massachusetts where British tax collectors were tarred-and-feathered.
1784. The Emerald Buddha is moved with great ceremony to its current place in Wat Phra Kaew, Thailand. The Emerald Buddha, a dark green statue, is in a standing form, about 66 centimeters (26 in) tall, carved from a single jade stone (Emerald in Thai means deep green color and not the specific stone). It is carved in the meditating posture in the style of the Lanna school of the northern Thailand. Except for the Thai King, no other person is allowed to touch the statue. The King changes the cloak around the statue three times a year, corresponding to the summer, winter, and rainy seasons, an important ritual performed to usher good fortune to the country during each season.
1820. U.S. Navy officer Stephen Decatur, hero of the Barbary Wars, is mortally wounded in a duel with disgraced Navy Commodore James Barron at Bladensburg, Maryland. Although once friends, Decatur sat on the court-martial that suspended Barron from the Navy for five years in 1808 and later opposed his reinstatement, leading to a fatal quarrel between the two men.
1859. Quito, Ecuador, the site of many powerful earthquakes through the years, suffers one of its worst when a tremor kills 5,000 people and destroys some of the most famous buildings in South America.
At 8:30 a.m. on March 22, nearly six full minutes of violent shaking struck the city. Buildings, churches and homes throughout the city were demolished by the tremor. Some of the area's most prominent buildings collapsed, including the Government Palace, the Archepiscopal Palace, the Chapel of El Sagrario and the Temple of the Augustines. Despite the loss of so many structures, the death toll was not as high as it could have been. Coming at 8:30 in the morning, the quake was just late enough that most of the residents had left their homes, where they would have been most vulnerable.
1871. In North Carolina, William Woods Holden becomes the first governor of a U.S. state to be removed from office by impeachment.
1895. Motion pictures are first displayed at a private screening by Auguste and Louis Lumiere. Their first public screening of movies at which admission was charged was held on December 28, 1895, at Paris's Salon Indien du Grand Café.
Even though Max and Emil Skladanowsky, inventors of the Bioskop, had offered projected moving images to a paying public one month earlier (November 1, 1895, in Berlin), film historians consider the Grand Café screening to be the true birth of the cinema as a commercial medium. The reason is the Skladanowsky brothers' screening was not a motion pictures film but a slideshow of animated still photographs which is not cinematography.
1916. The last Emperor of China, Yuan Shikai, abdicates the throne and the Republic of China is restored.
1920. Azeri and Turkish army soldiers with participation of Kurdish gangs attack the Armenian inhabitants of Shushi. The Massacre of Shushi was a pogrom directed against the ethnicArmenian population of Shushi, a town in the region of Nagorno-Karabagh. The event took place between 22 and 26 March 1920, and had as its background a conflict over competing claims of ownership of the region by Armenia and Azerbaijan. It resulted in the complete destruction of the Armenian-populated quarters of Shusha and the elimination of the town's Armenian population.
1923. The first radio broadcast of an ice hockey game is made by Foster Hewitt.
1933. "Happy days are here again" as U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signs into law a bill legalizing the sale of beer and wine, ending the country's "noble experiment" with Prohibition.
1939. Germany takes Memel from Lith uania. Lithuania had lost control over the situation in the Territory. In the early hours of 23 March 1939, after an oral ultimatum had caused a Lithuanian delegation to travel to Berlin, the Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Juozas Urbšys and his German counterpart Joachim von Ribbentrop signed the Treaty of the Cession of the Memel Territory to Germany in exchange for a Lithuanian Free Zone for 99 years in the port of Memel, using the facilities erected in previous years.
Hitler had anticipated this aboard a Kriegsmarine naval ship, and at dawn sailed into Memel to celebrate the return heim ins Reich of the Memelland. This proved to be the last of a series of bloodless annexations of territories separated from the German or Austrian Empire by the Treaty of Versailles which had been perceived by many if not most Germans as a humiliation. German forces seized the territory even before the official Lithuanian ratification.
1941. Washington's Grand Coulee Dam begins to generate electricity.
1945. The Arab League is founded when a charter is adopted in Cairo, Egypt.
1954. Closed since 1939, the London bullion market reopens. The London bullion market is a wholesale over-the-counter market for the trading of gold and silver.
1955. Swedish actress Lena Olin is born Lena Maria Jonna Olin in Stockholm. Olin's international debut in a lead role on film was in the 1984 Swedish film After the Rehearsal. In 1988, Olin starred opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in her first English speaking and internationally produced film, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and became a respected actress outside of Europe as well. After this, Olin received offers from the US and Hollywood. (See pictures.)
In 1989, she earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her work in Enemies: A Love Story, in which she portrayed the survivor of a Nazi camp. In 1994 Olin starred in Romeo Is Bleeding and played her, perhaps, most extreme character to date; the outrangeous hit woman Mona Demarkov -- still one of the actresses most popular portrayals on film.
From 2002 to 2006, Olin appeared opposite Jennifer Garner in her first American television role ever; on the second season of the successful television series Alias. For her work on the series as Irina Derevko, Olin received an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in 2003.
1960. Arthur Leonard Schawlow and Charles Townes receive the first patent for a laser.
1963. Please Please Me, the first Beatles album, is released in the UK.
1972. The United States Congress sends the Equal Rights Amendment to the states for ratification. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution. The ERA was originally written by Alice Paul and, in 1923, it was introduced in the Congress for the first time. In 1972, it passed both houses of Congress and went to the state legislatures for ratification. The ERA failed to receive the requisite number of ratifications before the final deadline mandated by Congress of June 30, 1982 expired and so it was not adopted.
1978. Karl Wallenda of the Flying Wallendas dies after falling off a tight-rope between two hotels in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Karl Wallenda was the founder of The Flying Wallendas, an internationally known daredevil circus act famous for performing death-defying stunts without a safety net.
Despite being involved in several tragedies in his family's acts, Karl continued with his death-defying stunts. In 1978, at age 73, Karl attempted a walk between the two towers of the ten-story Condado Plaza Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on a wire stretched 121 feet (37 metres) above the pavement, but fell to his death when he was blown off the wire by high winds.
He was quoted as saying, "Life is being on the wire, everything else is just waiting."
1984. Teachers at the McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach, California are charged with Satanic ritual abuse of the children in the school. The charges are later dropped as completely unfounded.
1989. Clint Malarchuk of the Buffalo Sabres suffers a near-fatal injury when another player accidentally slits his throat.
1995. Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov returns to Earth after setting a record for 438 days in space.
1997. Tara Lipinski, age 14 years and 10 months, becomes the youngest champion women's World Figure Skating Champion.
2004. Ahmed Yassin, co-founder and leader of the Palestinian Sunni Islamist militant group Hamas, and bodyguards are killed in the Gaza Strip when hit by Israeli Air Force AH-64 Apache fired Hellfire missiles.
2011. Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi appears at his Bab al-Azizia compound and tells his followers "we will be victorious in the end."
Meanwhile. the former President of Israel, Moshe Katsav, is sentenced to seven years in prison, two years probation and payment of compensation to his victims on charges of rape, indecent assault, sexual harassment and obstruction of justice. Current President Shimon Peres says that "this is a sad day but everyone is equal before the law."
