Poem: "Single Life Blues," by Baron Wormser, from When (Sarabande Books).
It's the birthday of poet RICHARD WILBUR, New York, 1921, our nation's poet laureate in 1987-88.
HOWARD NEMEROV, who followed Wilbur as the nation's poet laureate in 1988, was also born on this date, in New York, 1920.
It's the birthday in 1914, Oklahoma City, of RALPH ELLISON, best known for his first and only novel, Invisible Man (1952), a story of a young black man who leaves the South for New York to join the civil rights movement.
It's the anniversary of the 1875 CIVIL RIGHTS ACT, one of the first civil rights acts which guaranteed blacks the right to use public accommodations, but it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883.
It was on this day in 1780 that PENNSYLVANIA became the first U.S. state to ABOLISH SLAVERY.
It was on this day in 1692 that Sarah Goode, Sarah Osborne and a servant girl named Tituba were arrested for the practice of WITCHCRAFT in Salem, Massachusetts, beginning the SALEM WITCH TRIALS.
Poem: "My Husband Discovers Poetry," by Diane Lockward, from Against Perfection (Poets Forum Press).
It's the birthday of JOHN IRVING, born in Exeter, New Hampshire, 1942, author of The World According to Garp, in 1978.
It's the birthday in Springfield, Massachusetts, 1904, of Theodor Seuss Geisel — DR. SEUSS — who wrote The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and dozens of other children's books.
It's the birthday of composer KURT WEILL, born in Dessau, Germany in 1900, best known for his 1927 musical Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and the 1928 Threepenny Opera.
It was on this day in 1877 that RUTHERFORD B. HAYES was declared president by one electoral vote the day before the inauguration.
Poem: "Vacuuming Spiders," by Charles Goodrich, from Insects of South Corvallis (Knot House).
It's the birthday of British mystery writer NICOLAS FREELING, 1927, London, author of Love in Amsterdam (1965), The Widow (1979), and Wolfnight (1982).
It's the birthday of poet JAMES MERRILL, born in New York in 1926, the son of the founder of the brokerage house, Merrill-Lynch. His Nights and Days won the National Book Award in 1966, and Divine Comedies the 1976 Pulitzer Prize.
The first issue of TIME magazine went on sale on this day in 1923.
It's the anniversary of INTERNATIONAL AIRMAIL, the first packages flown from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Seattle in 1919.
It's the anniversary of the 1863 CONSCRIPTION ACT, a declaration by President Abraham Lincoln ordering all able-bodied men between the ages of 20 and 45 to sign up for the Union army unless they could pay $300.
It was on this day in 1817 that the FIRST COMMERCIAL STEAMBOAT ROUTE from Louisville, Kentucky, on the Ohio River, down to New Orleans began.
Poem: "From the Manifesto of the Selfish," by Stephen Dunn, from Landscape at the End of the Century (W.W. Norton).
It's the OLD INAUGURATION DAY. From George Washington's first presidency in 1789 all the way until 1933, presidents were sworn in on March 4. JOHN ADAMS was sworn in as the nation's second president on this day in 1797 as the second president. He had been Washington's Vice-President for eight years. THOMAS JEFFERSON was the first president to be inaugurated in Washington, D.C., in 1801.
It was on this day in 1952 that ERNEST HEMINGWAY wrote a letter to his publisher saying that he'd just finished THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, and he declared it was the best writing he had ever done and the best that he ever would do.
It's the birthday of the South African singer and activist MIRIAM MAKEBA, born near Johannesburg in 1932.
It's the birthday of British writer ALAN SILLITOE, in Nottingham, 1928, best known for his first novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), and for the short story, "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner," published the next year, both of which were made into popular movies.
It's the anniversary of VERMONT'S statehood, admitted to the Union in 1791 as the first addition to the original 13 colonies.
It's the birthday in 1394 in Porto, Portugal, of PRINCE HENRY THE NAVIGATOR, who sponsored the Portuguese voyages of discovery in the 15th century, in particular opening up the west coast of Africa to the slave trade.
Poem: "Two Ember Days in Alabama," by Andrew Hudgins, from The Never-Ending (Houghton, Mifflin).
PRESIDENT FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT ordered a four-day bank holiday on this day in 1933, an effort to curtail the devastating "bank runs" of the Great Depression when panicky investors withdrew their money from the banks.
It's the birthday in Wilmington, Delaware, 1853, of HOWARD PYLE, who's best known for the 1883 book The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, which he both wrote and illustrated.
It's the anniversary of the BOSTON MASSACRE, 1770, in which five men were killed in a skirmish with British soldiers.
It's the birthday of WILLIAM OUGHTRED, the mathematician and inventor of the slide rule, born in Buckinghamshire, England, 1574.
Poem: "Ultrasound," by Sharon Bryan, from Flying Blind (Sarabande Books).
It's the birthday of the Colombian writer, GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ, born in the coastal town of Arataca, 1928, and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which came out in 1967 and won him the Nobel Prize for Literature.
It's the anniversary of the BATTLE OF FORT DOUAMONT, a part of the larger 1916 Battle of Verdun in WWI.
ASPIRIN was patented on this day in 1899 by the chemist Felix Hoffmann. He found a way to take the pain-killing ingredient that people had used for centuries in the willow tree and other plants and stabilize it and manufacture it cheaply.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, the author of Little Women, died on this day in 1888 in Boston — overcome with grief after returning just a few hours earlier from her father's funeral.
It was on this day in 1884 that SUSAN B. ANTHONY and more than 100 other suffragists presented President Chester Arthur with a demand that he support women's right to vote. They failed, but the two women's suffrage groups—the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association—soon merged and worked for the next 36 years toward passage of the 19th Amendment, in 1920.
The poet ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING was born on this day in 1806 near Durham, England, author of Sonnets from the Portuguese, published in 1850, including the one that starts, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways."
Poem: "Why We Are Afraid," by Clemens Starck, from Journeyman's Wages (Story Line Press).
It was on this date in 1945 that American troops seized a crucial bridge over the Rhine River at REMAGEN and began pouring into Germany. With the Soviet army closing in on Berlin from the east, the war in Europe would be over in a few months.
MONOPOLY was invented on this day in 1933. It came out at the height of the Great Depression and was a big hit because each player got $1,500 and tried to bankrupt the others by buying, selling, and trading properties and by charging exorbitant rent.
Robert Frost's poem, "STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING," was published in the New Republic magazine on this date in 1923. He was proud of the poem, and said the lines, "Whose woods these are, I think I know, his house is in the village though..." contained everything he ever knew about how to write.
THE FIRST JAZZ RECORD went on sale on this day in 1917. The Victor Company released a tune called "The Dixieland Jazz Band One-Step" recorded by Nick La Rocca and his Original Dixieland Jazz Band who had traveled all the way from New Orleans to New York to make the record.
It's the birthday of the Norwegian poet ROLF JACOBSEN, born in Oslo in 1907.
It's the birthday of HELEN PARKHURST, the founder of the Dalton Plan of Education, born in Durand, Wisconsin in 1887.
It's the birthday in 1872, Holland of PIET MONDRIAN, the abstract painter famous for geometric pictures of black lines and colored rectangles on white backgrounds.
