On This Day In History – March 5

Birthdays

• 1898 Zhou Enlai, Premier of the People’s Republic of China, born in Huai’an, China (d. 1976)
• 1918 James Tobin, American economist, Nobel laureate (d. 2002)
• 1934 Daniel Kahneman, Israeli economist and Nobel laureate (2002), born in Tel Aviv, Israel

Events

• 363 Roman Emperor Julian moves from Antioch with an army of 90,000 to attack the Sassanid Empire, in a campaign that brings about his own death
• 1770 Boston Massacre (Incident on King Street): British soldiers kill 5 men in a crowd throwing snowballs, stones and sticks at them. African American Crispus Attucks 1st to die; later held up as early black martyr. Massacre galvanizes anti-British feelings
• 1864 1st track meet between Oxford & Cambridge
• 1904 Nikola Tesla describes the process of the ball lightning formation in Electrical World and Engineer
• 1923 Montana & Nevada become 1st states to enact old age pension laws, providing precedent for Social Security 10 years later
• 1931 Gandhi & British viceroy Lord Irwin sign pact
• 1933 FDR proclaims 10-day bank holiday
• 1933 Germany’s Nazi Party wins majority in parliament (43.9%-17.2M votes)
• 1946 Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, popularizes the term and draws attention to the division of Europe
• 1971 “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin first played live at Ulster Hall, Belfast by Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Bonham and John Paul Jones
• 1976 British pound falls below $2 for 1st time
• 1995 Graves of Tsar Nicholas II and family found in St Petersburg
• 2013 The Dow Jones surpasses its 2007 pre-financial crisis levels for the first time
• 2013 Venezuelan Vice-President Nicolás Maduro assumes the presidency after the death of Hugo Chávez
• 2018 North Korean leader Kim Jong-un meets South Korean officials for the first time since taking office, hosting a dinner in Pyongyang