21. März

The whole community died. One family buried its valuables in a wall: the Erfurt Treasure, found in 1998, with about 3,000 silver coins and a gold Jewish wedding ring. The synagogue survived as a warehouse and is now a museum.

The archbishop who wrote the Prayer Book had signed several recantations. Brought to recant once more in public, he withdrew them all and, at the stake, held his right hand in the fire first because it had signed. England wrote the date “21 March 1555”; it fell in 1556 as we count years.

The Paris Academy had made Fermat’s theorem its prize question. Asked by Heinrich Olbers whether he would enter, Carl Friedrich Gauss replied that the theorem, as an isolated proposition, held little interest for him: he could easily set down many such statements that no one could prove or disprove.

Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens told a Savannah crowd that the new government’s “corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition”.

With Russia out, Ludendorff moved divisions west and gambled on winning before the Americans arrived in force. Short, heavy bombardments and storm troops gained more ground than anyone had since 1914, and the Germans reached the Marne again, but they ran out of men and supplies.

Under Malan, J. G. Strijdom and H. F. Verwoerd the government passed law after law: separate beaches, buses, post-office counters and park benches under the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act of 1953, stricter pass laws, and the removal of coloured voters from the common roll in the Cape. Signs…

A crowd gathered at the police station in a Pan Africanist Congress protest against the pass laws, and the police opened fire. Sixty-nine people were killed, many shot in the back, and about 180 wounded, the figures South African History Online and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission give.…

The PAC asked men to leave their passes at home and present themselves for arrest. At Sharpeville a crowd of several thousand gathered at the police station, and the police opened fire. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that 69 people were killed and more than 180 wounded, many shot in…

It came from a virus that Enders and Thomas Peebles had taken in 1954 from a 13-year-old boy, David Edmonston. Before it, the CDC estimates, measles infected 3 to 4 million Americans a year and killed 400 to 500.

How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — King, at the state capitol Under federal protection, about 3,200 set out along U.S. 80; a court limited them to 300 on the two-lane stretch through Lowndes County. By the capitol steps they were about…

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sharpeville, police armed with live ammunition opened fire on a crowd walking from Langa township to a funeral. The Kannemeyer Commission found that twenty people were killed.