3 marzo

A voyage to take home the envoys who had come for the new capital’s inauguration, sixteen countries in all. The fleet split into squadrons for Aden, Dhofar and Africa.

Philip Henslowe marked a new play, “harey the vj”, performed by Lord Strange’s Men, and took £3 16s 8d. It stayed in the repertory for some fifteen performances. Most scholars take it to be 1 Henry VI. He wrote the date as 3 March 1591, still the old year before Lady Day. How would it haue ioyed…

Cherry-Garrard and Dimitri took two dog teams south to One Ton Depot to meet the polar party, with orders not to risk the dogs. They waited a week in blizzards and turned back on 10 March with no sign of Scott. Cherry-Garrard asked himself for the rest of his life whether he should have gone on.

Alice Paul put some 5,000 marchers on Pennsylvania Avenue the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. Crowds broke through and attacked them. Ida B. Wells, told to march at the back with the Black women, stepped in with the Illinois delegation instead.

Eight days, 8 to 16 March in the West, from a women’s march for bread to the end of the monarchy. Hasegawa counts 1,443 killed and wounded in Petrograd; other estimates run from about 1,300 to 1,500. Very little happened outside the capital: the provinces followed its lead.

In a flat on Millionnaya Street, after hearing out the new ministers, Michael said he would take the crown only if a Constituent Assembly offered it. None ever did. The Romanovs had ruled for 304 years.

Germany’s “Operation Punch”. Its armies advanced up to 240 kilometres in a week, mostly by train and against almost no resistance, and took Dvinsk on the first day. Lenin threatened to resign unless the party accepted the German terms.

Joffe, then Trotsky, played for time and for a revolution in Germany. General Max Hoffmann put the German terms on a map: Poland and the Baltic provinces were not coming back.

The Council of People’s Commissars, at first all Bolshevik: Lenin in the chair, Trotsky at foreign affairs, Stalin at nationalities. Left SRs joined in December. It ruled from the Smolny until it moved to Moscow in March 1918.

A war of movement over a front far longer than the Western: Russia invaded East Prussia and Austrian Galicia in 1914, lost Poland in 1915 and nearly broke Austria-Hungary in 1916. After two revolutions the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918, giving up Poland, the Baltic…

Grigori Sokolnikov signed under protest, refusing to discuss the terms. Russia gave up Poland, Lithuania and Courland, left Livonia and Estonia to German occupation, recognised Finland and Ukraine and ceded Kars, Ardahan and Batum to the Ottomans: about a third of its population and most of its…

The Assembly abolished the office the Ottomans had claimed since Selim I and expelled every member of the dynasty. The last caliph, Abdülmecid II, left by train for Switzerland the next morning.

After nine years in which Tibet refused permission, Hugh Ruttledge led the biggest party yet, with a wireless link to Darjeeling. Percy Wyn-Harris and Lawrence Wager, then Frank Smythe alone, reached about Norton’s height on the same traverse, and no higher.

The first craft through the asteroid belt and the first to Jupiter. It carries a gold-anodised plaque, designed by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake and drawn by Linda Salzman Sagan, showing two people and the way to the Sun. Its last faint signal came from about 80 times Earth’s distance from the Sun.

Hanoi’s General Offensive and Uprising of spring 1975, under General Văn Tiến Dũng. It began in the Central Highlands with roads cut and feints at Pleiku and Kontum, and ended eight weeks later in Saigon. The last stage was named the Ho Chi Minh Campaign.

Barnosky and colleagues asked the question with the fossil record’s own yardstick, taken from Jablonski: three quarters of species lost. Their answer was not yet: recorded losses are far smaller. But today’s rates are well above background. If every threatened species went extinct within a century…

A console that slides out of its dock to become a handheld, merging the two product lines Nintendo had always kept apart. It passed 150 million sales.