8 maart

A Commons committee found that company stock had been handed to ministers. John Aislabie, Chancellor of the Exchequer, was expelled from the House and committed to the Tower. The journals date it 8 March 1720/21.

Helvétius’s De l’esprit of 1758 had caused a scandal, and the royal council revoked the Encyclopédie’s licence to print. In September Pope Clement XIII condemned it. D’Alembert had already quit. Malesherbes, the royal director of the book trade, warned Diderot of a search and hid his manuscripts…

A crowd watched Watt’s first full-size engine start work pumping at Bloomfield colliery in Tipton. Its cylinder had been bored by John Wilkinson, whose new boring mill cut it true enough to hold the steam.

Pennsylvania militia hunting raiders killed 96 Christian Lenape at a Moravian mission town, men, women and children, though they had taken no part in the war. None of the killers was punished.

On the second day the Union’s Monitor, with its revolving turret, arrived and fought the Virginia to a standstill for hours: the first battle between ironclads. Every wooden navy in the world was obsolete.

An outnumbered Union army won in the Ozarks and kept Missouri out of Confederate hands. Two Cherokee regiments fought on the Confederate side, one of them under Stand Watie. Union losses were 1,349; Confederate estimates run from 2,000 to 2,500 (NPS).

Rebuilt from the scuttled USS Merrimack, the Confederate ironclad rammed and sank the Cumberland and ran the Congress aground to burn. Union shot bounced off her armour. Of the battle’s 433 casualties (NPS), 409 were Union.

The Aéro-Club de France gave her licence number 36. She had first flown alone in October 1909, and was among the first women anywhere to do so.

Japan’s Fifteenth Army crossed the Chindwin to invade India and take the British base at Imphal. The garrison, supplied by air, held; the attackers starved when the monsoon came. It was the worst defeat in the Japanese army’s history to that time.

The United States took over the fighting. American troop numbers went from about 23,000 at the start of 1965 to 485,600 at the end of 1967. General Westmoreland’s strategy was attrition: search and destroy, and the body count.

The first American ground combat units, two battalions of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, waded ashore north of Da Nang to guard the air base. They were met by girls with garlands of flowers and a sign welcoming them.

Philips showed journalists a prototype player reading a small disc with a laser. Sony joined the project that year, and the joint standard of 1980 settled on a twelve-centimetre disc holding 74 minutes: long enough, the story goes, for Beethoven’s Ninth.

Speaking to evangelical ministers in Orlando, Reagan called the Soviet Union “an evil empire.” Two weeks later he proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, a shield against missiles that critics named “Star Wars.”

Japan’s Suisei passed 151,000 km from the nucleus and watched the huge hydrogen cloud around the comet. Its sister Sakigake followed on 11 March at about 7 million kilometres.

Sealed in a public ceremony on Place Vendôme on International Women’s Day, four days after Parliament, meeting at Versailles, voted 780 to 72. Article 34 now says the law sets the conditions for a woman’s “guaranteed freedom” to have an abortion, the first constitution to name it explicitly.