March 7

The Canopus decree adds a leap dayDecree of Canopus

A synod of priests at Canopus honoured Ptolemy III and ordered a sixth extra day every fourth year, so that festivals would stop drifting through the seasons in the 365-day civil year. The reform was ignored; Egypt got its leap year only under Augustus, with the Alexandrian calendar.

The bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier, banned 219 propositions taught in the arts faculty, many drawn from Aristotle and Averroes, and some held by Aquinas, who had died three years earlier to the day.

The fleet lay off Java for four months, waiting for the monsoon. Ma Huan found a thousand Chinese families at the port of Gresik nearby, and three kinds of people on the island: Muslims from the west, Chinese, and the Javanese.

In Kyoto, Saigō Takamori and Komatsu Tatewaki of Satsuma and Kido Takayoshi of Chōshū, enemies two years before, agreed to stand together against the shogunate. Sakamoto Ryōma, a rōnin from Tosa, brokered the deal. Japanese calendar: Keiō 2, 1st month, 21st day

Rutherford told the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, and the May issue of the Philosophical Magazine, that an atom’s positive charge and almost all its mass sit in a tiny central charge some ten thousand times smaller than the atom, with electrons around it.

Five weeks against contrary winds. On the day the Fram sailed, Scott’s party was eleven days out from the Pole on the way back.

The Fram anchored at Hobart and Amundsen, keeping the news even from the pilot, cabled his brother in code. His first account, dated Hobart, 8 March 1912, was in the papers within days.

About 600 marchers led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge and met state troopers and Clark’s posse, who attacked them with clubs, whips and tear gas. Lewis’s skull was fractured and Amelia Boynton was beaten unconscious; 17 were hospitalised and dozens more treated.…

Declared in 36 magisterial districts, it gave police and soldiers power to detain without charge and immunity for acts in good faith. Thousands were detained, and television crews were barred from filming unrest.

The Beastie Boys’ debut on Def Jam, produced by Rick Rubin, became the first rap album to reach No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, and held the top spot for seven weeks.

2 Live Crew had turned Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman” into a crude parody after the publisher refused a licence. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously, in Justice Souter’s opinion, that a commercial parody can be fair use: the leading case on the question ever since.

Kepler stared at one patch of sky in Cygnus and Lyra, watching some 150,000 stars for the faint dip of a planet passing in front. By its retirement in 2018 it had found more than 2,600 planets, enough to show that planets outnumber the stars.

For The Hurt Locker: the first woman in 82 years of Academy Awards to win it, beating her ex-husband James Cameron and Avatar. Chloé Zhao was the second, in 2021.