March 9 – Some Important Events on this day
141 BC 👉🏼 Liu Che, posthumously known as Emperor Wu of Han, assumes the throne of the Han Dynasty in China and rules for 54 years 🇨🇳
1497 👉🏼 Nicolaus Copernicus’ 1st recorded astronomical observation 🔭
1500 👉🏼 Pedro Álvares Cabral departs Lisbon, Portugal at the head of a 13 ship expedition to India that will also claim Brazil for Portugal
1522 👉🏼 Martin Luther begins preaching his “Invocavit Sermons” in the German city of Wittenberg, reminding citizens to trust God’s word rather than violence and thus helping bring to a close the revolutionary stage of the Reformation.
In 1517, the obscure German theologian Martin Luther published a document criticizing the Catholic selling of ‘indulgences’, or actions performed to reduce the amount of punishment for sin. Luther could not have known that his document and the subsequent events would change the face of Europe and Christendom forever. Over the next 150 years, Europe split between the Catholic faith of the Roman popes and the new, reformed religion known as Protestantism, of which there were many branches. Northern Europe switched to Protestant, Southern Europe remained Catholic, and Central Europe became the site of the devastating Thirty Years’ War.
For his writings and teachings, Luther was put on trial for heresy and in 1521 was excommunicated by the Pope. He would continue to teach and write widely on religion, including by translating the Bible into German vernacular and publishing numerous hymns. He would die in 1546, near the peak of the Reformation itself. Today, more than 900 million people adhere to the Protestant faith.
1765 👉🏼 After a public campaign by the writer Voltaire, judges in Paris posthumously exonerate Jean Calas of murdering his son. Calas had been tortured and executed in 1762 on the charge, though his son had actually committed suicide. 🇫🇷
1776 👉🏼 Adam Smith publishes the influential economics book “The Wealth of Nations”
1842 👉🏼 Giuseppe Verdi’s opera “Nabucco” premieres in Milan 🎶
1908 👉🏼 Italian football club Inter Milan founded as Foot-Ball Club Internazionale ⚽️
1918 👉🏼 Russian Bolshevik Party becomes the Communist Party
1933 👉🏼 US Congress is called into special session by FDR, beginning its “100 days”
1935 👉🏼 Adolf Hitler publically announces the creation of a new air force, the Luftwaffe 🇩🇪
1945 👉🏼 334 US B-29 Superfortresses attack Tokyo with 120,000 fire bombs 💣
The “Operation Meetinghouse” firebombing of Tokyo on the night of March 9–10, 1945, was the single deadliest air raid of World War II. The bombings and resulting fires inflicted a greater area of fire damage and loss of life than the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima or Nagasaki as single events.
1946 👉🏼 Ted Williams is offered $500,000 to play in Mexican Baseball League, he refuses. ⚾️
1951 👉🏼 Physicist Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam submit a classified paper at the Los Alamos lab, in which they proposed their revolutionary new design, staged implosion, for a practical megaton-range hydrogen bomb
1953 👉🏼 Joseph Stalin’s funeral is held in Moscow after four days of national mourning
1959 👉🏼 Barbie makes her debut at the American Toy Fair in New York. Over a billion have been sold worldwide since. 🧍🏼♀️
1961 👉🏼 Soviet flight Sputnik 9 carries and returns from orbit a dog named Chernushka (Blackie), frogs and a guinea pig 🐶
1974 👉🏼 Last Japanese soldier, a guerrilla operating in Philippines, surrenders, 29 years after World War II ended. ✔️ Read the article!
