this day in history

On 6 March 1475, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born in a small hill town in Tuscany. He went on to produce some of the most reproduced images in the history of Western civilisation, and died still working, at 88.

On 5 March 1953, Joseph Stalin died on the floor of his dacha, where he had lain unattended for the better part of a day. Nobody had dared go in to check.

On 4 March 1918, an Army cook reported sick at Camp Funston, Kansas. By noon, a hundred soldiers had the same symptoms. Within two years, the Spanish flu would kill more people than the war that spread it.

On 3 March 1938, an American drilling crew in the Saudi desert struck oil at Dammam No. 7. The well produced 1,585 barrels on its first day. Eighty-eight years later, that single strike has reshaped the global economy, bankrolled a kingdom, and made the politics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries unimaginable without it.

On 3 March 1861, Alexander II freed twenty-three million Russian serfs. For his troubles, he was blown apart by a bomb twenty years later. The country he tried to modernise would soon tear itself to pieces.

On 2 March 1797, the Bank of England issued its first £1 and £2 banknotes — emergency paper to replace vanishing gold. The crisis measure became permanent. We still live with the consequences.

On 1 March 1692, three women were brought before magistrates in Salem Village, Massachusetts — the first act in a drama that would leave nineteen dead. The trials were small by European standards. The psychology behind them was not.

On 28 February 2026, Israel and the United States launched strikes across Iran. Whether this marks the beginning of the end for the Islamic Republic — or another crisis it will survive — nobody yet knows.

On 28 February 1525, the last Aztec emperor Cuauhtémoc was hanged on the orders of Hernán Cortés. What began with 500 soldiers and thirteen horses remade an entire continent.

On 27 February 380, Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica and made Nicene Christianity the only legal religion of the Roman Empire. Christianity had joined a very exclusive club.