Browsing: March 2

A Brief History On March 2, 1978, comic actor Charlie Chaplin suffered the indignity of having his coffin stolen from its grave in Switzerland.  The grave robbers held Chaplin’s remains for ransom, but were soon caught and the coffin, complete with Charlie, was reburied, this time with reinforced concrete. Digging Deeper Chaplin was not the only celebrity to be victimized by grave robbers, and today we look at two other notable cases. Thomas Paine, American revolutionary, was improbably dug up in 1819 by an Englishman that brought the body to England for a more ceremonial interment, but lacking funds, he…

A Brief History This article presents a chronological list of notable events that happened on March 2nd.  For each date below, please click on the date to be taken to an article covering that date’s event. Digging Deeper On March 2, 1657, the city of Tokyo, Japan, then known as Edo, suffered a catastrophic fire that lasted 3 days and killed 100,000 Japanese people, a death toll greater than either of the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. On March 2 and 3, 1859, the largest sale of African slaves in the United States came to a…

A Brief History On March 2, 1978, space exploration history was made when Vladimír Remek, a pilot, politician, and diplomat from Czechoslovakia became the first person in space that was not Russian or American. Digging Deeper Remek lifted off aboard Soviet space craft Soyuz 28 for an 8-day trip to outer space, heading to the Soviet space station, Salyut 6.  A former pilot in the Czechoslovakian Air Force, Remek was hailed a national hero and even was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union medal by the USSR.  He parlayed his renown into a career in politics, serving as a…

A Brief History On March 2, 1962, Wilt Chamberlain, center for the Philadelphia Warriors, scored an National Basketball Association (NBA) single-game record of 100 points against the New York Knicks.  To put this in perspective, at that time, the only other player to have scored 70 or more points in a single game was Elgin Baylor with 71 points.  This performance put Chamberlain so far ahead of any other scoring flurry that he was truly in a class by himself.  In the 53 years since then, no other player has approached his record, with the closest effort being Kobe Bryant’s…

A Brief History On March 2 and 3, 1859, the largest sale of African slaves in the United States came to a sad conclusion near Savannah, Georgia when the last slaves formerly owned by plantation owner Pierce Mease Butler (1807/10-1867) were sold in order for Butler to satisfy his considerable debts.  Known to history as The Great Slave Auction or alternatively as The Weeping Time, a total of 436 human beings were sold like pieces of property.  Soon, the US Civil War would be fought, and slavery would end in the United States, preventing any such future crimes against humanity…