Moments in Time – Feb. 20, 2019

#Middlebury

• On March 6, 1475, Michelangelo Buonarroti, the greatest of the Italian Renaissance artists, is born in Caprese. His most important early work was the Pieta (1498), a traditional type of devotional sculpture that showed the body of Christ in the lap of the Virgin Mary.
• On March 5, 1815, Franz Anton Mesmer, a German physician who pioneered the medical field of hypnotic therapy, dies in obscurity in Meersburg, Swabia (now Germany). His process of mesmerism, as it came to be known, produced hypnotic states that had an extraordinary influence on his patients’ physical illnesses.
• On March 4, 1888, Knute Rockne is born in Voss, Norway. He would go on to become one of the most successful coaches in the history of college football, coaching Notre Dame during their golden era in the 1920s. Rockne won three national championships with the Fighting Irish.
• On March 10, 1945, 300 American bombers continue to drop almost 2,000 tons of incendiaries on Tokyo for a second day. The attack destroyed large portions of the Japanese capital and killed 100,000 civilians.
• On March 8, 1950, Volkswagen, maker of the Beetle automobile, expands its product offerings to include a microbus. The bus was a favorite mode of transportation for hippies in the U.S. during the 1960s and became an icon of the American counterculture movement.
• On March 7, 1972, in the biggest air battle in Southeast Asia in three years, U.S. jets battle five North Vietnamese MiGs and shoot one down 170 miles north of the Demilitarized Zone.
• On March 9, 1985, the first-ever Adopt-a-Highway sign is erected in Texas. Highway 69 was adopted by the Tyler Civitan Club, which committed to picking up trash along a 2-mile stretch of the road. The program eventually spread across the U.S.

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