Moments in Time – February 17, 2021

#Middlebury

• On March 5, 1770, a mob of American colonists gathers at the Customs House in Boston and begins taunting the British soldiers guarding the building. The protesters, who called themselves Patriots, were protesting the occupation of their city by British troops.
• On March 3, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln signs a bill creating the Freedman’s Bureau. The federal agency oversaw the transition of African Americans from slavery to freedom. The bureau was given power to dispense relief in the South, provide medical care and education, and redistribute “abandoned” lands to former slaves.
• On March 2, 1904, Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, the author and illustrator of such beloved children’s books as “The Cat in the Hat,” is born in Springfield, Massachusetts. Geisel used his middle name (which was also his mother’s maiden name) as his pen name.
• On March 4, 1918, the first cases of the deadly Spanish flu pandemic are reported in soldiers at Fort Riley, Kansas. The virus soon traveled to Europe with U.S. soldiers heading to aid the Allies in France. The flu would eventually kill 20 million to 50 million people around the world.
• On March 7, 1923, The New Republic publishes Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which begins with the famous line “Whose woods these are, I think I know.”
• On March 1, 1966, Venera 3, an unmanned Soviet probe launched from Kazakhstan, collides with Venus, the second planet from the sun. It was the first spacecraft to reach the surface of another planet.
• On March 6, 2001, Napster begins complying with a federal court order to block the transfer of copyrighted songs over its peer-to-peer network. Some 60 million users around the world had freely exchanged digital mp3 files using Napster, which folded three months later.

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