Today In History with The Retrospectors

The mass suicide of 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult in San Diego County was discovered on 26th March, 1997. The tragedy came to light after a former member alerted authorities, having received a farewell videotape recorded by the group.  Leader Marshall Applewhite had preached that a spacecraft travelling in the wake of the Comet Hale–Bopp would carry their souls to a higher level of existenc...

Each Lady Day, the Hampshire village of Tichborne hands out bags of flour to the  locals - a tradition that began on 25th March, 1150 after Lady Marbella Tichborne, on her death-bed, suggested distributing a ‘Tichborne Dole’ to the needy.  It’s far from the only quaint charity event still going strong in England. In the Kentish village of Biddenden each Easter Monday, locals indulge in ‘Biddenden...

The first international women’s sports event, The Women’s Olympiad, kicked off in Monte Carlo on 24th March, 1921. A hundred athletes from five nations competed in track and field events, defying the male-dominated Olympic movement that excluded women from all sports except tennis, golf, sailing and croquet. Created by campaigner Alice Milliat, the event showcased the skills of pioneering athletes...

Ricky Martin’s ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca’ was released on 23rd March, 1999 - launching the singer to worldwide superstardom, and kickstarting a Latino pop boom that propelled J-Lo, Shakira, Christina Aguilera, Enrique Iglesias and Santana into the charts. But he wasn’t an overnight success. He had already conquered the Latin music world, starred on General Hospital, and even nabbed the official 1998 FI...

The bubonic plague was blamed on witches, Jews, God’s wrath, and, on 20th March 1345, in a new theory propagated by the King of France, the rare planetary alignment between Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in Aquarius. Of course, the real cause of the Black Death lay in the microscopic world of bacteria, carried by fleas on rats. But mediaeval society, ill-equipped to comprehend the science behind the pa...

Blaise Pascal created the first organised public transport system: the carrosses à cinq sols (“five-sou carriages”), which had its first full day of service in Paris on 19th March, 1662. Like a modern bus, the horse-drawn carriages followed fixed routes and scheduled departures, running whether or not they were full; a scheme authorised by royal patent under the reign of Louis XIV, granting Pascal...

Tenji blocks (点字ブロック) - small raised shapes in the pavement to assist visually impaired people in crossing the road - were first installed near the Okayama School for the Blind in Japan on March 18th, 1967.  Designed by Seiichi Miyake (三宅精一), the innovation gained traction in urban areas like Tokyo and Osaka, gradually spreading nationwide, particularly in bustling cities where safety fo...

The first ever St. Patrick’s Day parade took place not in Ireland, as many people might expect, but in Spanish Florida, on March 17, 1601. It wasn’t until about 100 years later that the world famous parades got going in Boston and New York City. Historian J. Michael Francis made the discovery of this unexpectedly early celebration of Ireland’s patron saint while investigating the Spanish imperial...

Over 200 people were burned at the stake on 16th March, 1244, throwing themselves on to the pyre in their refusal to accept the Catholic church. These ‘Cathars’ reportedly followed a radical dualist belief system, seeing the material world as the creation of an evil force, with salvation lying in renouncing earthly pleasures. After years of persecution, on this day they found themselves trapped in...

The Guatemalan island of Flores, once known as Nojpetén, witnessed the final clash between Spanish conquistadors and the last independent Maya kingdom on March 13th, 1697.  The Itza warriors, equipped with ornate spears and swords, fought valiantly to defend their homeland; but Spanish firepower ultimately overwhelmed them, leading to heavy casualties and the retreat of many defenders.  In this ep...

What is Australia’s capital city? Not Sydney. Nor Melbourne. It’s Canberra: so named at an official ceremony on 12th March, 1913 - when the site was little more than grazing land for sheep. But for this newly-federated nation, Canberra’s remote, inland location was a deliberate compromise to offset the rivalry between the country’s two largest cities. Sydney had long been the principal colonial ce...

Disgruntled textile workers stormed a factory near Nottingham on March 11th, 1811, kickstarting the political movement famously known as Luddism. Their protest was not anti-technology per se; instead it stemmed from a desire for better work opportunities and wages, amidst economic hardships exacerbated by the Napoleonic Wars. As tensions escalated, the British government deployed troops to safegua...

The infamous French Foreign Legion was formed by King Louis Philippe on March 10, 1831, to help the French control Algeria using mercenaries who were more expendable than native young Frenchmen. To this day a magnet for men who want a clean break from their past, the Legion famously did not ask many questions about where their recruits came from - or if they had a criminal record.  In this episode...

The hip-swivelling Hula Hoop craze swept through America within months of its 1958 debut - yet Wham-O didn’t receive a patent for it until 5th March, 1963.  The toy had first come to the attention of Arthur K. 'Spud' Melin, the company’s co-founder, when Australian swimsuit model Joan Anderson demonstrated it in California. Appending the ‘hula’ name to it tapped into the zeitgeist for Hawaiian ima...

Svetlana Aleluyeva walked into the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi on 9th March, 1967, and asked for political asylum. As the only daughter of Joseph Stalin, she was an unknown figure outside the USSR; panicking American diplomats: how could they grant her asylum, without warming up the Cold War? The U.S. tried to keep her defection under wraps, but upon arriving in New York in April 1967, she held a pr...

Pioneering music-sharing platform Napster faced a pivotal legal showdown on March 6th, 2001, when - despite the company’s defence that it was merely a tool for innocent purposes - US District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ordered the removal of all copyrighted material from the service. Napster's legal troubles had begun with lawsuits from prominent artists like Metallica and Dr. Dre, but it was the Re...

John Lennon's controversial statement that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus was first published in the London Evening Standard on 4th March, 1966. The reporter, Maureen Cleave, documented the eccentricities of Lennon's life and his dissatisfaction with fame and wealth; his musings on religion went almost completely unnoticed. That all changed months later, when American shock jocks unearth...

Sending rude mail was dealt a devastating blow on 3rd March, 1873, when the campaign against pornography, reproductive health, birth control, and abortion led by self-appointed ‘Special Agent’ of the US Postal Service Anthony Comstock went all the way to Washington.  After the ‘Comstock Act’ became law, books were banned, ‘obscene’ pamphlets were destroyed, and, in Comstock’s home state of Connect...

King Kong roared onto the silver screen on March 2nd, 1933, in an extraordinary simultaneous screening at Radio City and the Roxy, New York - attracting 10,000 viewers in one hit. The buzz around the film was no accident — RKO Pictures had blitzed the public with an aggressive marketing campaign, including publishing a novelization before the film’s release and producing a radio serial that aired...

New Orleans witnessed its first modern Mardi Gras procession - kick-started by a group of students eager to revive the traditional masquerade, banned for six decades - on 27th February, 1827.  The city’s parades and revelry can trace their origins back to ancient pagan festivals and European traditions, cemented by the arrival of French-Canadian explorer (and MASSIVE ‘Fat Tuesday’ fan) Jean-Baptis...

The 89th Academy Awards reached its grand finale on 26th February 2017, with a balls-up that instantly entered Hollywood lore. Presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway stepped onstage to announce Best Picture and declared La La Land the winner. Cast and crew flooded the stage, speeches began, and the orchestra swelled - but the true winner, of course, was Moonlight. Beatty’s visible hesitation, r...

Henri Landru, known as ‘Bluebeard’ to the French public, was executed by guillotine on 25th February, 1922, having murdered at least ten women he dated during the First World War. He continued to protest his innocence throughout his sensational trial - despite having drawn a detailed doodle of the oven he had used to burn his victims’ bodies. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly unpick Landru’...

Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone - now better known as St Francis of Assisi - attended Mass on 24th February, 1208, and heard the Gospel According to Matthew. From that day on, the former soldier and playboy removed his shoes, put on a rough tunic, and embarked fully into a monastic lifestyle. The process would lead him to meet the Pope and become officially recognised by the Church - but alienate...

Optometry historians observe 23rd February, 1305 as the day eyeglasses were perhaps first discussed in public, when friar Giordano de Rivalto stood at the pulpit and declared that he had personally met the man who invented spectacles... Except, frustratingly, he forgot to mention the bloke’s name. One popular contender for the title is Salvino D'Armati, a Florentine said to have created the first...

Departing from Puerto Rico with grand plans to establish a new colony, Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León set out on his ill-fated second expedition to Florida on February 20th, 1521.  Ponce de León's reputation as a conquistador preceded him, with tales of his brutal conquests in Hispaniola preceding his quest for new lands. Despite being ousted from power by his rival Diego Columbus, Ponce de L...