March 1905

March 1, 1905 (Wednesday)

• U. S. Secretary of State John Hay gave assurances to the Ambassador from Haiti that the U.S. had no intention of annexing the Dominican Republic.
• Lord Selborne, the British First Lord of the Admiralty, resigned to accept the position of High Commissioner for Southern Africa, to succeed Lord Milner.
• Died: Jean-Baptiste Claude Eugène Guillaume, 83, French sculptor

  March 2, 1905 (Thursday)

• Russia's Committee of Ministers voted to grant religious freedom to the residents of the Russian Empire.

  March 3, 1905 (Friday)

• Tsar Nicholas II of Russia announced his decision to create an elected assembly, the Imperial State Duma, to represent the people of the Russian Empire in an advisory capacity, although the real power to make laws remained with the Tsar and the cabinet of ministers.
• Born: Marie Glory, French film actress; in Mortagne-au-Perche, Orne département
• Died: A. A. Cruana, 74, Maltese archaeologist

  March 4, 1905 (Saturday)

• The second inauguration of Theodore Roosevelt took place as the incumbent U.S. president, who had taken office in 1901 to fill the remainder of the term of President William McKinley, was sworn in for a full term as 26th President of the United States.
• Newly inaugurated vice president Charles W. Fairbanks called the Fifty-ninth Congress of the United States of America into session.

  March 5, 1905 (Sunday)

• In the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian Imperial Army began its retreat from Mukden, after losing 100,000 troops in three days.

  March 6, 1905 (Monday)

• Russia's Sergei Diaghilev achieved national fame with the display of over 4,000 paintings at the Tauride Palace in Saint Petersburg. He would go on to worldwide prominence a year later with his touring exhibition in Europe.
• An annular solar eclipse was visible over Australia, with residents of Perth in Western Australia seeing the maximum totality.
• Died:
• *Pierre Boisrond-Canal, 72, President of Haiti 1876-1879, 1888 and 1902
• *John Henninger Reagan, 86, U.S. Representative for Texas who resigned from Congress in 1861 to serve in the government of the Confederate States of America as its Postmaster General during the American Civil War. After the end of the war and the readmission of Texas to the Union, Reagan was re-elected to the U.S. Congress in 1875 and then as a U.S. Senator from 1887 to 1891

  March 7, 1905 (Tuesday)

• The UK House of Commons declined to approve remedial measures for evicted Irish tenants in Britain, the legislation receiving 182 votes in favor and 220 against.
• Tsar Nicholas II dissolved a proposed commission to investigate labor disputes in the Russian Empire, after workers organizations refused to send delegates.

  March 8, 1905 (Wednesday)

• The U.S. Senate voted to confirm all of the diplomatic and consular appointments made by President Roosevelt.

  March 9, 1905 (Thursday)

• U.S. Senator William B. Bate of Tennessee died suddenly from pneumonia, five days after attending the inauguration of the president and the beginning of his fourth term at the opening of the 59th Congress. Bate, who served had three full terms as Senator, had first taken office 18 years and five days earlier, on March 4, 1887. A funeral was held for him the next day in the Senate Chamber of the U.S. Capitol, after which his body was sent back to Nashville.

  March 10, 1905 (Friday)

• The Japanese capture of Mukden completed the rout of the Russian Imperial Army in Manchuria as the Russo-Japanese War continued. The Russian commander, General Aleksey Kuropatkin, telegraphed the Tsar that his armies would be retreating to avoid further danger.
• Canadian-born swindler Cassie Chadwick, who had claimed to be the daughter and an heiress of multi-millionaire Andrew Carnegie to defraud banks of millions of dollars, was sentenced for 14 years imprisonment after being convicted for fraud against the Citizen's National Bank in Cleveland. She would die in the Ohio State Penitentiary less than three years later, dying on October 10, 1907.
• Born: Richard Haydn, English-born U.S. actor on stage, film and television; in Camberwell, London

  March 11, 1905 (Saturday)

• Christian Michelsen became the new Prime Minister of Norway, at the time that Norway was part of the United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway, with the title of Prime Minister in Christiania. Appointed by King Oscar II of Sweden to succeed Francis Hagerup, Michelsen would become the first Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Norway after the dissolution of the United Kingdoms on October 26.

  March 12, 1905 (Sunday)

• Italy's Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti and his cabinet stepped down, after their resignations and had been announced on March 4 because of Giolitti's illness.
• Born: Takashi Shimura, 76, Japanese film actor who starred in Rashomon, Seven Samurai, and the original Godzilla; in Ikuno, Hyōgo Prefecture

  March 13, 1905 (Monday)

• Entertainer and spy Mata Hari introduced her exotic dance act in the Musée Guimet, Paris.

  March 14, 1905 (Tuesday)

• The massive Karstadt department store, at the time the largest in Germany, opened in the Maxvorstadt borough of Munich, and would remain in operation more than a century later.
• Twenty-three of the 26 crew of the British windjammer ship Kyber died when the ship was wrecked off of the coast of Cornwall and Land's End. Local first responders saved three of the men, and the rest were buried in a mass grave.

  March 15, 1905 (Wednesday)

• Oil magnate Zeynalabdin Taghiyev and journalist Alimardan bey Topchubashov held a meeting of Azerbaijani Muslim nationalists who wrote a petition to seek an end to discrimination within the Russian Empire.
• The city of Sparks, Nevada, was incorporated.
• Born: Berthold von Stauffenberg, German aristocrat and lawyer implicated as a conspirator in the 1944 attempt by his brother, Claus von Stauffenberg, to assassinate Adolf Hitler; in Stuttgart
• Died:
• *Meyer Guggenheim, 77, Swiss-born American silver mining entrepreneur and patriarch of the Guggenheim family
• *Amalie Skram, 58, Norwegian author and feminist

  March 16, 1905 (Thursday)

• James Hamilton Peabody was installed as the governor of the U.S. state Colorado by the Colorado Legislature while the election dispute between himself and Alva Adams was being investigated, on the condition that Peabody resign in favor of Lieutenant Governor J. F. McDonald. Peabody resigned the next day and McDonald became acting governor of Colorado.
• Born: Elisabeth Flickenschildt. German film and television actress; in Hamburg

  March 17, 1905 (Friday)

• Russia's General Aleksey Kuropatkin was relieved of duty from his command of the 1st Manchurian Army, and replaced by General Nikolai Linevich.
• France's Chamber of Deputies voted to reduce the military service requirement for young men to two years.
• U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, in New York City for the annual St. Patrick's Day celebration, came to the wedding of his 20-year-old niece, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, to her distant cousin, 23-year old law student Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Theodore, the 26th U.S. President, served the role of "giving the bride away" to Franklin, who would become the 32nd President of the United States in 1933 with Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt as his First Lady.

  March 18, 1905 (Saturday)

• Albert Einstein submitted for publication his paper "On a heuristic viewpoint concerning the production and transformation of light", in which he explained the photoelectric effect using the notion of light quanta. The paper would be published on June 9.
• Born:
• *Robert Donat, English film actor and Academy Award Winner known for Goodbye, Mr. Chips and The 39 Steps; in Withington, Lancashire
• *Thomas Townsend Brown, American inventor known for his observation of what he called the Biefeld–Brown effect, and for his attempt to build an anti-gravity device; in Zanesville, Ohio

  March 19, 1905 (Sunday)

• Twin explosions killed 24 miners at the Rush Run and Red Ash coal mines near Thurmond, West Virginia.
• Born: Albert Speer, German architect and convicted war criminal who became the Nazi German Minister of Armaments and War Production as a close associate of Adolf Hitler; in Mannheim, Grand Duchy of Baden. Speer served a 20-year prison sentence at Spandau Prison for his use of concentration camp inmates as slave labor in armaments factories, and wrote a best-selling account of the experience after his release.

  March 20, 1905 (Monday)

• The Grover Shoe Factory disaster killed 58 employees in Brockton, Massachusetts, when a boiler exploded and the factory building collapsed.
• Born: Vera Panova, Soviet Russian novelist and playwright; in Rostov-on-Don

  March 21, 1905 (Tuesday)

• "The Treaty of Peace and Friendship" between Chile and Bolivia, signed on October 20, 1904, went into effect, settling the question of the border between the two South American nations. Bolivia ceded the territory of Antofagasta to Chile in return for Chile extending a railroad from the Pacific port of Arica to the Bolivian capital at La Paz.

  March 22, 1905 (Wednesday)

• Russia's Committee of Ministers voted to abolish the compulsory use of the Russian language in schools in "Congress Poland".

  March 23, 1905 (Thursday)

• The Theriso revolt began in Crete as about 1,500 men, led by Eleftherios Venizelos, met at the village of Theriso to challenge the island's authoritarian government and press for its unification with Greece.
• In the U.S. state of Maryland, the state Supreme Court ordered Governor Edwin Warfield to submit a proposed constitutional amendment for disenfranchisement of non-whites to a referendum vote.
• Lord Midleton, Britain's Secretary of State for India, presented a report to the House of Commons that over 346,000 people had died of bubonic plague in India in a single year.
• Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany signed legislation authorizing the construction of a railway across its colony of Kamerun from Jaunde to Lake Chad.
• Born:
• *Sir John Randall, British physicist whose improved version of the cavity magnetron made centimetric wavelength radar possible during World War II and was later a key component to the microwave oven; in Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire
• *Lale Andersen, German singer known for her recording of Lili Marleen, one of the most popular songs in Europe during World War II in the Axis and Allied nations; in Bremerhaven