March 5 in History

British soldiers fired into a crowd of colonists outside the Custom House on King Street in Boston on March 5, 1770, killing five men. Crispus Attucks, a man of African and Native American descent, was the first to fall and became the first casualty of the American Revolution. The soldiers had been pelted with snowballs, oyster shells, and chunks of ice by a mob that had been harassing the sentry for hours. Captain Thomas Preston ordered his men to hold fire, but in the chaos, shots rang out. John Adams, who would later become the second president, defended the soldiers at trial, arguing that they had acted in self-defense. Six were acquitted; two were convicted of manslaughter and branded on their thumbs. Samuel Adams and Paul Revere exploited the incident for propaganda purposes, producing an inflammatory engraving that depicted the soldiers firing in formation on a helpless crowd. The 'Boston Massacre' became the colonists' most powerful recruitment tool for revolution.

The Nazi Party won 43.9 percent of the vote in the Reichstag elections of March 5, 1933, their best result ever but still short of a majority. Hitler, who had been chancellor for barely five weeks, had used the Reichstag fire four days earlier to declare a state of emergency and suspend civil liberties, allowing the SA brownshirts to terrorize opposition voters and shut down Communist Party offices. Despite this intimidation, the Social Democrats held 18.3 percent and the Communists retained 12.3 percent. The election result did not give Hitler the two-thirds majority needed to amend the constitution, so he turned to the Enabling Act on March 23, pressuring and threatening the remaining parties into granting him dictatorial powers. Only the Social Democrats voted against it. Within months, all other parties were banned, independent trade unions dissolved, and the Gestapo was operational. The March 5 election was the last competitive multi-party vote in Germany until 1949.

Joseph Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939, then expressed shock when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. He had purged most of his senior military officers — shooting or imprisoning some 35,000 — in the years before the war, leaving the Red Army hollowed out precisely when it needed leadership most. He also ignored 84 separate intelligence warnings that an invasion was coming. He survived both the purges he ordered and the war he almost lost. He died in his dacha in March 1953, having apparently suffered a stroke, lying on the floor for hours because his guards were afraid to disturb him. No one knows exactly how long he lay there before anyone dared check.

Winston Churchill traveled to Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, at President Truman's invitation, and delivered the speech that gave the Cold War its most enduring metaphor. 'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent,' he declared, naming the division of Europe in terms so vivid they became permanent geopolitical shorthand. The speech was controversial at the time. Many Americans still viewed the Soviet Union as a wartime ally and considered Churchill's rhetoric dangerously provocative. Stalin compared Churchill to Hitler. Truman, who had read the speech beforehand and approved its content, publicly distanced himself from it. But within two years, the Berlin blockade, the communist coup in Czechoslovakia, and Soviet nuclear testing vindicated Churchill's warning. The Fulton speech did not cause the Cold War, but it crystallized the emerging reality into language that shaped Western policy for four decades.

Spanish naval forces cornered the pirate Roberto Cofres off the coast of Puerto Rico on March 5, 1825, ending a five-year campaign during which he had attacked merchant vessels throughout the Caribbean with impunity. Cofres was unusual among Caribbean pirates of the early nineteenth century because he operated during an era when piracy was supposed to have ended. The golden age of Caribbean piracy had concluded a century earlier, but Cofres exploited the power vacuum created by Latin American independence wars to raid shipping between Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and the Virgin Islands. He was captured, tried by a military tribunal, and executed by firing squad in Aguada, Puerto Rico, on March 29, 1825. His death marked the definitive end of significant pirate activity in the Caribbean, as newly independent nations and colonial powers established permanent naval patrols along major trade routes.

Robert Stephenson's Britannia Bridge opened across the Menai Strait on March 5, 1850, connecting the island of Anglesey to the Welsh mainland using a revolutionary tubular iron design that no engineer had attempted before. The bridge consisted of two rectangular wrought-iron tubes through which trains passed, each tube spanning 460 feet between stone towers. Stephenson had tested the concept by building scale models and subjecting them to stress tests in collaboration with engineer William Fairbairn and mathematician Eaton Hodgkinson. The tubes were floated into position on pontoons at high tide and then jacked up to their final height of 100 feet above the water. The design eliminated the need for the suspension chains that supported the adjacent Menai Suspension Bridge, creating a rigid structure that could carry heavy rail traffic. The Britannia Bridge proved that wrought iron could be used to span previously impossible distances and directly influenced the development of box-girder construction methods used in modern bridge engineering.

Hugo Chávez won the Venezuelan presidency in 1998 running against the political establishment on a platform of Bolivarian socialism, named for independence hero Simón Bolívar. He survived a coup attempt in 2002 that the United States had foreknowledge of. He nationalized oil, built social programs for the poor, and picked fights with the United States loudly enough to become an international figure. He called George W. Bush 'the Devil' at the United Nations in 2006 and said the podium still smelled of sulfur. He died March 5, 2013, from cancer at 58. Born July 28, 1954, in Sabaneta. The oil wealth he redistributed ran out after his death. Venezuela became something different without him — and without the oil prices that had made his programs possible.