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Britain forced China to buy opium at gunpoint. Now China is the primary source of the chemicals that make fentanyl, which kills tens of thousands of Americans a year. The symmetry is not accidental, but it is not justice either.
In 1826, a 30-year-old diplomat abducted a 15-year-old heiress with forged letters and a manufactured family crisis, married her at Gretna Green, and nearly got away with it. He served three years in prison. Then helped found New Zealand.
On 6 March 1475, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born in a small hill town in Tuscany. He went on to produce some of the most reproduced images in the history of Western civilisation, and died still working, at 88.
On 5 March 1953, Joseph Stalin died on the floor of his dacha, where he had lain unattended for the better part of a day. Nobody had dared go in to check.
In the centre of Moscow, just east of the Kremlin, there is a district whose name translates as China City. It has never had anything to do with China.
On 4 March 1918, an Army cook reported sick at Camp Funston, Kansas. By noon, a hundred soldiers had the same symptoms. Within two years, the Spanish flu would kill more people than the war that spread it.
On 3 March 1938, an American drilling crew in the Saudi desert struck oil at Dammam No. 7. The well produced 1,585 barrels on its first day. Eighty-eight years later, that single strike has reshaped the global economy, bankrolled a kingdom, and made the politics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries unimaginable without it.
On 3 March 1861, Alexander II freed twenty-three million Russian serfs. For his troubles, he was blown apart by a bomb twenty years later. The country he tried to modernise would soon tear itself to pieces.
On 2 March 1797, the Bank of England issued its first £1 and £2 banknotes — emergency paper to replace vanishing gold. The crisis measure became permanent. We still live with the consequences.
On 1 March 1692, three women were brought before magistrates in Salem Village, Massachusetts — the first act in a drama that would leave nineteen dead. The trials were small by European standards. The psychology behind them was not.