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Today is a very special day for those of you who are mathematically inclined. March 14th, or numerically 3/14, is Pi Day, a celebration of the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, which is approximately 3.14 to 1. What makes today special is that there will be a second during the day when…

March 13 marks the 376th anniversary of the naming of Harvard College. Originally founded as “New College” in 1636 by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the college was renamed to honor clergyman John Harvard, who left the college £779 and a library of about 400 books. Follow us on twitter (@triviapodcast), Facebook (www.facebook.com/triviapodcast) or our website (www.triviapeople.com) Also, if you’re…

March 12 marks the 103rd anniversary of the founding of the Girl Guides, which would later become the Girl Scouts of the USA. Juliette Gordon Low founded the Girl Guides after meeting Robert Baden-Powell, who founded the Scouting movement in 1907. The Girl Scout mission is to build “girls of courage, confidence and character, who…

March 11th marks the 128th anniversary of the start of the Great Blizzard of 1888. As much as 60 inches of snow fell over parts of New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts over the course of four days. Paired with winds up to 80 miles per hour, this led to snowdrifts as…

On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made the first successful telephone call, speaking the words “Mr. Watson — Come Here — I want to see you,” to his assistant in another room. Later that year, Bell would demonstrate a telephone that transmitted across a four-mile distance. He offered to sell the patent to the…

March 9th marks the 56th birthday of one Barbara Millicent Roberts, better known as Barbie. The first Barbie doll was introduced at the American International Toy Fair by the Mattel company in 1959. About 350,000 Barbie dolls were sold in the first year of production, and an estimated 1 billion dolls have been sold since…

March 8th is the 198th anniversary of the founding of the New York Stock Exchange. Originally located in a coffee shop on Wall Street, the exchange moved to several locations before settling at its current location in 1903. The Dow Jones industrial average was created in 1896 to gauge the performance of industrial stocks. Follow…

March 7th is the 50th anniversary of the first Selma-to-Montgomery March, also known as “Bloody Sunday.” In February, 1965, a march in Perry County, Alabama, resulted in the shooting death of protester Jimmie Lee Jackson by a state trooper. Organizers planned a march to Montgomery as a nonviolent outlet for the outrage over Jackson’s death.…

March 6th is the 146th anniversary of the publication of Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements. Mendeleev, a Russian professor of chemistry, is recognized as the first person to use a periodic table to predict the properties of then-undiscovered elements. He also ordered his table according to chemical properties rather than atomic weight, unintentionally listing them…

March 5th marks the 69th anniversary of Winston Churchill coining the phrase “Iron Curtain” to describe the Soviet Union’s influence on the countries of Central and Eastern Europe following World War II. Initially, Churchill’s speech was not well received in the west, which still considered the Soviets a wartime ally. The Iron Curtain remained in…