Births
which occurred on a March 10:
1965 The
Odd Couple, play by Neil Simon [04 Jul 1927~], opens on Broadway.
1964
The first Ford Mustang car is produced. ^top^
The first Ford Mustang was produced
on this day. The Mustang wasn’t released to the public until 16 April
1964, however, when it made, as one journalist described it, "the
most sensational introduction of modern times." The Mustang was the
result of Ford’s desire to make a small, sporty car which was inexpensive
enough to appeal to young car buyers, an increasingly important market.
The Mustang was the brainchild, or at least the mouthchild, of Ford
executive Lee Iacocca. David Halberstam explained Iacocca’s relationship
to the Mustang: "Outside the industry, Iacocca, who controlled the
publicity for the car, was always considered the father of the Mustang…
Within Ford, however, Don Frey, the product manager, was seen as the
brains behind it." But to sell short Iacocca’s impact as a salesman
would be a mistake. The car’s development never would have made it
past the reluctant upper echelons of Ford management without Iacocca’s
push.
The Mustang was not an
entirely new line of car in the traditional sense. In fact, Iacocca’s
production team intended to make a car readily adaptable to existing
Ford parts. By making the Mustang a Ford Falcon under the hood, Iacocca’s
team cut their costs dramatically. Iacocca called the Mustang a Ford
Falcon with "a whole new skin and greenhouse." He would never have
called it that during its development, however. Iacocca stressed the
Mustang as a whole new breed of Ford: muscular, small, and young.
The base price of the car was only $2368, but buyers averaged over
$1000 of extra features. Iacocca said, "People want economy so badly
they don’t care how much they pay for it." Over it first two years
the Mustang earned $1.1 billion in profits for Ford. Iacocca created
an astounding media blitz surrounding the car’s release. He and the
Mustang made the covers of Time and Newsweek, and the car appeared
in every major business and automotive publication. Historian Gary
Witzenburg explained, "No new car in history had ever received the
publicity and attention that the media lavished on Ford’s sporty small
car." One of the US’s most popular car models, then, is a testament
to one of the US’s greatest salesman. |
1946 Gérard Garouste, French artist.
1940
David Rabe, playwright.
1936 Manuel Vicent,
escritor y periodista español.
1935 José Antonio Labordeta,
cantautor, escritor y político español, diputado por la Chunta Aragonesista.
1932 Lecciones de introducción al psicoanálisis
de Sigmund Freud [06 May 1856 – 23 Sep 1939] se publica.
^
1920 Boris Vian, à Ville
d’Avray, écrivain français non conformiste, inventeur du Verlan.
Si l’on pouvait le rapprocher d’un
grand homme de sciences et de lettres français, ce serait de ce philosophe
du XVIIIe siècle, Diderot ; par sa soif de connaissances et leur étendue,
par sa certitude qu’aujourd’hui, autant qu’hier et davantage, chacun
peut et doit être un Pic de la Mirandole. Ingénieur de l’École centrale
des arts et manufactures, féru de mathématiques à l’instar de son
ami Raymond Queneau (et pareil à Diderot), ouvert aux recherches les
plus audacieuses de la cybernétique, de l’électronique, de l’astrophysique,
l’angoisse certes le saisit devant l’usage meurtrier de la science
et il ne cesse de pousser des cris d’alarme contre sa monopolisation
par les chefs d’État et les militaires; il n’en reste pas moins convaincu
qu’elle peut libérer l’homme de ses tâches serviles, réduire à presque
rien la durée du travail, ouvrir l’ère du loisir, de l’activité créatrice
non répétitive, en un mot du bonheur (car il ose ce mot). S’il est
vrai qu’il a été un pionnier de l’écologie, c’est qu’à ses yeux toute
erreur, tout abus de la science peut être corrigé par la science,
à la condition expresse que l’homme (et non les seuls " spécialistes
") en conserve la maîtrise et entende la faire servir à sa liberté
et à son plaisir. Il est mort le 23 juin 1959. |
1915 Harry Bertoia, Italian-born US sculptor and designer
who died on 06 November 1978.
1910 Pablo Serrano,
escultor español.
1903 Clare Boothe Luce, US playwright
and politician who died on 09 October 1987.
1892 Arthur Honegger
Le Havre France, composer (King David; film scores: Crime and Punishment).
He died on 27 November 1955.
1869 Benjamin
Fedorovich Kagan, worked on the foundations of geometry; died
in 1953
1864 William
Fogg Osgood, his main work was on the convergence of sequences
of continuous functions, solutions of differential equations, the calculus
of variations and space filling curves. He died in 1943.
1858
Henry W. Fowler, English lexicographer and philologist who died
on 26 December 1933.
1853 Luigi Rossi, Swiss artist
who died on 06 August 1923.
1845
(26 February Julian) Aleksandr Aleksandrovich III , second son
of Aleksandr II who was assassinated on 13 March (01 March Julian) 1881.
He inherited the next day the autocratic power and used it to try to Russify
the national minorities in the Russian empire and to persecute religions
other than the Orthodox. He died on 01 November (20 October Julian) 1894.
1843 Hugo Oehmichen, German artist who died in 1932.
1833
Pedro Antonio de Alarcón y Ariza, Spanish writer.
^top^
Pedro
Antonio de Alarcón, born in Guadix, Spain, would die on 10 July
1891 in Valdemoro. He would grow up to be a writer remembered for
his novel El
sombrero de tres picos (1874). Alarcón had achieved a considerable
reputation as a journalist and poet when his play El hijo pródigo
was hissed off the stage in 1857. The failure so exasperated him that
he enlisted as a volunteer in the Moroccan campaign of 1859-60. The
expedition provided the material for his eyewitness account Diario
de un testigo de la guerra de Africa (1859), a masterpiece in
its way as a description of campaigning life.
On his return Alarcón became editor of the anticlerical periodical
El Látigo, but in the years 1868-1874 he ruined his political
reputation by rapid changes of position. His literary reputation,
however, steadily increased. El sombrero de tres picos, a
short novel inspired by a popular ballad, is notable for its skillful
construction and pointed observation and is a masterpiece of the costumbrismo
literary genre. Manuel de Falla based his ballet of the same title
on the story, and Hugo Wolf wrote an opera so titled. Alarcón's other
major novels are El final de Norma (1855), El escándalo
(1875), and El niño de la bola (1880).
— Pedro
Antonio de Alarcón en seguida comenzó a escribir Literatura. Se
desengañó de la política. Fue profundamente católico. Evolucionó de
la política liberal a la conservadora. Escribió crónicas de viajes,
poesías, un drama (que fracasó), artículos periodísticos, cuentos
y novelas. La capital de sus novelas es la narración misma, más que
los personajes, el ambiente; en este sentido, no es propiamente realista,
a pesar de ciertos detalles técnicos, y tiene una clara raíz romántica:
El escándalo, El niño de la bola, El sombrero de tres picos, El
Capitán Veneno, Historietas nacionales. Tiene un gran sentido
dramático.
— Painting El
niño de la bola by Joaquin
Sorolla y Bastida (27 Feb 1863 – 11 Aug 1923)
— P.A. de A. y A. is not to be confused with
Juan Ruiz de Alarcón y Mendoza, (1581– 04 Aug 1639), author of
La
Verdad Sospechosa, Mexican-born Spanish dramatist of the
colonial era who was the principal dramatist of early 17th-century
Spain after Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina. |
1822 Willem Roelofs I, Dutch painter who died on 12 May
1897. — MORE
ON ROELOFS AT ART “4” MARCH
with links to images.
1814 Julián Sanz del Río,
escritor y pensador español.
1808 José Francisco de Castro
y Orozco, literato y político español.
1791 Ángel
de Saavedra Ramírez de Baquedano, duque de Rivas, político liberal
y escritor romántico español.
1789 Augustin Alexandre Thierrat,
French artist who died on 13 April 1870.
1787 William
Etty, British painter specialized in nudes, who died on 13 November
1849. — MORE
ON ETTY AT ART “4” MARCH with
links to images.
1787 Francisco Martínez de la Rosa,
político español.
1772 Friedrich von Schlegel, German
writer and critic who died on 12 January 1829.
1760 Leandro
Fernández de Moratín, dramaturgo español.
1748 John
Playfair among the first in Britain to teach modern analysis;
died in 1819.
1622 Johann
Heinrich Rahn, first to use the symbol ÷
for division in his algebra book published in 1659; died in 1676.
1549 San Francisco Solano, "apóstol de Perú", misionero
español.
1538 Thomas Howard Duke of Norfolk; son
of poet Henry Howard earl of Surrey (born in 1517, executed on 19 January
1547 for being a Catholic and alledgedly intriguing to have his father succeed
Heny VIII), executed by order of Queen Elizabeth on 02 June 1572 for being
a Catholic and allegedly intriguing against her.
1503 Fernando
I de Alemania, fundador del Imperio Austriaco.
^
1503 Ferdinand I,
Holy Roman emperor (1558–1564) and king of Bohemia and Hungary from
1526, who, with his Peace of Augsburg (1555), concluded the era of
religious strife in Germany following the rise of Lutheranism by recognizing
the right of territorial princes to determine the religion of their
subjects. He also converted the elected crowns of Bohemia and Hungary
into hereditary possessions of the house of Habsburg.
The younger brother of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V [24 Feb 1500
– 21 Sep 1558], Ferdinand was granted Austria, with the regency
of both the Habsburg German lands and Württemberg. For more than three
decades he was Charles's deputy in German affairs, representing him
at imperial diets and serving as president of the Reichsregiment (imperial
governmental council). Initially he followed Charles's policies almost
unquestioningly. Hostile toward Protestantism, he bore some responsibility
for the Lutheran secession from the Diet of Speyer (1529), and, after
he had lost Württemberg to the Lutheran landgrave Philip the Magnanimous
of Hesse [13 Nov 1504 – 31 Mar 1567] in 1534, he helped the
emperor defeat the Protestant Schmalkaldic League in 1546–1547.
Aggrieved, however, at Charles's refusal
to reinstate him in recaptured Württemberg and at the emperor's attempts
to ensure the succession of his son Philip (the future Philip II of
Spain) to the imperial crown, Ferdinand began to take a more independent
stand. The imperial heir since 1531, he was not finally placated until
Charles agreed in 1553 to exclude Philip from the German succession,
which then passed to Ferdinand's son, the future Maximilian II. On
the Protestant issue, Ferdinand, unlike Charles, eventually became
convinced of the need for a compromise. In 1552 he negotiated the
Treaty of Passau with the Lutheran elector Maurice of Saxony, who
was at war with the emperor; and in 1555 he signed the Peace of Augsburg,
which, with few interruptions, brought half a century of peace to
Germany's warring religious factions.
In foreign affairs Ferdinand was no less successful. In 1526, on the
death of his brother-in-law, King Louis II of Bohemia and Hungary,
Ferdinand claimed both domains. He took possession of Bohemia without
difficulty but faced a rival claimant, János Zápolya [1487 –
22 July 1540], in Hungary. Each was elected by a rival faction, and
Hungary remained divided among Ferdinand, Zápolya, and the Ottoman
Empire. In 1538, by the Peace of Nagyvárad (German: Grosswardein),
Ferdinand became Zápolya's successor, but he was unable to enforce
the agreement in his lifetime. The Ottoman Empire almost continually
threatened Europe during Ferdinand's reign. The Turks failed to take
Vienna in 1529 but threatened Austria again in 1532 and 1541. After
repeated and mostly futile pleas for assistance from the German princes,
Ferdinand finally reestablished an uneasy peace in 1562, when he agreed
to pay tribute to the Ottoman sultan for Austria's share of Hungary.
Ferdinand took over Charles's
imperial functions in 1555 and was elected emperor in 1558 after his
brother's abdication. With his accession, the Habsburg domains became
separated into more easily governable Austrian and Spanish parts,
with Spain going to Philip and Germany to Ferdinand. The new emperor
centralized his administration and, though only with limited success,
sought to revive Roman Catholicism in his lands. His eldest son, Maximilian,
succeeded him in 1564. Though always overshadowed by his brother Charles
V, Ferdinand had become one of the most successful Habsburg rulers
of the 16th century, increasing the hereditary possessions of the
Austrian Habsburgs significantly and restoring peace to the empire
after decades of religious warfare. |
|
On
a March 10: 
2000
Chechen patriots counterattack the Russian aggressors in Saadi-Khutor.
