Good morning.
Spring arrives in Whitewater, on a day with chance of snow showers and a high of nineteen. (Monday, March 18th is the most recent day to have a snowfall accumulation of at least an inch.)
Whitewater’s Tech Park Board meets today at 8 AM.
CNN asks if this is the best golf shot ever:
Looking at it from this vantage, I’d say it’s very good, indeed.
On this day in 1778, Americans meet a (French) king:
Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane and Arthur Lee present themselves to France’s King Louis XVI as official representatives of the United States on this day in 1778. Louis XVI was skeptical of the fledgling republic, but his dislike of the British eventually overcame these concerns and France officially recognized the United States in February 1778.
Some of the great ironies of the American Revolution lay in the relationship between the new United States and the French. In 1774, when Parliament decided to offer religious toleration and judicial autonomy to French-speaking Catholics in Quebec, North American colonists expressed horror at the notion of empowered French Catholics on their borders. In 1778, though, Franklin, Deane and Lee, all proponents of democratic government, were delighted at the prospect that the French Catholic monarchy, ruling by divine right, would come to their aid in a war against British parliamentary rule.
On this day in 1854, the Republicans are born:
On this date Free Soilers and Whigs outraged by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, met in Ripon to consider forming a new political party. The meeting’s organizer, Alvan E. Bovay, proposed the name “Republican” which had been suggested by New York editor Horace Greeley. You can see eyewitness accounts of the meeting, early Republican campaign documents, and other original sources on our page devoted to Wisconsin and the Republican Party. Though other places have claimed themselves as the birthplace of the Republican Party, this was the earliest meeting held for the purpose and the first to use the term Republican. [Source: History of Wisconsin, II: 218-219]
Google tests one’s knowledge of Russian monuments: “In the Russian monument of the founder of Moscow, which hand is he holding out to the side?”