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My birthday was on March 1. Leafing through an “on this day” type history book in a bookstore (and later Wikipedia), I discovered that some interesting things happened on one March 1 or another. The two that caught my eye were the Battle of Adwa in 1896 (a rare instance of an African country, Ethiopia, defeating a would-be colonizer, Italy) and Pennsylvania becoming the first state to abolish slavery in 1780. Other things that were interesting were the founding of Rio de Janeiro (1565), the beginning of the Salem witch trials (1692), the admission of Ohio (1803) and Nebraska (1867) to the Union, the establishment of Yellowstone National Park (1872), and the completion of the Hoover Dam (1936).