March 5 · This Day in America
On a cold, snow-packed night, a mob and a squad of British regulars meet on King Street, and it goes wrong fast. Taunts become snowballs become a club, and then a soldier fires. A ragged volley follows. When the smoke clears, five colonists are dead or dying — among them Crispus Attucks, a sailor of African and Native descent, the first to fall. The town calls it a massacre and means it as a battle cry. Paul Revere engraves the scene into propaganda; Samuel Adams keeps the memory burning with yearly orations. And then John Adams, future president, takes the unpopular case and defends the soldiers in court, because he believes even hated men deserve a fair trial. Both things are true at once, and both are American: the rage that builds a revolution, and the conscience that insists on the law. Adams later called it the night independence was born.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1946
At a small college in Fulton, Missouri, with President Truman seated behind him, Winston Churchill — out of office, a private guest — warns that "an iron curtain has descended across the continent." The phrase names the Cold War before it has a name. It was delivered not in London or Moscow but in the American heartland, and the world's next half-century took shape from that podium.
Source: www.nationalww2museum.org
“On that night the foundation of American independence was laid.”John Adams, on the Boston Massacre