March 9 in History

Emperor Wu of Han reigned from 141 to 87 BC, the longest rule in Chinese imperial history, during which he transformed China from a cautious confederation into an expansionist empire. He made Confucianism the state ideology, establishing an examination system for government officials that lasted in various forms for two millennia. His military campaigns pushed Chinese borders to their greatest extent: armies reached the Fergana Valley in Central Asia, conquered northern Vietnam, colonized parts of Korea, and drove the nomadic Xiongnu confederation far beyond the Great Wall. His most consequential decision was sending the diplomat Zhang Qian westward in 138 BC, a mission that opened the Silk Road connecting China to Rome. Zhang brought back horses, grapes, alfalfa, and knowledge of civilizations China had never contacted. The trade routes he established carried not just goods but technologies, religions, and diseases between East and West for the next 1,500 years.

The ironclads USS Monitor and CSS Virginia clashed in Hampton Roads, Virginia, on March 9, 1862, in the first battle between armored warships. The Virginia, rebuilt from the scuttled hull of the USS Merrimack, had devastated the wooden Union fleet the previous day, sinking the Cumberland and forcing the Congress to surrender. The Monitor arrived overnight, a strange-looking vessel with a revolving turret sitting on a flat hull that sailors called a 'cheesebox on a raft.' The four-hour battle ended in a tactical draw: neither ship could penetrate the other's armor. But the strategic implications were revolutionary. Every wooden warship in every navy in the world became obsolete overnight. Britain and France, both with massive wooden fleets, immediately halted construction and began building ironclads. The battle forced a complete reconception of naval warfare, replacing centuries of wooden-hulled, sail-powered combat with the steel and steam age that defined naval power until aircraft carriers emerged.

Pancho Villa led approximately 500 mounted guerrillas across the US-Mexico border on March 9, 1916, and attacked the town of Columbus, New Mexico, burning buildings and killing 18 Americans. Villa's motives remain debated: he may have been retaliating against an arms dealer who had defrauded him, or he may have been trying to provoke a US intervention that would destabilize his rival, President Carranza. Whatever the reason, the raid was the first armed invasion of the continental United States since the War of 1812. President Wilson ordered General John 'Black Jack' Pershing to lead a Punitive Expedition of 10,000 troops into Mexico to capture Villa. The expedition spent eleven months searching the vast Chihuahuan Desert without catching its target. Villa knew the terrain and had the support of the local population. The failed expedition did, however, serve as a training ground for American officers, including George S. Patton, who gained valuable experience in mobile warfare that they would later apply in World War I.

Napoleon Bonaparte married Josephine de Beauharnais in a civil ceremony in Paris on March 9, 1796, just two days before departing for his Italian campaign. Josephine, a 32-year-old widow with two children whose first husband had been guillotined during the Terror, was six years older than the 26-year-old general. The marriage was one of history's most complicated love affairs. Napoleon was passionately devoted to Josephine, writing her anguished letters from the battlefield while she conducted affairs in Paris. She brought him social connections to the old aristocracy that his Corsican origins could not provide, smoothing his path through Parisian high society. The marriage survived infidelities on both sides and Napoleon's rise to Emperor, but it could not survive childlessness. Napoleon divorced Josephine in 1809 to marry Marie Louise of Austria, who gave him an heir. Josephine reportedly said, 'I will never know a greater sorrow.' Napoleon kept a portrait of her by his bed at Elba and died with her name on his lips.

Pedro Alvares Cabral's fleet of thirteen ships departed Lisbon on March 9, 1500, bound for India following Vasco da Gama's pioneering route around Africa. Cabral swung wide to the southwest to catch favorable winds and currents, a standard navigational technique, but traveled so far west that he sighted land on April 22. He named it the Island of the True Cross and claimed it for Portugal. Whether the 'discovery' was accidental or deliberate remains debated: some historians argue that Portuguese navigators already knew land existed to the west based on earlier voyages. Cabral stayed only nine days before continuing to India, where his expedition met with hostility and eventually returned to Lisbon with only four of its thirteen ships. The Brazilian landfall fell within Portugal's sphere under the Treaty of Tordesillas, giving Lisbon a legal claim to territory that would eventually become its largest and most valuable colony, supplying sugar, gold, diamonds, and coffee for three centuries.

The RAF's first solo mission wasn't against enemy fighters — it was policing Mesopotamian tribes with a £2 million annual budget, one-tenth the cost of traditional ground forces. Wing Commander Richard Pink led eight aircraft squadrons to control modern-day Iraq through "air control," dropping leaflets warning villages before bombing them if they didn't comply with British rule. Pink's bombers replaced 60,000 soldiers. Winston Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, championed this cheaper imperial strategy despite outcry over bombing civilians. The method worked so efficiently that Britain exported it across the empire, and other powers took notes. America's drone warfare in the same region a century later? Pink drew that blueprint.

The Notorious B.I.G. — Christopher Wallace — was shot four times while sitting in an SUV in Los Angeles on March 9, 1997. He was 24. Six months earlier, Tupac Shakur had been killed in Las Vegas in what looked like a connected rivalry. Nobody has been charged in either murder. Biggie released two albums while alive: Ready to Die and Life After Death. The second dropped sixteen days after he was shot. It went to number one. He weighed 380 pounds, walked with a cane, and rapped about money and death and Brooklyn with a storyteller's precision. Born in Clinton Hill. Died six miles from the Staples Center. The case is still open.