Hula Hoop patented

Sourced from: history.com

March051963 thing. However, the Hula Hoop never faded March 5, 1963: the Hula Hoop, a hip- away completely and still has its fans today swiveling toy that became a huge fad across According to Ripley’s Believe It or Not, in America when it was first marketed by April 2004, a performer at the Big Apple Wham-O in 1958, is patented by the Circus in Boston simultaneously spun 100 company’sco-founder,Arthur“Spud”Melin. hoopsaroundherbody

An estimated 25 million Hula Hoops were Earlier that same year, in January, sold in its first four months of production according to the Guinness World Records, alone. two people inTokyo, Japan, managed to spin

The enormous popularity of the Hula the world’s largest hoop–at 13 feet, 4 Hoop was short-lived and within a matter of inches–aroundtheirwaistsatleastthreetimes months, the masses were on to the next big each.

March05,1953 the middle-class democratic government that Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union had supplanted the czar’s rule Stalin since1924,diesinMoscow continued to move up the party ladder, from Ioseb Dzhugashvili was born in 1878 in commissar for nationalities to secretary Georgia, then part of the Old Russian Empire. generaloftheCentralCommittee—arolethat The son of a drunk who beat him mercilessly would provide the center of his dictatorial and a pious washerwoman mother, Stalin takeover and control of the party and the new learnedRussian,whichhespokewithaheavy USSR. accent all his life, in an Orthodox Church-run Stalindidnotmellowwithage;hepursued school. a reign of terror, purges, executions, exiles to While studying to be a priest atTiflisTheological Seminary, he began secretly reading Karl Marx and other left-wing revolutionary thinkers. In 1900, Stalin became active in revolutionary political activism, taking p a r t i n l a b o r demonstrations and strikes. Stalin joined the more militant wing of the M a r x i s t S o c i a l Democratic movement, the Gulag Archipelago (a system of forced- the Bolsheviks, and became a student of its labor camps in the frozen north) and leader,VladimirLenin. persecutioninthepostwarUSSR,suppressing Stalin’sfirstbigbreakcamein1912,when all dissent and anything that smacked of Lenin, in exile in Switzerland, named him to foreign, especially Western European, serve on the first Central Committee of the influence. Bolshevik Party—now a separate entity from

To the great relief of many, he died of a the Social Democrats. The following year, massive heart attack on March 5, 1953. He is Stalin (finally dropping Dzugashvili and rememberedtothisdayasthemanwhohelped taking the new name Stalin, from the Russian savehisnationfromNazidomination—andas word for “steel”) published an article on the the mass murderer of the century, having roleofMarxisminthedestinyofRussia. overseen the deaths of between 8 million and In1917,escapingfromanexileinSiberia, 20millionofhisownpeople. he linked up with Lenin and his coup against

Iconic photo of Che Guevara taken

March05,1960

Moments before he was shot to death by a soldier of the Bolivian government, the revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara told his executioner, “Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man!” Guevara died a short time later, on October 9, 1967 at the age of 39, but he was correct in his assertion that this would not be the end of his legacy Today, that legacy almost always takes the form of a single photograph, Guerrillero Heroico, which some have called the most famousphotographintheworld.

The following year the image of Guevara went viral. It appeared on the cover of a copy of Guevara’s memoirs, published in Italy. It was also used as thecoverofaliteraryjournaladvertised on the New York City subway. In the Arts Laboratory in London. 1968 was a year sameyear,IrishartistJimFitzpatrickcreated of upheaval across the world, and Guevara’s a stylized version of the image, setting a image featured prominently during the black-and-white Guevara against a red student riots that swept France in May, the background, and distributed it as widely as populist protests of Italy’s “Hot Autumn” hecouldtohonorGuevara’slegacy Aposter and the nonviolent, surrealist-inspired bearingFitzpatrick’simagewasshownatthe demonstrationsoftheDutch“Provos.”