Today is the vernal equinox, the first full day of SPRING! Above is Salvador Dalí’s “The First Days of Spring” (1929), which art historians consider to be one of his first forays into surrealism. It is small, for him, about two feet wide by 20 inches tall, so it may be larger on some peoples’ screens right now than it is in life. The painting is at the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. (For some, the fact of a Salvador Dalí museum in St. Pete is surreal.)
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Edward Smith had a great idea: obtain a set of keys to the front doors of City Bank on Wall Street, let himself in one weekend morning, and grab as much as he could between then and when the bank opened for business again the following Monday. This was in 1831, and on this date that year, 185 years ago today, he broke into the bank and stole $245,000 dollars in banknotes and coins, an amount that is the equivalent of $6.8 million in 2015 dollars. This is the first reported bank robbery in U.S. history. Not the first robbery, the first to make the papers. (See image at top.)

A sudden improvement in his manner of living was the giveaway: the week of the robbery he rented a new room that was too expensive for a young shoe salesman, which had been his profession, and he spent about $60,000 quite quickly. His new landlord was curious about a tenant who would not leave his room without either securing or carrying with him three particular suitcases. One day when he left two of them behind, the landlord and local police picked the locks on one of them and discovered the stolen money. Smith was arrested and all of the money except the $60,000 he had spent was recovered. He was convicted after a one-day trial, did five years’ hard labor in Sing Sing, and there Edward Smith drops off the stage of history.

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Ninety minutes after a U.S.-imposed deadline on Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein expired—leave Iraq or face war—war began on this date in 2003. “Operation Iraqi Freedom” was underway, with forces primarily made of a coalition between the United States and Great Britain.
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Laurence Sterne (seen above) died on this date in 1768. At the time of his death, he was one of the most famous writers in England, having written two comic novels, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. His reputation flagged a bit after his death—Samuel Johnson complained about Shandy’s many storytelling tricks that, “Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last”—but by the 20th Century Sterne was once again a beloved novelist whose works were thought to be worth study.

His body was stolen soon after the funeral and sold to a medical school for dissection, which was a fairly common occurrence at the time, but in a Sternian bit of comedy, someone recognized the body on the anatomy class slab and did what he could to have the author of Tristram Shandy re-buried. In another Sternian bit of comedy, all the confusion this engendered meant that he was buried in an unmarked grave and each person who ought to have known where he had been buried pointed to different spots.
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