On this day in ...... 1838 (170 years ago today), a man who'd become an internationally renowned advocate of slavery abolition and universal suffrage, for women as well as men, Frederick Douglass, escaped from slavery. Douglass, who was about 21 at the time, left Maryland and traveled by train to New York. He wore the clothes and carried the ID papers of a freed sailor of African ancestry. (credit for photo montage of Douglass and colleague Elizabeth Cady Stanton)
... 301, Marinus, a stonemason-turned-Saint believed to have been born in
what is now Croatia, founded San Marino, among the world's oldest republics. Today the mountainous country (flag at right), which is about the size of Washington, D.C., and is fully surrounded by Italy, has a population of about 31,000.
