March 18 in History

March 18 is the 78th day of the year. There are 288 days remaining until the end of the year. 

• 1314 – Jacques de Molay, the 23rd and last Grand Master of the Knights Tempar, was burned at the stake.
• 1634 – Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, French author of first historical novel, was born. She died in 1693.
• 1673 – John Berkeley, 1st Baron Berkeley of Stratton sold his part of New Jersey to the Religious Society of Friends, known as Quakers.
• 1766 – The British Parliament repealed the Stamp Act.
• 1834 – Six farm laborers from Tolpuddle, England were sentenced to be transported to Australia for forming a trade union.
• 1850 – American Express was founded by Henry Wells and William Fargo.
• 1874 – Hawaii signed a treaty with the US granting exclusive trading rights. 
• 1922 – In India, Mohandas Gandhi was sentenced to six years in prison for civil disobedience.
• 1925 – A tornado hit Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, killing 695 people.
• 1942 – The War Relocation Authority was established in the United States to take Japanese Americans into custody.
• 1965 – Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov left his spacecraft for 12 minutes, becoming the first person to walk in space.
• 1968 – The U.S. Congress repealed the requirement for a gold reserve to back United States currency.
• 1989 – In Egypt, a 4,400-year-old mummy was found near the Pyramid of Cheops.
• 1990 – The largest art theft in United States history: 12 paintings worth $300 million were stolen from a museum in Boston, Massachusetts.
• 1992 – White South Africans vote overwhelmingly in favor to end the racist policy of  Apartheid.
• 2003 – British Sign Language was recognized as an official British language. 

March 17 in History

March 17 is the 77th day of the year. There are 289 days remaining until the end of the year.

• 460 CE – Saint Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, died. He was born in 387 CE.
• 1756 – St. Patrick’s Day was celebrated in NYC for the first time (at the Crown and Thistle Tavern).
• 1845 – The rubber band was patented.
• 1941 – In Washington, DC, the National Gallery of Art was officially opened by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
• 1950 – Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley announced the creation of element 98, which they name Californium.
• 1959 – Tenzin Gyatso the 14th Dalai Lama, fled Tibet for India.
• 1969 – Golda Meir became the first woman Prime Minister of Israel.
• 1992 – A referendum to end Apartheid in South Africa was passed, 68.7% to 31.2%.

March 16 in History

March 16 is the 76th day of the year. There are 290 days remaining until the end of the year.

• 1190 – 150 Jews were massacred in York Castle in England.
• 1621 - Samoset, of the Mohegan tribe, strolled into the Plymouth Colony and greeted the colonists in English.
• 1802 – The Army Corps of Engineers was established to found and operate the US Military Academy at West Point.
• 1872 – The Wanderers F.C. won the first FA Cup, the oldest football  competition in the world.
• 1912 – Lawrence Oates, a member of Robert Falcon Scott’s South Pole expedition who had become ill, his tent into a blizzard, saying, "I am just going outside and may be some time." He died in the blizzard.
• 1926 – Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts.
• 1958 – The Ford Motor Company produced its 50 millionth automobile, a Thunderbird.
• 1968 – General Motors produced its 100 millionth automobile, an Oldsmobile Toronado.
• 1988 – The Kurdish town of Halabjah in Iraq was attacked with a mix of poison gas and nerve agents on the orders of Saddam Hussein, killing 5,000 people and injuring about 10,000 people.
• 1995 – Mississippi formally ratified the 13th Amendment becoming the last state to aboloish slavery. 
• 1998 – Pope John Paul II asked God for forgiveness for the inactivity and silence of Roman Catholics during the Holocaust.

March 11 in History

March 11 is the 71st day of the year. There are 295 days remaining until the end of the year.

March 11 is Johnny Appleseed Day in the United States.

• 1702 – The Daily Courant, England’s first national daily newspaper, was published for the first time.
• 1824 – The US War Department created the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
• 1851 – The first performance of Rigoletto by Giuseppe Verdi occurred in Venice. 
• 1867 – The first performance of Don Carlos by Giuseppe Verdi took place in Paris.
• 1888 – The Great Blizzard of 1888 began on the US eastern seaboard, killing more than 400.
• 1955 – Sir Alexander Fleming, Scottish biologist who discovered penicillin and won the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, died. He was born in 1881.
• 1983 – Pakistan successfully conducts a cold test of a nuclear weapon. 
• 1993 – Janet Reno was confirmed by US Senate as the first female US Attorney General.
• 1999 – Infosys became the first Indian company listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange.
• 2002 – James Tobin, American economist & 1981 Nobel laureate, died. He was born in 1918.
• 2006 – Michelle Bachelet was inaugurated as first female president of Chile.
• 2011 – An earthquake measuring 9.0 in magnitude strikes 81 miles east of Sendai, Japan, triggering a tsunami that killed thousands of people. This event also triggered the second largest nuclear accident in history, and one of only two events to be classified as a Level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale.

March 10 in History

March 10 is the 70th day of the year. There are 296 days remaining until the end of the year.

• 1804 – In St. Louis, Missouri, a formal ceremony to transfer ownership of the Louisiana Territory from France to the United States.
• 1831 – The French Foreign Legion was established by King Louis-Philppe to support his war in Algeria.
• 1848 – The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was ratified by the United States Senate, ending the Mexican-American War.
• 1876 – Alexander Graham Bell made the first successful telephone call saying, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you."
• 1891 – Almon Strowger, an undertaker in Topeka, Kansas, patented the Strowger switch, a device that led to the automation of telephone circuit switching.
• 1906 – Europe’s worst mine disaster, in Courrières, France, killed 1099 miners.
• 1922 – Mahatma Gandhi was arrested in India, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years in prison. He was released after two years for an appendectomy.
• 1959 – Fearing an abduction attempt by China, 300,000 Tibetans surrounded the Dalai Lama’s palace to prevent his removal.
• 1977 – Astronomers discovered rings around Uranus.

March 9 in History

March 9 is the 69th day of the year. There are 297 days remaining until the end of the year.

• 1841 – The United States Supreme Court ruled that captive Africans who had seized control of the ship carrying them had been taken into slavery  illegally.
• 1842 – The first documented discovery of gold in California occurred at Rancho San Francisco, six years before the California Gold Rush.
• 1933 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt submitted the Emergency Banking Act to Congress, the first of his New Deal policies.
• 1959 – The Barbie doll made its debut at the American International Toy Fair in New York.
• 1990 – Dr. Antonia Novello was sworn in as the first woman and Hispanic American US Surgeon General.
• 2010 – The first same-sex marriages in Washington, D.C. took place.
• 2011 – Space Shuttle Discovery makes its final landing after 39 flights.

March 8 in History

March 8 is the 68th day of the year. There are 298 days remaining until the end of the year. 

• 1618 – Johannes Kepler discovered the third law of planetary motion, which says that the square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.
• 1655 – John Casor became the first legally recognized slave in Britain's North American colonies.
• 1702 – Anne Bonny, Irish-American pirate, was born. She died in 1782.
• 1775 – An anonymous writer, thought to be Thomas Paine, published African Slavery in America, the first article in the American colonies calling for the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery.
• 1817 – The New York Stock Exchange was founded.
• 1841 – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, was born. He died in 1935.
• 1910 – Raymonde de Laroche became the first woman to receive a pilot’s license.
• 1911 – International Women’s Day was launched in Copenhagen, Denmark by Clara Zetkin.
• 1917 – The United States Senate voted to limit filibusters by adopting the cloture rule.
• 1917 – International Women’s Day protests in St. Petersburg contributed to the February Revolution.
• 1920 – The Arab Kingdom of Syria, the first modern Arab state, was established.
• 1936 – Daytona Beach Road Course held their first oval stock car race.
• 1949 – American Mildred Gillars ("Axis Sally") was tried for treason and sent to prison.
• 1979 – Philips demonstrated the compact disc publicly for the first time.

March 7 in History

March 7 is the 67th day of the year. There are 299 days remaining until the end of the year. 

• 1765 – Nicephore Niepce, French inventor of photography, was born. He died in 1833.
• 1849 – Luther Burbank, American botanist, was born. He died in 1926. He developed the Shasta daisy, the Fire poppy, the July Elberta peach, the Santa Rosa plum, the Flaming Gold nectarine, the Wickson plum, the Freestone peach, and the white blackberry.
• 1876 – Alexander Graham Bell was granted the first patent for the telephone.
• 1900 – The German liner SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse became the first ship to send wireless signals to shore.
• 1912 – Roald Amundsen announced his expedition had reached the South Pole on December 14,1911.
• 1965 – A march of 600 civil rights advocates was forcefully broken up in Selma, Alabama.
• 1986 – Divers from the USS Preserver located the crew cabin of Challenger on the ocean floor.
• 1994 – The US Supreme Court ruled that  parodies of an original work are generally covered by the doctrine of fair use.
• 2007 – The British House of Commons voted to make the upper chamber, the House of Lords, entirely elected.
• 2009 – The Kepler space observatory, designed to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars, was launched.

March 6 in History

March 6 is the 65th day of the year. There are 301 days remaining until the end of the year.

• 1476 – Michelangelo, Italian artist and sculptor, was born. He died in 1564.
• 1820 – The Missouri Compromise was signed into law by President James Monroe, allowing Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state.
• 1834 – York, Upper Canada was incorporated as Toronto.
• 1836 – After a 13-day siege by an army of 3,000 Mexican troops, the 187 Texas volunteers, including frontiersman Davy Crockett and Colonel Jim Bowie, defending the  Alamo  were killed and the fort captured.
• 1840 – The Baltimore College of Dental Surgery opened, the first dental school.
• 1853 – Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La Traviata premiered in Venice.
• 1857 – US Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case, which said African-Americans could never be citizens.
• 1869 – Dmitri Mendeleev presented the first periodic table to the Russian Chemical Society.
• 1888 – Louisa May Alcott, American novelist, died. She was born in 1832.
• 1899 – Bayer registered aspirin as a trademark.
• 1946 – Ho Chi Minh signed an agreement with France that recognized Vietnam as an autonomous state.
• 1951 – The trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for espionage began.
• 1953 – Georgy Maksimilanovich Malenkov succeeded Joseph Stalin as Premier of the Soviet Union
• 1957 – Ghana becomes the first sub-Saharan country to gain Independence from the British.
• 1967 – Svetlana Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin’s daughter, defected to the US.
• 1973 – Pearl S. Buck, American writer & Nobel laureate, died. She was born in 1892.
• 1981 – After 19 years of presenting the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite signed off for the last time.
• 1986 – Georgia O’Keeffe, American artist, died. She was born in 1887.
• 2010 – Betty Millard, writer, artist, political activist, philanthropist, and  feminist, died. She was born in 1911.

March 5 in History

March 5 is the 65th day of the year. There are 301 days remaining until the end of the year.

• 1616  – Nicolaus Copernicus’ book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was banned by the Catholic Church.
• 1770 – Five colonists, including Crispus Attucks, an African-American, were killed by British troops in Boston.
• 1836 –Samuel Colt made the first production-model revolver, the .34-caliber.
• 1868 – The impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson began.
• 1872 – George Westinghouse patented the railroad air brake.
• 1882 – Great Britain’s first electric trams began service in east London.
• 1942 – US Navy Seabees were established.

March 4 in History

March 4 is the 63rd day of the year. There are 303 days remaining until the end of the year.

• 1675 – John Flamsteed was appointed the first Astronomer Royal of England.
• 1681 – Charles II granted a land charter to William Penn for what would become Pennsylvania.
• 1789 – In NYC, the first Congress of the United States met, putting the US Constitution into effect.
• 1791 – Vermont is admitted as the 14th US state.
• 1794 – The Eleventh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, dealing with each state’s sovereign immunity, was passed by the US Congress.
• 1797 – In the first peaceful transfer of power between elected leaders, John Adams was sworn in as President succeeding George Washington.
• 1837 – Chicago was incorporated as a city.
• 1861 – Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated for his first term as US President.
• 1877 – Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake premièred at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.
• 1882 – Britain’s first electric trams ran in east London.
• 1890 – The longest bridge in Great Britain, the Forth Rail Bridge in Scotland, measuring 1,710 feet long, was opened.
• 1894 – A fire in Shanghai destroyed1,000 buildings.
• 1902 – In Chicago, the American Automobile Association was established.
• 1985 – The Food and Drug Administration approved a blood test for AIDS.
• 1998 – The US Supreme Court ruled that federal laws banning on-the-job sexual harassment also apply when both parties are the same gender in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services.

March 3 in History

March 3 is the 62nd day of the year. There are 304 days remaining until the end of the year.

• 1820 – The US Congress passed the Missouri Compromise.
• 1845 – Florida was admitted as the 27th US state.
• 1849 – The US Department of the Interior was established. 
• 1849 – The U.S. Congress passed the Gold Coinage Act allowing the minting of gold coins.
• 1857 – France and the United Kingdom declared war on China (Second Opium War).
• 1865 – The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, the founding member of the HSBC Group, opened its doors.
• 1873 – U.S. Congress enacted the Comstock Law, making it illegal to send any "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" books through the mail.
• 1875 – Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen premièred at the Opera Comique in Paris.
• 1875 – The first organized indoor ice hockey game was played in Montreal.
• 1879 – The United States Geological Survey was created.
• 1913 - 5,000 march to support women's voting rights the day President-elect Woodrow Wilson arrived in DC for his swearing in.
• 1915 – NACA, the predecessor of NASA, WAs founded.
• 1923 – TIME magazine was published for the first time.
• 1931 – The United States officially adopted The Star-Spangled Banner as its national anthem.
• 1938 – Oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia.
• 1939 – In Mumbai, Mohandas Gandhi  began his fast in protest the autocratic British rule in India.
• 1967 – Go Mi-Young, South Korean mountaineer who climbed Makalu, Kangchenjunga, and Dhaulagiri in six weeks, was born. She died in a fall in 2009.

March 2 in History

March 2 is the 61st day of the year. There are 305 days remaining until the end of the year.

• 1717 – The Loves of Mars and Venus was the first ballet performed in England.
• 1791 – Long-distance communication sped up with the unveiling of a semaphore telegraph machine in Paris.
• 1797 – The Bank of England issued the first one-pound and two-pound banknotes.
• 1807 – US Congress passed an act to prohibit the importation of slaves into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the US from any foreign kingdom, place, or country.
• 1836 – Declaration of independence of the Republic of Texas from Mexico.
• 1861 – Tsar Alexander II signed the emancipation reform into law, abolishing Russian serfdom.
• 1877 – Two days before inauguration, Congress declared Rutherford B. Hayes the winner of the election even though Samuel J. Tilden had won the popular vote.
• 1882 – Queen Victoria narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in Windsor.
• 1899 – Mount Rainier National Park was established in Washington.
• 1903 – In New York City, the Martha Washington Hotel opened, becoming the first hotel exclusively for women.
• 1917– The enactment of the Jones-Shafroth Act granted Puerto Ricans US citizenship.
• 1933 – The film King Kong opened at Radio City Music Hall in New York City.
• 1949 – The first automatic street light was installed in New Milford, Connecticut.
• 1953 – The Academy Awards were first broadcast on TV by NBC.
• 1962 – Wilt Chamberlain set the single-game scoring record in the NBA by scoring 100 points.
• 1983 – CD players and discs were released for the first time in the US.

March 1 in History

March 1 is the 60th day of the year. There are 306 days remaining until the end of the year.

March 1 is National Pig Day in the US.

• March 1886 - Alfred Spink established “The Sporting News,” the first newspaper dedicated to sports, in St. Louis, Missouri.
• 1565 – The city of Rio de Janeiro was founded.
• 1642 – Georgeana, Massachusetts (now York, Maine) became the first incorporated city in the United States.
• 1692 – Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba appeared before magistrates in Salem Village, Massachusetts thus beginning the Salem Witch Trials.
• 1781 – The Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation.
• 1790 – The first US census was authorized.
• 1803 – Ohio was admitted as the 17th US state.
• 1805 – Justice Samuel Chase was acquitted at the end of his impeachment trial by the US Senate.
• 1845 – President John Tyler signed a bill authorizing the United States to annex the Republic of Texas.
• 1847 – The state of Michigan formally abolished capital punishment.
• 1867 – Nebraska was admitted as the 37th US state.
• 1872 – Yellowstone National Park became the world's first national park.
• 1873 - E. Remington & Sons began production of the first practical typewriter.
• 1886 – The Anglo-Chinese, Singapore was founded by Bishop William Oldham. 
• 1893 – Nikola Tesla gave the first public demonstration of the radio in St. Louis, Missouri.
• 1896 – Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity.
• 1901 – The  Australian Army was formed.
• 1912 – Albert Berry made the first parachute jump from a moving airplane.
• 1914 – The Republic of China joined the Universal Postal Union.
• 1932 – Charles Augustus Lindbergh III was kidnapped.
• 1936 – Hoover Dam was completed. 
• 1936 – A strike on board the SS California led to the demise of the International Seamen’s Union and the creation of the National Maritime Union.
• 1941 – W47NV (now known as WSM-FM) began operations in Nashville, Tennessee becoming the first FM radio station in the United States.
• 1946 – The Bank of England was nationalized.
• 1947 – The International Monetary Fund began financial operations.
• 1952 - Jerri Nielsen Fitzgerald, physician who performed a breast biopsy on herself while stationed in Antarctica in 1999. She died on June 23, 2009. 
• 1961 – Uganda became self-governing and held its first elections.
• 1961 – President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps.
• 1995 – Yahoo! was incorporated.
• 2003 – The International Criminal Court held its inaugural session in The Hague.
• 2006 – English-language Wikipedia reaches its one millionth article.