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• 1766 – The British Parliament repealed the Stamp Act.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• 1968 – The U.S. Congress repealed the requirement for a gold reserve to back United States currency.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.