TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – MARCH 8
1618 Johannes Kepler discovers the third Law of Planetary Motion.
1702 Queen Anne becomes the monarch of England upon the death of William III.
1782 The Gnadenhutten massacre took place. About 90 Indians were killed by militiamen in Ohio in retaliation for raids carried out by other Indians.
1790 George Washington delivers the first State of the Union address.
1817 The New York Stock Exchange is founded
1862 On the second day of the Battle of Pea Ridge, Confederate forces, including some Indian troops, under General Earl Van Dorn surprise Union troops, but the Union troops win the battle.
1862 The Confederate ironclad C.S.S. Virginia (formerly U.S.S. Merrimack) is launched.
1880 President Rutherford B. Hayes declares that the United States will have jurisdiction over any canal built across the Isthmus of Panama.
1917 The beginning of the Russian Revolution ( Often Called The February Revolution March 1917 in the Western Calendar ) against Czarist Rule following the lack of food in Petrograd leading to the abdication by Nicholas II and the beginning of the communist party rule in Russia.
1921 Spanish Premier Eduardo Dato is assassinated while leaving Parliament in Madrid.
1941 Martial law is proclaimed in Holland in order to extinguish any anti-Nazi protests.
1945 Phyllis Mae Daley receives a commission in the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps. She will become the first African-American nurse to serve duty in World War II.
1948 US Supreme Court rules in McCollum v. Board of Education that religious instruction in public schools is unconstitutional
1957 The Suez Canal which connects the Mediterranean and the Red Sea is reopened to international traffic by Egypt after Israel withdraws from occupied Egyptian territory.
1965 More than 4,000 Marines land at Da Nang in South Vietnam and become the first U.S. combat troops in Vietnam.
1969 The Pontiac Firebird Trans Am the epitome of the American muscle car is introduced.
1970 The Nixon administration discloses the deaths of 27 Americans in Laos.
1971 In the Fight of the Century, Joe Frazier triumphs over Muhammad Ali
1973 Two bombs explode near Trafalgar Square in Great Britain injuring 234 people.
1979 The compact disc is presented to the public The CD was developed by Philips and Sony.
1982 The United States accuses the Soviets of killing 3,000 Afghans with poison gas.
1985 The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reported that 407,700 Americans were millionaires. That was more than double the total from just five years before.
1999 The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Timothy McVeigh for the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
1999 The White House, under President Bill Clinton, directed the firing of nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee from his job at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The firing was a result of alleged security violations.
2001 The U.S. House of Representatives voted for an across-the-board tax cut of nearly $1 trillion over the next decade.
2008 President Bush has vetoed a bill that would explicitly prohibit the Central Intelligence Agency from using interrogation methods including include Waterboarding.
2013 The US state of South Dakota passed a law that would allow teachers to be armed in schools.
2014 Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 went missing while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The flight disappeared as it was passing between Malaysia and Vietnam.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
