537 – The Goths began their siege on Rome.
1302 – The characters Romeo and Juliet were married this day according to William Shakespeare.
1502 – Ismail I, founder of the Safavid dynasty, crowned Shah of Persia (rules till 1524)
1665 – NY approves new code guaranteeing Protestants religious rights
1702 – The Daily Courant, the first regular English newspaper was published.
1744 – English auction house Sotheby’s holds its first ever auction (of books) in London
1789 – Benjamin Banneker and Pierre Charles L’Enfant begin to lay out Washington, D.C.
1824 – The U.S. War Department created the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Seneca Indian Ely Parker became the first Indian to lead the Bureau.
1845 – The Flagstaff War: In New Zealand, Chiefs Hone Heke and Kawiti lead 700 Māoris to chop down the British flagpole and drive settlers out of the British colonial settlement of Kororareka because of breaches of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi.
1855 – Bowery Boys gang leader William Poole aka “Bill the Butcher” is buried in Brooklyn with 155 carriages and 6,000 mourners
1888 – The “Blizzard of ’88” began along the U.S. Atlantic Seaboard shutting down communication and transportation lines. More than 400 people died.(March 11-14)
1901 – U.S. Steel was formed when industrialist J.P. Morgan purchased Carnegie Steep Corp. The event made Andrew Carnegie the world’s richest man.
1904 – After 30 years of drilling, the north tunnel under the Hudson River was holed through. The link was between Jersey City, NJ, and New York, NY
1907 – U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt induced California to revoke its anti-Japanese legislation.
1907 – In Bulgaria, Premier Nicolas Petkov was killed by an anarchist.
1918 – US Army mess cook Private Albert Gitchell of Fort Riley, Kansas becomes the first documented case of Spanish flu; start of worldwide pandemic killing 50-100 million
1930 – U.S. President Howard Taft became the first U.S. president to be buried in the National Cemetery in Arlington, VA.
1941 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the Lend-Lease Act, which authorized the act of providing war supplies to the Allies.
1942 – 1st deportation train leaves Paris for Auschwitz Concentration Camp
1965 – Indonesia President Sukarno signs the ‘Supersemar’ order, giving army commander Lt. Gen. Suharto authority to do whatever he “deemed necessary” to restore order
1966 – Military coup led by Indonesian General Suharto breaks out
1969 – Levi-Strauss started selling bell-bottomed jeans.
1985 – Mikhail Gorbachev was named the new chairman of the Soviet Communist Party.
1986 – Popsicle announced its plan to end the traditional twin-stick frozen treat for a one-stick model.
1988 – A cease-fire was declared in the war between Iran and Iraq.
1990 – Lithuania declared its independence from the Soviet Union. It was the first Soviet republic to break away from Communist control.
1992 – Former U.S. President Nixon said that the Bush administration was not giving enough economic aid to Russia.
1998 – The International Astronomical Union issued an alert that said that a mile-wide asteroid could come very close to, and possibly hit, Earth on Oct. 26, 2028. The next day NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that there was no chance the asteroid would hit Earth.
2004 – Over 200 people were killed and over 1,400 were injured when bombs exploded in Madrid train stations. Al-Qaeda took responsibility for the attacks.
2011 – Japan is hit by an enormous earthquake that triggers a deadly 23-foot tsunami in the country’s north, about 230 miles northeast of Tokyo. Cooling systems in one of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station fail shortly after the earthquake, causing a nuclear crisis.
2012 – US soldier kills 16 civilians in Afghanistan
2013 – North Korea cuts the phone line with South Korea, breaching the 1953 armistice
2018 – China’s National People’s Congress approves removal of term limits for a leader, will allow Xi Jinping presidency for life
2020 – Smallest dinosaur ever discovered – skull preserved in piece of amber smaller than a fingertip from a mine in Myanmar, reported in “Nature”
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
