1855 – Bowery Boys gang leader William Poole aka “Bill the Butcher” is buried in Brooklyn with 155 carriages and 6,000 mourners
1425 BC – Thutmose III, Pharaoh of Egypt, dies (according to the Low Chronology of the 18th Dynasty).
537 – The Goths began their siege on Rome.
843 – Icon veneration officially re-instated in Hagia Sophia Cathedral in Constantinople
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 – A new legal code was approved for the Dutch and English towns, guaranteeing religious observances unhindered.
1665 – NY approves new code guaranteeing Protestants religious rights
1702 – The Daily Courant, the first regular English newspaper was published.
1708 – Queen Anne withholds Royal Assent from the Scottish Militia Bill, the last time a British monarch vetoes legislation
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, Seven hundred Maoris led by their chief, Hone-Heke, burned the small town of Kororareka. The act was in protest to the settlement of Maoriland by Europeans, which was a breach 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
1861 – A Confederate Convention was held in Montgomery, Alabama, where a new constitution was adopted.
1863 – Union troops under General Ulysess S. Grant give up their preparations to take Vicksburg after failing to pass Fort Pemberton, north of Vicksburg.
1865 – Union General William Sherman and his forces occupied Fayetteville, NC.
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)
1900 – British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury rejected the peace overtures offered from the Boer leader Paul Kruger.
1901 – Britain rejected an amended treaty to the canal agreement with Nicaragua.
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.
1905 – The Parisian subway was officially inaugurated.
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 – Conservationists John Merriam, Madison Grant, and Henry Fairfield Osborn found “Save the Redwoods League” – a non-profit forest conservation land trust in San Francisco, California founded
1930 – U.S. President Howard Taft became the first U.S. president to be buried in the National Cemetery in Arlington, VA.
1935 – The German Air Force became an official department of the Reich.
1941 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the Lend-Lease Act, which authorized the act of providing war supplies to the Allies.
1942 – General Douglas MacArthur leaves Bataan for Australia.
1945 – Flemish nazi collaborator Maria Huygens sentenced to death
1946 – Communists and Nationalists began fighting as the Soviets pulled out of Mukden, Manchuria.
1946 – Pravda denounced Winston Churchill as anti-Soviet and a warmonger.
1947 – The DuMont network aired “Movies For Small Fry.” It was network television’s first successful children’s program.
1958 – American B-47 accidentally drops nuclear bomb 15,000 ft on a family home in Mars Bluff, South Carolina; creates crater 75 ft across, bomb without its nuclear capsule
1960 – Pioneer 5 launched into solar orbit between Earth & Venus
1963 – US Defense Secretary Robert MacNamara orders the adoption by the US military of the M16 assault rifle, originally designed as the AR-15 by Eugene Stoner
1964 – U.S. Senator Carl Hayden broke the record for continuous service in the U.S. Senate. He had worked 37 years and seven days.
1969 – Levi-Strauss started selling bell-bottomed jeans.
1972 – OPEC threatens “appropriate sanctions” against companies that “fail to comply with . . . any action taken by a Member Country in accordance with [OPEC] decisions.”
1973 – An FBI agent is shot at Wounded Knee in South Dakota.
1974 – Rhino Store gives people 5 cents to take home Danny Bonaduce’s Album
1982 – Harrison Williams (Sen-D-NJ) resigns rather than face expulsion
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.
1990 – In Chile, Patricio Aylwin was sworn in as the first democratically elected president since 1973.
1992 – Former U.S. President Nixon said that the Bush administration was not giving enough economic aid to Russia.
1993 – Janet Reno was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate to become the first female attorney general.
1993 – North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty refusing to open sites for inspection.
1994 – In Chile, Eduardo Frei was sworn in as President. It was the first peaceful transfer of power in Chile since 1970.
1997 – An explosion at a nuclear waste reprocessing plant caused 35 workers to be exposed to low levels of radioactivity. The incident was the worst in Japan’s history.
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.
2002 – Two columns of light were pointed skyward from ground zero in New York as a temporary memorial to the victims of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
2004 – 191 people die as several bombs explode on Madrid commuter trains
2009 – Winnenden school shooting – 17 people are killed at a school in Germany.
2013 – North Korea cuts the phone line with South Korea, breaching the 1953 armistice
2014 – Refugees from Syria pour into the Kingdom of Jordan
2017 – At least 65 killed in landslide at rubbish dump near Addis Ababa, Ethopia
2018 – China’s National People’s Congress approves removal of term limits for a leader, will allow Xi Jinping presidency for life
2020 – COVID-19 declared a pandemic by the head of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, with 121,564 cases worldwide and 4,373 deaths
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
