432 Saint Patrick, aged about 16 is captured by Irish pirates from his home in Great Britain and taken as a slave to Ireland (traditional date)
0045 BC – In his last victory, Julius Caesar defeats the Pompeian forces of Titus Labienus and Pompey the Younger in the Battle of Munda.
0180 – Marcus Aurelius dies. Commodus is now the only emperor.
0461 – Bishop Patrick, St. Patrick, died in Saul. Ireland celebrates this day in his honor.
0624 – Muhammad wins a key victory over his Meccan adversaries in the Battle of Badr.
1328 – Treaty of Edinburgh by which England acknowledged the independence of Scotland under Robert 1 was concluded at Edinburgh
1526 – French King Francis I freed from Spain
1537 – French troops invade Flanders
1577 – Martin Frobisher gets commission from the Cathay Company to hunt for gold in the Arctic; he will return with tons of worthless pyrites, which are dumped as street ballast in London, giving rise to the legend that the streets of London were paved with gold
1658 – Pro-Charles II plot in England discovered
1756 – St. Patrick’s Day was celebrated in New York City for the first time. The event took place at the Crown and Thistle Tavern.
1766 – Britain repealed the Stamp Act that had caused resentment in the North American colonies.
1775 – Transylvania Land Company, headed by Richard Henderson, buys most of Kentucky through treaty signed with Cherokee chiefs at Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga River (later declared illegal)
1776 – British forces evacuated Boston to Nova Scotia during the Revolutionary War.
1778 – Britain declares war on France, due to French alliance with US
1805 – The Italian Republic, with Napoleon as president, becomes the Kingdom of Italy, with Napoleon as King
1845 – Rubber band patented by Stephen Perry of London
1870 – Wellesley College was incorporated by the Massachusetts legislature under its first name, Wellesley Female Seminary.
1884 – In Otay, California, John Joseph Montgomery made the first manned, controlled, heavier-than-air glider flight in the United States.
1886 – 20 black people were killed in the Carrollton Massacre in Mississippi.
1894 – US and China sign treaty preventing Chinese laborers from entering US
1909 – In France, the communications industry was paralyzed by strikes.
1910 – The Camp Fire Girls organization was founded by Luther and Charlotte Gulick. It was formally presented to the public exactly 2 years later.
1914 – Russia increased the number of active duty military from 460,000 to 1,700,000.
1919 – Dutch steel workers strike for 8 hour day and minimum wages
1921 – Dr Marie Stopes opens Britain’s first birth control clinic (London)
1927 – US government doesn’t sign League of Nations disarmament treaty
1929 – General Motors acquires German auto manufacturer Adam Opel
1930 – In New York, construction began on the Empire State Building. Excavation at the site began on January 22.
1931 – In an attempt to lift the state from the hard times of the Great Depression, the Nevada state legislature votes to legalize gamblin
1938 – The Italian Air Force, in support of Francisco Franco, bombs Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War
1939 – Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945): The Battle of Nanchang between the Kuomintang and the Japanese breaks out.
1942 – Holocaust: The first Jews from the Lviv Ghetto (western Ukraine) are gassed at the Belzec death camp (eastern Poland).
1943 – Physician Willem J. Kolff performs the world’s first ‘hemodialysis’ using his artificial kidney machine, however the treatment is unsuccessful and the patient dies, in the Netherlands
1944 – During World War II, the U.S. bombed Vienna.
1950 – Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley announced that they had created a new radioactive element. They named it “californium”. It is also known as element 98.
1957 – Presidential plane crashes on Mt. Manunggal in Cebu, Philippines killing 25 including Filipino President Ramon Magsaysay
1958 – The Vanguard 1 satellite was launched by the U.S.
1959 – The Dalai Lama (Lhama Dhondrub, Tenzin Gyatso) fled Tibet and went to India.
1961 – The U.S. increased military aid and technicians to Laos.
1962 – Moscow asked the U.S. to pull out of South Vietnam.
1967 – Snoopy and Charlie Brown of “Peanuts” were on the cover of “LIFE” magazine.
1969 – Golda Meir was sworn in as the fourth premier of Israel.
1970 – The U.S. Army charged 14 officers with suppression of facts in the My Lai massacre case.
1972 – U.S. President Nixon asked Congress to halt busing in order to achieve desegregation.
1973 – Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and a consortium of Western firms led by British Petroleum agree to the formal nationalization of Iran’s oil industry in return for an assured 20-year supply of Iranian oil
1978 – RCMP charge Toronto Sun editor Peter Worthington and publisher Donald Creighton with violating Official Secrets Act; published information from secret report on Soviet espionage activities in Canada
1982 – In El Salvador, four Dutch television crewmembers were killed by government troops.
1985 – U.S. President Reagan agreed to a joint study with Canada on acid rain.
1987 – IBM releases PC-DOS version 3.3 (but Windows is on the way)
1988 – Eritrean War of Independence: The Nadew Command, an Ethiopian army corps in Eritrea, is attacked on three sides by military units of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) in the opening action of the Battle of Afabet
1989 – A series of solar flares caused a violent magnetic storm that brought power outages over large regions of Canada.
1991 – USSR holds a referendum to determine if they should stay together; 9 of 15 Soviet representatives officially approve new union treaty
1992 – In Buenos Aires, 10 people were killed in a suicide car-bomb attack against the Israeli embassy.
1995 – Gerry Adams became the first leader of Sinn Fein to be received at the White House.
1998 – Washington Mutual announced it had agreed to buy H.F. Ahmanson and Co. for $9.9 billion dollars. The deal created the nation’s seventh-largest banking company.
1999 – A panel of medical experts concluded that marijuana had medical benefits for people suffering from cancer and AIDS.
2000 – In Kanungu, Uganda, a fire at a church linked to the cult known as the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments killed more than 530. On March 31, officials set the number of deaths linked to the cult at more than 900 after authorities subsequently found mass graves at various sites linked to the cult.
2001 – OPEC decides to cut output by 4% or 1 million barrels per day, effective April 1
2004 – NASA’s Messenger became the first spacecraft to enter into orbit around Mercury. The probe took more than 270,000 pictures before it crashed into the surface of Mercury on April 30, 2015.
2008 – Governor Eliot Spitzer of New York resigns after scandal involving a high-end prostitute; David Paterson becomes acting governor
2009 – The iTunes Music Store reached 800 million applications downloaded.
2014 – The Republic of Crimea is declared
2016 – Archaeologists announce the discovery of an 2,500 year old iron age warrior king burial ground, with 75 graves in Pocklington, Northern England
2019 – Facebook removes 1.5 million videos of the Christchurch mosque shootings in first 24 hrs after the attack, although only 1.2 million blocked at upload
2020 – Chad begins repaying a $100 million debt to Angola with cattle, as more than 1,000 cows arrive in Luanda
2022 – Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari apologies for recent fuel shortages and power outages, including the failure of the national electricity grid and an increase in adulterated fuel
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
