1345 – Saturn, Jupiter and Mars-conjunction: thought “cause of plague epidemic”
1413 – Henry V took the throne of England upon the death of his father Henry IV.
1616 – Walter Raleigh was released from Tower of London to seek gold in Guyana.
1627 – France & Spain signed an accord for fighting Protestantism.
1760 – The great fire of Boston destroyed 349 buildings.
1774 – The British parliament passes first of the Intolerable Acts: the Boston Port Act, which closed Boston harbor until colonists would pay for damages following the Boston Tea Party
1792 – In Paris, the Legislative Assembly approved the use of the guillotine.
1815 – Napoleon Bonaparte entered Paris after his escape from Elba and began his “Hundred Days” rule.
1816 – The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed its right to review state court decisions.
1852 – Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” subtitled “Life Among the Lowly,” was first published.
1854 – The Republican Party was organized in Ripon, WI. About 50 slavery opponents began the new political group.
1865 – A plan by John Wilkes Booth to abduct U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was ruined when Lincoln changed his plans and did not appear at the Soldier’s Home near Washington, DC.
1899 – At Sing Sing prison, Martha M. Place became the first woman to be executed in the electric chair. She was put to death for the murder of her stepdaughter.
1900 – US Secretary of State John Hay announces that all nations to whom he sent notes calling for an ‘open door’ policy in China have essentially accepted his stand
1906 – In Russia, army officers mutiny at Sevastopol.
1916 – Albert Einstein presents his general theory of relativity – The revolutionary theory describes the interdependency of matter on the one hand and space and time on the other. It is one of the most influential theories in Physics.
1918 – The Bolsheviks of the Soviet Union asked for American aid to rebuild their army.
1952 – The U.S. Senate ratified a peace treaty with Japan
1965 – U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered 4,000 troops to protect the Selma-Montgomery civil rights marchers.
1968 – LBJ signs a bill removing gold backing from US paper money
1969 – U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy called on the U.S. to close all bases in Taiwan.
1980 – The U.S. made an appeal to the International Court concerning the American Hostages in Iran.
1984 – The U.S. Senate rejected an amendment to permit spoken prayer in public schools.
1987 – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved AZT. The drug was proven to slow the progress of AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome).
1991 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that employers could not exclude women from jobs where exposure to toxic chemicals could potentially damage a fetus.
1995 – About 35,000 Turkish troops crossed the northern border of Iraq in pursuit of the separatist rebels of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
1995 – In Tokyo, 12 people were killed and more than 5,500 others were sickened when packages containing the nerve gas Sarin was released on five separate subway trains. The terrorists belonged to a doomsday cult in Japan.
1997 – Liggett Group, the maker of Chesterfield cigarettes, settled 22 state lawsuits by admitting the industry marketed cigarettes to teenagers and agreed to warn on every pack that smoking is addictive.
2000 – Former Black Panther Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, once known as H. Rap Brown, was captured following a shootout that left a sherriff’s deputy dead.
2001 – Petrobras 36 Oil Platform, the world’s largest oil rig, sinks with 400,000 US gallons of fuel and crude oil aboard, after suffering three explosions on March 15
2002 – Arthur Andersen pled innocent to charges that it had shredded documents and deleted computer files related to the energy company Enron.
2003 – The United States invade Iraq, assisted by the United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland – The Iraq War, which was termed illegal by then UN Secretary, Kofi Annan, caused hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths.
2012 – 50 people are killed and 240 injured in a wave of terror attacks across 10 cities in Iraq
2016 – Barack Obama becomes the first US President to visit Cuba since 1928, arriving for a 3 day tour
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
