March 10th
 

1831 ~ The French Foreign Legion was established by King Louis-Philippe to support his war in Algeria.

1844 ~ Birthday of Pablo de Sarasate, Violinist.

1893 ~ Côte d'Ivoire became a French colony.

1957 ~ Birthday of Osama bin Laden, Terrorist.

1965 ~ Neil Simon's play ''The Odd Couple'' opened on Broadway.

1969 ~ James Earl Ray pleaded guilty to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

1977 ~ Astronomers discovered rings around Uranus.

1982 ~ The U.S. placed an embargo on Libyan oil because of Libya’s support of terrorist groups.

1985 ~ Death of Konstantin Chernenko, Soviet leader.

1993 ~ Dr. David Gunn was shot to death outside a Pensacola, Fla., abortion clinic.

March 11th
 

1847 ~ Death of Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman), Pioneer & Agronomist.

1941 ~ World War II: President Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Bill.

1952 ~ Birthday of Douglas Adams, Science Fiction/Comedy novelist.

1955 ~ Death of Alexander Fleming, Biologist.

1968 ~ Death of John Wyndham, Author.

1985 ~ Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader.

1993 ~ Janet Reno is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, becoming the first female U.S. Attorney General.

1996 ~ John Howard became the twenty-fifth Prime Minister of Australia.

1997 ~ Paul McCartney was knighted by Queen Elizabeth.

2004 ~ Simultaneous explosions on rush hour trains in Madrid, Spain, killed 191 people and wounded at least 1,800 in an attack linked to al-Qaida.

March 12th
 

1685 ~ Birthday of George (Bishop) Berkeley, Philosopher.

1895 ~ Coca-Cola sold in bottles for the first time.

1912 ~ The Girl Scouts (née Girl Guides) were started in the U.S.

1913 ~ Canberra officially named.

1922 ~ Birthday of Jack Kerouac, Writer.

1925 ~ Birthday of Harry Harrison, Science Fiction author.

1938 ~ Anschluss: German troops occupied Austria; annexation declared the following day.

1950 ~ Dennis the Menace made its syndicated debut.

1987 ~ Les Misérables opened on Broadway.

1999 ~ Death of Sir Yehudi Menuhin, violinist.

March 13th
 

1764 ~ Birthday of Earl Grey, Prime Minister of the U.K., obtainer of a popular bergamot tea recipe.

1781 ~ William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus.

1855 ~ Birthday of Percival Lowell, Astronomer.

1868 ~ The impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson began in the U.S. Senate.

1906 ~ Death of Susan B. Anthony, civil rights and women's suffrage activist.

1925 ~ A law in Tennessee, the Butler Act, was passed, prohibiting the teaching of evolution.

1938 ~ Death of Clarence Darrow, Attorney.

1964 ~ Kitty Genovese was murdered in an incident which shocked the world and prompted investigation into the Bystander effect.

1979 ~ The New Jewel Movement, headed by Maurice Bishop, ousted Prime Minister Eric Gairy in a nearly bloodless coup d'etat in Grenada.

1996 ~ In Dunblane, Scotland, 16 children and 1 adult teacher were shot dead by a man who then committed suicide.

March 14th
 

1681 ~ Birthday of Georg Philipp Telemann, German Composer.

1804 ~ Birthday of Johann Strauss Sr.

1835 ~ Birthday of Giovanni Schiaparelli, Italian Astronomer.

1879 ~ Birthday of Albert Einstein, physicist, awarded the Nobel Prize in physics 1921.

1883 ~ Death of Karl Marx, political theorist.

1900 ~ The Gold Standard Act was ratified, placing U.S. currency on the gold standard.

1964 ~ A jury in Dallas found Jack Ruby guilty of murdering Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy.

1984 ~ Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Féin, was wounded in an assassination attempt in central Belfast.

1991 ~ After 16 years in prison for allegedly bombing a pub in an Irish Republican Army attack, the "Birmingham Six" were freed when a court determined that the police fabricated evidence.

1997 ~ Surgeons at Bethesda Naval Medical Center repaired a torn knee tendon in President Bill Clinton's right leg; caused by a stumble at the Florida home of golfer Greg Norman.

March 15th
 

44 B.C. ~ Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of Roman senators.

1877 ~ The first Test cricket match, between England and Australia.

1898 ~ Death of Henry Bessemer, English metallurgist.

1906 ~ Rolls-Royce Ltd. wass registered.

1916 ~ President Woodrow Wilson sent 12,000 U.S. troops over the Mexican border to pursue Pancho Villa.

1937 ~ Death of H. P. Lovecraft, horror writer.

1956 ~ ”My Fair Lady” opened in New York City. Rex Harrison played Henry Higgins, and Julie Andrews was Eliza Doolittle.

1975 ~ Death of Aristotle Onassis, shipping magnate.

1990 ~ British journalist Farzad Bazoft executed for spying.

1991 ~ Germany formally regained complete independence after World War II.

March 16th
 

1521 ~ Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan reached the Philippines, where he was killed by natives the following month.

1736 ~ Death of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Italian composer.

1789 ~ Birthday of Georg Ohm, German physicist and developer of Ohm's law.

1850 ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter was first published.

1898 ~ Death of Aubrey Beardsley, British Artist.

1926 ~ Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket, at Auburn, Massachusetts.

1968 ~ The My Lai Massacre was carried out by U.S. troops under the command of Lt. William L. Calley.

1978 ~ Aldo Moro was kidnapped by left-wing urban guerrillas in Italy and was later killed by his captors.

1984 ~ William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, was kidnapped by Islamic fundamentalists; he died in captivity.

1988 ~ The Kurdish town of Halabjah attacked with a mix of poison gas and nerve agents killing 5000.

March 17th
 

180 ~ Death of Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor.

461 ~ Death of Saint Patrick, patron saint of Ireland.

1673 ~ Jacques Marquette & Louis Jolliet began their exploration of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi river.

1782 ~ Death of Daniel Bernoulli, Mathematician.

1834 ~ Birthday of Gottlieb Daimler, Engineer & Inventor.

1845 ~ The rubber band was patented by Stephen Perry.

1861 ~ The Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed.

1919 ~ Birthday of Nat King Cole, Singer. Oh! what a singer!

1959 ~ Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, fled Tibet and travels to India.

1992 ~ A suicide car-bomb killed 29 and injured 242 at the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina.


Feastdays & Holidays


Catholicism ~ Feast day of St Patrick: a public holiday in Ireland and Montserrat, widely celebrated in North America.

March 18th
 

1844 ~ Birthday of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Composer.

1850 ~ American Express was founded by Henry Wells & William Fargo.

1909 ~ Einar Dessau used a short-wave radio transmitter becoming the first to broadcast as a ham radio operator.

1940 ~ Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini held a meeting at the Brenner Pass during which the Italian dictator agreed to join in Germany's war against France and Britain.

1962 ~ France and Algeria signed an agreement ending the Algerian War.

1965 ~ Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov, left his spacecraft Voskhod 2 for 12 minutes, and became the first man to walk in space.

1968 ~ The U.S. Congress repealed the requirement for a gold reserve to back US currency.

1978 ~ Death of Leigh Brackett, Science Fiction author.

1990 ~ 12 paintings, collectively worth $100 million, were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts. This was the largest art theft in U.S. history.

1992 ~ Microsoft shipped Windows 3.1.

March 19th
 

1687 ~ Explorer Robert de La Salle was murdered while searching for the mouth of the Mississippi River.

1813 ~ Birthday of David Livingstone, Missionary & Explorer.

1848 ~ Birthday of Wyatt Earp, Policeman & Gunfighter.

1906 ~ Birthday of Adolf Eichmann, Nazi official.

1915 ~ The U.S. Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles for the second time.

1932 ~ Sydney Harbor Bridge opened.

1950 ~ Death of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Author.

1953 ~ The Academy Awards were first televised.

1982 ~ Argentines landed on South Georgia Island, precipitating the Falklands War.

1987 ~ Death of Louis-Victor de Broglie, Physicist, awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 1929.


Feastdays & Holidays


The swallows return to Mission San Juan Capistrano in California.

March 20th
 

1727 ~ Death of Sir Isaac Newton, Physicist.

1815 ~ Napoleon returned to Paris after escaping from Elba, beginning his "Hundred Days" rule.

1828 ~ Birthday of Henrik Ibsen, Playwright.

1852 ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was published.

1916 ~ Albert Einstein published his theory of General Relativity.

1928 ~ Birthday of Fred Rogers, children's television host.

1969 ~ John Lennon married Yoko Ono in Gibraltar.

1995 ~ A sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway killed 12 and wounded 1,300 people.

2000 ~ Former Black Panther Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, once known as H. Rap Brown, was captured following a shootout in Atlanta.

2003 ~ U.S. and British forces invaded Iraq from Kuwait.

March 21st
 

1685 ~ Birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach, Composer.

1839 ~ Birthday of Modest Mussorgsky, Russian composer.

1867 ~ Birthday of Florenz Ziegfeld, Broadway Impresario.

1945 ~ World War II: British troops liberated Mandalay, Burma.

1960 ~ Police fired on demonstrators in Sharpeville, South Africa, killing 69 and wounding 180.

1963 ~ Alcatraz, a federal penitentiary on an island in San Francisco Bay, was closed.

1965 ~ Rev. King led 3,200 people on the start of the third civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

1980 ~ President Carter announced a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow to protest the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan.

1999 ~ Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones became the first to circumnavigate the Earth in a hot air balloon.

2002 ~ Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and three other suspects were charged with murder in the kidnapping and killing of WSJ reporter Daniel Pearl.

March 22nd
 

1599 ~ Birthday of Anthony van Dyck, Painter.

1683 ~ Anne Hutchinson was expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony for religious dissent.

1687 ~ Death of Jean Baptiste Lully, French Composer.

1832 ~ Death of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Writer & Poet.

1882 ~ U.S. Congress outlawed polygamy.

1923 ~ Birthday of Marcel Marceau, Mime.

1963 ~ The British Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, denied improper involvement with the model Christine Keeler.

1972 ~ The Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. constitution was sent to the states for ratification.

1993 ~ The Intel Corporation shipped the first Pentium chips.

2004 ~ Death (by Israeli Hellfire missile) of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, co-founder and spiritual leader of Hamas.

March 23rd
 

1749 ~ Birthday of Pierre Simon de Laplace, Mathematician & Astronomer.

1775 ~ Patrick Henry delivered his famous speech - "give me liberty or give me death" in Williamsburg, Virginia.

1857 ~ Elisha Otis's first elevator was installed at 488 Broadway, New York City.

1882 ~ Birthday of Emmy Noether, Mathematician. Now there's a lady who had a tough row to hoe!

1912 ~ Birthday of Wernher von Braun, Engineer.

1923 ~ Birthday of Roger Bannister, athlete, first "Miracle Mile"

1983 ~ President Ronald Reagan made his initial proposal to develop technology to intercept missiles.

1989 ~ Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced cold fusion at the University of Utah.

1989 ~ A 1,000-foot diameter Near-Earth asteroid (4581 Asclepius) missed the Earth by 400,000 miles.

2001 ~ The Russian Mir space station was de-orbited, breaking up in the atmosphere before falling into the southern Pacific Ocean near Fiji.

March 24th
 

1874 ~ Birthday of Harry Houdini, Magician.

1882 ~ Robert Koch announced the discovery of the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis.

1882 ~ Death of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poet.

1893 ~ Birthday of Walter Baade, Astronomer.

1905 ~ Death of Jules Verne, Author.

1965 ~ Ranger 9 broadcast live TV as it crashed-landed onto the Moon.

1972 ~ The UK imposed direct rule over Northern Ireland.

1980 ~ Archbishop Óscar Romero was killed by gunmen while celebrating Mass in San Salvador.

1989 ~ The Exxon Valdez spilled 240,000 barrels of oil after running aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound.

1999 ~ NATO launched air strikes against Yugoslavia. This marked the first time NATO attacked a sovereign nation.