Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/March
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Selected anniversaries/On this day archive
January – February – March – April – May – June – July – August – September – October – November – December
Recent changes to Selected anniversaries – Selected anniversaries editing guidelines
It is now 19:18 on Sunday, February 12, 2012 (UTC) – Purge cache for this page
| << | Selected anniversaries for March |
>> | ||||
| Su | Mo | Tu | We | Th | Fr | Sa |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
| An archive of historical anniversaries that appeared on the Main Page 2012 day arrangement |
||||||
- 1633 – Samuel de Champlain reclaimed his role as commander of New France on behalf of Cardinal Richelieu.
- 1692 – Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Tituba were brought before local magistrates in Salem Village, Massachusetts, beginning the Salem witch trials.
- 1811 – Muhammad Ali Pasha (pictured), Wāli of the Ottoman province of Egypt, killed the leaders of the Mamluk Sultanate to seize power, founding a dynasty that would last until 1952.
- 1958 – Archbishop of Chicago Samuel Stritch was appointed Pro-Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of Faith, thus becoming the first American to head a dicastery of the Roman Curia.
- 2007 – Danish police forcibly evicted squatters from the Ungdomshuset in Copenhagen, prompting widespread rioting that would result in 690 arrests in three days.
More anniversaries: February 29 – March 1 – March 2
March 2: The Nineteen Day Fast begins (Bahá'í Faith)
- 1836 – Texas Revolution: At a convention of delegates in Washington-on-the-Brazos, the Mexican state of Texas adopted a declaration of independence, establishing the Republic of Texas.
- 1939 – Italian Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli was elected as Pope and took the name Pius XII (pictured).
- 1943 – Second World War: Australian and American air forces attacked and destroyed a large convoy of the Japanese Navy in the Bismarck Sea north of Papua New Guinea.
- 1949 – The B-50 Superfortress Lucky Lady II landed in Fort Worth, Texas, after completing the first non-stop around-the-world airplane flight in 94 hours and one minute.
- 1978 – Aboard the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz 28, Czech Vladimír Remek became the first person not from the Soviet Union or the United States to go into space.
More anniversaries: March 1 – March 2 – March 3
March 3: Liberation Day in Bulgaria (1878); Hinamatsuri in Japan
- 1284 – The Statute of Rhuddlan incorporated the Principality of Wales into England.
- 1875 – The first indoor game of ice hockey was played at the Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal by James Creighton and McGill University students.
- 1875 – French composer Georges Bizet's opera Carmen , based on the novella of the same title by Prosper Mérimée, premiered at the Opéra Comique in Paris.
- 1924 – The Free State of Fiume (flag pictured), a short-lived independent free state located in the modern city of Rijeka, Croatia, was annexed by the Kingdom of Italy.
- 1943 – Second World War: During a German aerial attack on London, 173 people were killed in a stampede while trying to enter Bethnal Green tube station, which was being used as an air raid shelter.
More anniversaries: March 2 – March 3 – March 4
.jpg)
- 306 – Roman Herculian guard Adrian of Nicomedia, who had converted to Christianity after being impressed with the faith of Christians that he had been torturing, was martyred.
- 1386 – Grand Duke of Lithuania Jogaila was crowned Władysław II Jagiełło (pictured), King of Poland, beginning the Jagiellon dynasty.
- 1899 – Cyclone Mahina struck Bathurst Bay, Queensland, killing over 400 people, the deadliest natural disaster in Australian history.
- 1918 – The first known case of the so-called Spanish flu was first observed at Fort Riley, Kansas.
- 1980 – Robert Mugabe of the Zimbabwe African National Union was elected to head the first government in Zimbabwe.
More anniversaries: March 3 – March 4 – March 5
March 5: Casimir Pulaski Day in Illinois (2012); Lei Feng Day in the People's Republic of China; St Piran's Day in Cornwall (United Kingdom)
- 1496 – King Henry VII of England issued letters patent to John Cabot and his sons, authorising them to explore unknown lands.
- 1936 – The prototype of the Supermarine Spitfire, a British single-seat fighter that was later used by the Royal Air Force and many other Allied countries during the Second World War, flew for the first time.
- 1960 – Cuban photographer Alberto Korda took his iconic photograph of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara (pictured).
- 1981 – The ZX81, a pioneering British home computer, was launched by Sinclair Research and went on to sell over 1.5 million units around the world.
- 1999 – Paul Okalik was elected as the first Premier of the Canadian territory of Nunavut.
More anniversaries: March 4 – March 5 – March 6
March 6: Independence Day in Ghana (1957)
- 1834 – York, Upper Canada, was incorporated as Toronto.
- 1836 – Texas Revolution: Mexican forces captured the Alamo in San Antonio from the Texans after a 13-day siege.
- 1899 – The German chemical and pharmaceutical company Bayer registered Aspirin (pills pictured) as a trademark.
- 1987 – In the worst maritime disaster involving a British registered ship in peacetime since 1919, the ferry Herald of Free Enterprise capsized while leaving the harbour of Zeebrugge, Belgium, killing 193 on board.
- 1988 – In Operation Flavius, the British Special Air Service killed Provisional Irish Republican Army volunteers Daniel McCann, Seán Savage and Mairéad Farrell while they were conspiring to bomb a parade of British military bands in Gibraltar.
More anniversaries: March 5 – March 6 – March 7
March 7: Teachers' Day in Albania
- 161 – Following the death of Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus agreed to become co-Emperors in an unprecedented arrangement in the Roman Empire.
- 1850 – In support of the Compromise of 1850, United States Senator Daniel Webster gave his "Seventh of March" speech, which was so unpopular among his constituency he was forced to resign.
- 1871 – José Paranhos, Viscount of Rio Branco (pictured), became Prime Minister of the Empire of Brazil, starting a four-year rule, the longest in the state's history.
- 1914 – Prussian William of Wied began his short reign as sovereign prince of the newly independent state of Albania.
- 2009 – The Kepler space observatory, designed to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars, was launched.
More anniversaries: March 6 – March 7 – March 8
March 8: International Women's Day; Mother's Day in various European countries
- 1010 – Persian poet Ferdowsi completed his masterpiece, the Shahnameh, the national epic of Iran and related societies.
- 1618 – German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler discovered the third law of planetary motion.
- 1655 – The court of Northampton County, Colony of Virginia, made John Casor the first legally recognized slave in England's North American colonies.
- 1910 – French aviatrix Raymonde de Laroche (pictured) became the first woman to receive a pilot's licence.
- 1966 – Nelson's Pillar, a large granite pillar with a statue of Lord Nelson on top in Dublin, Ireland, was destroyed by a bomb.
- 1978 – BBC Radio 4 transmitted the first episode of English author and dramatist Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a science fiction radio series that was later adapted into novels, a television series, and other media formats.
More anniversaries: March 7 – March 8 – March 9
- 1009 – The first known record of the name of Lithuania appeared in an entry in the annals of the monastery of Quedlinburg (in modern Germany).
- 1842 – Nabucco, an opera by Italian Romantic composer Giuseppe Verdi that established his reputation as a composer, premiered at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.
- 1842 – The first documented discovery of gold in California occurred at Rancho San Francisco, six years before the California Gold Rush.
- 1862 – American Civil War: In the world's first major battle between two powered ironclad warships (pictured), the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia, fought to a draw near the mouth of Hampton Roads in Virginia.
- 1945 – World War II: A bomb raid on Tokyo by American B-29 heavy bombers started a firestorm, killing over 100,000 people.
- 1956 – In Tbilisi, Georgia, Soviet military troops suppressed mass demonstrations against Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization policy.
More anniversaries: March 8 – March 9 – March 10
- 1607 – Susenyos defeated the combined armies of Yaqob and Abuna Petros II at the Battle of Gol in Gojjam, making him Emperor of Ethiopia.
- 1830 – The Royal Dutch East Indies Army, the military force maintained by the Netherlands in its colony of the Netherlands East Indies, was established by royal decree.
- 1952 – Forbidden by law to seek re-election, former President Fulgencio Batista (pictured) staged a coup d'état to resume control in Cuba.
- 1965 – Thomas Playford, Premier of South Australia, left office after 27 years, the longest term of any democratically elected leader in the history of Australia.
- 2006 – NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter attained orbit around Mars.
More anniversaries: March 9 – March 10 – March 11
March 11: Independence Day in Lithuania (1990)
- 222 – Disgusted with Roman emperor Elagabalus's disregard for Roman religious traditions and sexual taboos, the Praetorian Guard assassinated him and his mother Julia Soaemias, mutilated their bodies, and threw them in the Tiber River.
- 1879 – Shō Tai (pictured), the last king of the Ryūkyū Kingdom, abdicated when the kingdom was annexed by Japan and converted to Okinawa Prefecture.
- 1941 – Second World War: The Lend-Lease Act was signed into law, allowing the United States to supply the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, China, France and other Allied nations with vast amounts of war material.
- 1966 – President Sukarno of Indonesia was forced to sign the Presidential Order Supersemar, giving Suharto the authority to take whatever measures he deemed necessary to restore order during the Indonesian killings.
- 1993 – Janet Reno was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the first female Attorney General of the United States.
More anniversaries: March 10 – March 11 – March 12
March 12: Independence Day in Mauritius (1968); Arbor Day in China and Taiwan
- 515 BCE – Construction of the Temple in Jerusalem was completed.
- 538 – Vitiges, king of the Ostrogoths, ended his siege of Rome, leaving the city in the hands of the victorious Roman general, Belisarius.
- 1622 – Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier, founders of the Jesuits, were canonized as saints by Pope Gregory XV.
- 1930 – Gandhi began the Dandi March (pictured), a 24-day walk to defy the British tax on salt in colonial India.
- 1947 – Cold War: U.S. President Harry S. Truman proclaimed the Truman Doctrine to help stem the spread of Communism.
- 1971 – The Turkish Armed Forces executed a coup by memorandum, forcing the resignation of Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel.
More anniversaries: March 11 – March 12 – March 13
- 1781 – German-born British astronomer and composer William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus (pictured) while in the garden of his house in Bath, Somerset, thinking it was a comet.
- 1845 – German composer Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, one of the most popular and most frequently performed violin concertos of all time, was first played in Leipzig, with violinist Ferdinand David as soloist.
- 1884 – Mahdist War: Forces loyal to self-proclaimed Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad began a 319-day siege of a combined Anglo-Egyptian force defending Khartoum, Sudan.
- 1964 – American Kitty Genovese was murdered, reportedly in view of neighbors who did nothing to help her, prompting research into the bystander effect.
- 1988 – The Seikan Tunnel, the longest and deepest tunnel in the world, opened between the cities of Hakodate and Aomori, Japan.
More anniversaries: March 12 – March 13 – March 14
March 14: New Year's Day in the Sikh Nanakshahi calendar; White Day in Japan; Commonwealth Day in the Commonwealth of Nations (2011); Pi Day
- 1757 – British Royal Navy Admiral John Byng was court-martialled and executed by firing squad for breaching the Articles of War when he failed to "do his utmost" during the Battle of Minorca at the start of the Seven Years' War.
- 1794 – American inventor Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, the first ever machine that quickly and easily separated cotton fibers from their seedpods.
- 1885 – The Mikado (poster pictured), Gilbert and Sullivan's most frequently performed Savoy Opera, debuted at the Savoy Theatre in London.
- 1991 – The "Birmingham Six", wrongly convicted of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings in England, were released after sixteen years in prison.
- 2008 – A series of riots, protests, and demonstrations erupted in Lhasa and elsewhere in Tibet.
More anniversaries: March 13 – March 14 – March 15
March 15: Ides of March; National Day in Hungary (1848); Hōnen Matsuri in Japan
- 44 BC – Dictator Julius Caesar of the Roman Republic was stabbed to death by Marcus Junius Brutus and several other Roman senators.
- 1917 – Tsar Nicholas II (pictured) of Russia was forced to abdicate in the February Revolution, ending three centuries of Romanov rule.
- 1943 – World War II: German forces recaptured Kharkov after four days of house-to-house fighting against Soviet troops, ending the month-long Third Battle of Kharkov.
- 1972 – The Godfather, a gangster film based on the novel of the same name by Mario Puzo and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, was released.
- 1985 – The company Symbolics became the first ever entity, individual or party to register a .com top-level domain name: symbolics.com.
More anniversaries: March 14 – March 15 – March 16
- 597 BC – Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II captured Jerusalem and installed Zedekiah as King of Judah.
- 1190 – Around 150 Jews inside York Castle in York, England, committed mass suicide rather than be killed by a mob.
- 1621 – Samoset became the first Native American to make contact with the Pilgrims when he strolled straight through the middle of the encampment at Plymouth Colony and greeted them in English.
- 1978 – The oil tanker Amoco Cadiz (pictured) split in two after running aground on Portsall Rocks, about 3 miles (5 km) off the coast of Brittany, France, resulting in one of the largest oil spills ever.
- 1988 – Iran-Iraq War: Iraqi forces began attacking the Kurdish town of Halabja with chemical weapons, killing up to 5,000 people.
More anniversaries: March 15 – March 16 – March 17
March 17: Saint Patrick's Day; Fast of Esther (Judaism, 2011)
- 1776 – American Revolutionary War: The British Army garrison in Boston, Massachusetts, withdrew from the city, ending the 11-month Siege of Boston.
- 1891 – The transatlantic steamship SS Utopia (pictured) accidentally collided with the battleship HMS Anson in the Bay of Gibraltar, sinking in less than twenty minutes and killing 562.
- 1942 – The Holocaust: The first mass killings of Jews began at Bełżec extermination camp in occupied Poland, the first of the Aktion Reinhard camps to begin operation.
- 1955 – Six thousand people in Montreal rioted to protest the suspension of ice hockey star Maurice Richard.
- 1957 – A plane crash on the slope of Mount Manunggal killed Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay and 24 others.
- 1992 – A car bomb destroyed the Israeli embassy and nearby buildings in Buenos Aires, killing 29 people and wounding 242 others.
More anniversaries: March 16 – March 17 – March 18
- 1241 – Mongol invasion of Poland: Mongols overwhelmed the Polish armies of Sandomierz and Kraków provinces in the Battle of Chmielnik and plundered the abandoned city of Kraków.
- 1892 – Canadian Governor General Lord Stanley of Preston pledged to donate what would become the Stanley Cup, today the oldest professional sports trophy in North America, as an award for Canada's top-ranking amateur ice hockey club.
- 1913 – King George I of Greece (pictured) was assassinated in Thessaloniki by Alexandros Schinas, who had no apparent motive.
- 1925 – The Tri-State Tornado spawned in Missouri, traveled over 219 miles (352 km) across Illinois and Indiana, and killed 695 along the way, making it the tornado with the longest continuous track ever recorded in the world and the deadliest in U.S. history.
- 1996 – The deadliest fire in Philippine history burned a nightclub in Quezon City, leaving 162 dead.
More anniversaries: March 17 – March 18 – March 19
March 19: Purim begins at sunset (Judaism, 2011); Saint Joseph's Day in Western Christianity; Father's Day in various countries
- 1279 – The Song Dynasty in Imperial China ended with a victory by the Yuan Dynasty at the Battle of Yamen off the coast of Xinhui, Guangdong Province.
- 1687 – The search for the mouth of the Mississippi River led by French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle ended with a mutiny and his murder in present-day Texas.
- 1808 – Charles IV of Spain abdicated in favour of his son, Ferdinand VII.
- 1941 – The Tuskegee Airmen, the first all-African American unit of the United States Army Air Corps, was activated.
- 1945 – World War II: A single Japanese aircraft bombed the American aircraft carrier USS Franklin (pictured), killing over 700 of her crew and crippling the ship.
More anniversaries: March 18 – March 19 – March 20
March 20: Purim ends at sundown (Judaism, 2011); Nowruz in Iran, Central Asia, and Zoroastrianism (2011); Independence Day in Tunisia (1956)
- 235 – Maximinus Thrax succeeded to the throne of the Roman Empire, the first of the so-called barracks emperors who gained power by virtue of his command of the army.
- 1852 – American author Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was first published, profoundly affecting attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the United States.
- 1923 –The Arts Club of Chicago hosted the opening of Pablo Picasso's first United States showing, entitled Original Drawings by Pablo Picasso, becoming an early proponent of modern art in the U.S.
- 1944 – World War II: Four thousand U.S. Marines made a landing on Emirau Island in the Bismarck Archipelago to develop an airbase as part of Operation Cartwheel.
- 1987 – The antiretroviral drug zidovudine (AZT) (chemical structure pictured) became the first antiviral medication approved for use against HIV and AIDS.
More anniversaries: March 19 – March 20 – March 21
March 21: Independence Day in Namibia (1990); Naw-Rúz in the Bahá'í calendar; World Down Syndrome Day; Shushan Purim in Jerusalem and Susa (Judaism, 2011); Mother's Day in the Arab world
- 1556 – Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, one of the founders of Anglicanism, was burnt at the stake in Oxford, England, for heresy.
- 1909 – The remains of the Báb, one of three central figures of the Bahá'í Faith, were interred by `Abdu'l-Bahá in Haifa, present-day Israel.
- 1943 – Second World War: Wehrmacht officer Rudolf Christoph von Gersdorff attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler by suicide bombing, but had to abort the plan at the last minute.
- 2002 – British schoolgirl Amanda Dowler was abducted on her way home from Heathside School in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey.
- 2006 – A man using a hammer smashed the statue of Phra Phrom (pictured) in the Erawan Shrine in Bangkok, Thailand, and was subsequently beaten to death by bystanders.
More anniversaries: March 20 – March 21 – March 22
- 1638 – The Massachusetts Bay Colony expelled Anne Hutchinson from its ranks for dissenting from Puritan orthodoxy.
- 1739 – Under orders from Shah of Iran Nader Shah (pictured) to plunder Delhi, India, Persian troops killed at least 20,000 Indians, forcing Mughal Emperor Muhammad Shah to beg for mercy.
- 1933 – The Holocaust: The construction of the first Nazi German concentration camp at Dachau was completed.
- 1984 – In what would be the longest and costliest criminal trial in United States history, teachers at the McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, were falsely charged with satanic ritual abuse of schoolchildren.
- 1995 – Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov of the Soyuz programme returned from the Mir space station after 437 days in space, setting a record for the longest spaceflight.
More anniversaries: March 21 – March 22 – March 23
March 23: Republic Day in Pakistan (1956); Day of Hungarian–Polish Friendship in Hungary and Poland
- 1775 – American Revolution: Patrick Henry made his "Give me Liberty, or give me Death!" speech to the Virginia House of Burgesses, urging the legislature to take military action against the British Empire.
- 1905 – 1,500 Cretans, led by Eleftherios Venizelos (pictured), met at the village of Theriso to call for the island's unification with Greece, beginning the Theriso revolt.
- 1931 – Bhagat Singh, one of the most influential revolutionaries of the Indian independence movement, and two others were executed by British authorities.
- 1991 – The Sierra Leone Civil War began when the Revolutionary United Front, with support from the special forces of Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia, invaded Sierra Leone in an attempt to overthrow Joseph Saidu Momoh.
- 2001 – The Russian Federal Space Agency deorbited the 15-year-old space station Mir, causing it to reenter the Earth's atmosphere and break up over the Pacific Ocean.
More anniversaries: March 22 – March 23 – March 24
March 24: Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice in Argentina
- 1603 – King James VI of Scotland acceded to the throne of England and Ireland, becoming James I of England and unifying the crowns of the kingdoms for the first time.
- 1869 – The last of Māori leader Titokowaru's forces surrendered to the New Zealand government, ending his uprising.
- 1882 – German physician Robert Koch announced the discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (pictured), a bacterium that causes tuberculosis.
- 1980 – One day after giving a sermon in which he made a plea to Salvadoran soldiers to stop carrying out the government's repression, Archbishop Óscar Romero was assassinated in San Salvador.
- 2008 – The Bhutan Peace and Prosperity Party, led by Jigme Thinley, won 45 out of 47 seats in the National Assembly of Bhutan in the country's first-ever general election.
More anniversaries: March 23 – March 24 – March 25
March 25: Feast of the Annunciation in Christianity; Independence Day in Greece (1821)
.jpg)
- 421 – According to legend, the city of Venice (in modern Italy) was founded exactly at the stroke of noon with the dedication of the first church, that of San Giacomo (pictured) at the islet of Rialto.
- 1911 – The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City killed more than 140 garment workers, many of whom could not escape the burning building because the managers had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits.
- 1949 – The Soviet Union began mass deportations of over 90,000 people from the Baltic states to Siberia.
- 1975 – King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was shot and killed by his nephew Faisal bin Musa'id.
- 1995 – American computer programmer Ward Cunningham established the first wiki site, the WikiWikiWeb.
More anniversaries: March 24 – March 25 – March 26
March 26: Independence Day in Bangladesh (1971); Earth Hour (20:30 local time in various areas, 2011)
- 1830 – The Book of Mormon, the defining sacred text of the Latter Day Saint movement, was first published.
- 1953 – Jonas Salk (pictured) announced the successful test of his polio vaccine on a small group of adults and children.
- 1974 – A group of peasant women in Chamoli district, Uttarakhand, India, used their bodies to surround trees in order to prevent loggers from felling them, giving rise to the Chipko movement.
- 1979 – By signing the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty, Egypt became the first Arab country to officially recognize Israel.
- 1997 – Police in Rancho Santa Fe, California, discovered the bodies of 39 members of Heaven's Gate who had died in an apparent cult suicide.
More anniversaries: March 25 – March 26 – March 27
March 27: Tatmadaw Day in Burma
- 1782 – Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, a leading British Whig Party statesman, began his second non-consecutive term as Prime Minister of Great Britain.
- 1884 – Outraged by a jury's decision to convict a man of manslaughter instead of murder, a mob in Cincinnati, Ohio, began three days of rioting.
- 1958 – Nikita Khrushchev (pictured) became Premier of the Soviet Union following the death of Joseph Stalin.
- 1981 – The Solidarity movement in Poland staged a warning strike, the biggest strike in the history of the Eastern Bloc, in which at least 12 million Poles walked off their jobs for four hours.
- 1998 – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the drug sildenafil, better known by the trade name Viagra, for use as a treatment for erectile dysfunction, the first pill to be approved for this condition in the United States.
- 2009 – The dam holding Situ Gintung, an artificial lake in Tangerang District, Indonesia, failed, resulting in floods killing at least 100 people.
More anniversaries: March 26 – March 27 – March 28
March 28: Teachers' Day in the Czech Republic; Serfs Emancipation Day in Tibet
-2.jpg)
- 193 – Praetorian Guards assassinated Roman Emperor Pertinax and sold the throne in an auction to Didius Julianus.
- 1802 – German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Matthäus Olbers discovered 2 Pallas, the second asteroid known to man.
- 1942 – Second World War: In occupied France, British naval forces successfully disabled the key port of Saint-Nazaire.
- 1979 – A partial core meltdown of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station (pictured) near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, resulted in the release of an estimated 43,000 curies (1.59 PBq) of radioactive krypton to the environment.
- 2003 – Invasion of Iraq: In a friendly fire incident, two members of the United States Air Force attacked the United Kingdom's Blues and Royals of the Household Cavalry, killing one and injuring five British soldiers.
More anniversaries: March 27 – March 28 – March 29
March 29: Boganda Day in the Central African Republic
- 1461 – Yorkist troops (emblem pictured) defeated Lancastrian forces at the Battle of Towton in Yorkshire, England, the largest battle in the Wars of the Roses up until that time with approximately 20,000 casualties.
- 1882 – The Knights of Columbus, the world's largest Catholic fraternal service organization, was founded by Michael J. McGivney in New Haven, Connecticut.
- 1942 – Second World War: The British Royal Air Force completed a bombing raid of Lübeck, the first major success for RAF Bomber Command against a German city.
- 1946 – Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, one of Mexico's leading universities, was founded.
- 1982 – Queen Elizabeth II gave Royal Assent to the Canada Act 1982, which ended all remaining dependence of Canada on the United Kingdom by a process known as "patriation".
More anniversaries: March 28 – March 29 – March 30
March 30: Land Day for Palestinians
- 1282 – Sicilians began to rebel against the rule of the Angevin King Charles I of Naples, starting the War of the Sicilian Vespers.
- 1822 – The United States merged East Florida and West Florida to create the Florida Territory.
- 1940 – Second Sino-Japanese War: Wang Jingwei (pictured) was officially installed by Japan as head of a puppet state in China.
- 1972 – Vietnam War: North Vietnamese forces began the Easter Offensive in an attempt to gain as much territory and destroy as many units of the South Vietnamese Army as possible.
- 1981 – Trying to impress actress Jodie Foster, obsessed fan John Hinckley, Jr. shot and wounded U.S. President Ronald Reagan and three others outside the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C.
More anniversaries: March 29 – March 30 – March 31
March 31: César Chávez Day in various U.S. states; King Nangklao Memorial Day in Thailand
- 1146 – French abbot Bernard of Clairvaux preached a sermon to a crowd at Vézelay, with King Louis VII in attendance, urging the necessity of a Second Crusade.
- 1822 – Greek War of Independence: Ottoman troops began the massacre of over 20,000 Greeks on the island of Chios.
- 1854 – U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew C. Perry (pictured) and the Tokugawa shogunate signed the Convention of Kanagawa, forcing the opening of Japanese ports to American trade.
- 1889 – The Eiffel Tower was inaugurated in Paris, becoming a global icon of France and one of the most recognizable structures in the world.
- 1910 – The six English towns of Burslem, Tunstall, Stoke-upon-Trent, Hanley, Fenton and Longton, amalgamated to form a single county borough.
More anniversaries: March 30 – March 31 – April 1
Selected anniversaries/On this day archive
January – February – March – April – May – June – July – August – September – October – November – December
Recent changes to Selected anniversaries – Selected anniversaries editing guidelines
It is now 19:18 on Sunday, February 12, 2012 (UTC) – Purge cache for this page
