Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/March 31

This is a list of selected March 31 anniversaries that appear in the "On this day" section of the Main Page. To suggest a new item, in most cases, you can be bold and edit this page. Please read the selected anniversaries guidelines before making your edit. However, if your addition might be controversial or on a day that is or will soon be on the Main Page, please post your suggestion on the talk page instead.

Please note that the events listed on the Main Page are chosen based more on relative article quality and to maintain a mix of topics, not based solely on how important or significant their subjects are. Only four to five events are posted at a time and thus not everything that is "most important and significant" can be listed. In addition, an event is generally not posted this year if it is also the subject of the scheduled featured article, featured list or picture of the day.

To report an error when this appears on the Main Page, see Main Page errors. Please remember that this list defers to the supporting articles, so it is best to achieve consensus and make any necessary changes there first.

← March 30	April 1 →

Staging area

Images

Use only ONE image at a time

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  Replica of Richard Pearse's aeroplane on display at the South Canterbury Museum in Timaru
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  Eiffel Tower
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  Eiffel Tower
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  Eiffel Tower
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  João Goulart
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  Matthew C. Perry
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  Woodcut picture of Matthew C. Perry
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  Cartoon of the riot during Schoenberg's concert

Ineligible

Blurb	Reason
Freedom Day in Malta	stub
1492 – The Catholic Monarchs of Spain issued the Alhambra Decree, ordering all Jews to convert to Christianity or be expelled from the country.	refimprove section
1717 – A sermon on The Nature of the Kingdom of Christ by Benjamin Hoadly, the Bishop of Bangor, ignited the Bangorian Controversy, a theological argument within the Church of England about whether the church should have any disciplinary authority.	unreferenced section
1778 – English explorer James Cook landed on Vancouver Island and claimed it for Great Britain.	refimprove sections
1903 – New Zealand inventor Richard Pearse reportedly flew in one of the first powered flying machines for a distance of several hundred metres, about nine months before the Wright brothers flew their Wright Flyer.	unreferenced section, refimprove section
1917 – The Danish West Indies became the U.S. Virgin Islands after the United States paid Denmark US$25 million for the Caribbean islands.	lots of CN tags
1931 – A TWA Fokker trimotor crashed in Chase County, Kansas, U.S., and killed eight people, including football coach Knute Rockne, stimulating advances in aircraft design and development.	refimprove
1951 – The first UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States, was delivered to the United States Census Bureau.	refimprove section
1964 – The Brazilian Armed Forces overthrew President João Goulart, establishing a military dictatorship that lasted 21 years.	primary sources and OR section

Eligible

• 1146 – French abbot Bernard of Clairvaux preached a sermon to a crowd at a council in Vézelay, with King Louis VII in attendance, urging the necessity of a Second Crusade.
• 1521 – Ferdinand Magellan and fifty members of his crew went ashore at present-day Limasawa to participate in the first Catholic Mass in the Philippines.
• 1854 – U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew C. Perry and the Tokugawa shogunate signed the Convention of Kanagawa, forcing the opening of Japanese ports to American trade.
• 1889 – The Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, was inaugurated.
• 1901 – A magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck the Black Sea, the most powerful ever recorded in the area.
• 1910 – Six English towns amalgamated to form a single county borough called Stoke-on-Trent, the first union of its type.
• 1913 – Arnold Schoenberg conducted the Vienna Concert Society in a concert of expressionist music that so shocked the audience that they began to riot.
• 1921 – The Australian Air Force was formed, replacing the short-lived Australian Air Corps and separating it from the Army.
• 1930 – To avoid government censorship, Hollywood movie studios instituted their own set of industry censorship guidelines, popularly known as the Hays Code.
• 1970 – Nine Japanese communists armed with samurai swords and pipe bombs hijacked Japan Airlines Flight 351 en route from Tokyo to Fukuoka.
• 1995 – American singer-songwriter Selena, known as the "queen of Tejano music", was murdered by the president of her fan club, Yolanda Saldívar, in Corpus Christi, Texas, deeply affecting the Latino community.
• Born/died: | Guru Angad |b|1504| Anne Hyde |d|1671| Panoutsos Notaras |b.or|1740; 1752| Pieter Burman the Elder |d|1741| Franz Abt |d|1885| J. P. Morgan |d|1913| Liz Claiborne |b|1929| Al Gore |b|1948| Ewan McGregor |b|1971| Frank Perdue |d|2005| Mary Greyeyes |d|2011| Ahmad Sayyed Javadi |d|2013

March 31: Cesar Chavez Day in various U.S. states (1927)

USS Missouri

• 1761 – Lisbon experienced its second major earthquake in six years, with effects felt as far north as Scotland.
• 1899 – Philippine–American War: Malolos, capital of the First Philippine Republic, was captured by American forces.
• 1942 – Second World War: Because of a mutiny by Indian soldiers against their British officers, Japanese troops captured Christmas Island without any resistance.
• 1992 – USS Missouri (pictured), the last active United States Navy battleship, was decommissioned in Long Beach, California.
• 2018 – Nikol Pashinyan began his protest walk, starting in the city of Gyumri, opening the 2018 Armenian revolution.

• Pope Benedict XIV (b. 1675)
• Edward FitzGerald (b. 1809)
• Choor Singh (d. 2009)

More anniversaries:

• March 30
• March 31
• April 1