Portal:United States/On this day/March 31
On this day for the United States
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Events
- 1774 - American Revolutionary War: The Kingdom of Great Britain orders the port of Boston, Massachusetts closed in the Boston Port Act.
- 1854 - Commodore Matthew Perry signs the Treaty of Kanagawa with the Japanese government, opening the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to American trade.
- 1906 - The Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (later National Collegiate Athletic Association) is established to set rules for amateur sports in the United States.
- 1917 - The United States takes possession of the Danish West Indies after paying $25 million to Denmark, and renames the territory the U.S. Virgin Islands.
- 1918 - Daylight saving time goes into effect in the United States for the first time.
- 1930 - The Motion Pictures Production Code is instituted, imposing strict guidelines on the treatment of sex, crime, religion and violence in motion pictures for the next thirty eight years.
- 1933 - The Civilian Conservation Corps is established with the mission to relieve rampant unemployment.
- 1951 - The first commercial US made computer, UNIVAC I, was delivered to the United States Census Bureau.
- 1968 - President Lyndon B. Johnson announces he will not run for re-election.
- 1970 - Explorer 1 re-enters the Earth's atmosphere (after 12 years in orbit).
- 1980 - The Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific railroad operate final train after ordered to be liquidated due to bankruptcy and debt owed to creditors.
- 1992 - USS Missouri (BB-63), the last active US Navy Battleship, is decommissioned in Long Beach, California.
- 1995 - In Corpus Christi, Texas, Latin superstar Selena Quintanilla Perez is shot and killed by Yolanda Saldivar, the president of her own fan club.
- 1998 - Netscape releases the code base of its browser under an open-source license agreement; the project is given the code name Mozilla and would eventually be spun off into the non-profit Mozilla Foundation.
- 2004 - In Fallujah, Iraq, 4 American private military contractors working for Blackwater USA, are killed and their bodies mutilated after being ambushed.