Historical Events On March 13 - On This Day

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• Summary
• Events
• Birthdays
• Deaths
• Weddings
• Film & TV
• Music
• Sport

• 483 Felix III begins his reign as Catholic Pope
• 607 12th recorded perihelion passage of Halley's Comet
• 624 Battle of Badr: Muhammad's Muslim forces win a significant victory over the Meccan army

• 1560 Spanish fleet occupies Djerba near Tripoli
• 1564 Influential politician Cardinal Granvelle flees Brussels
• 1567 Battle of Oosterweel: Spanish mercenary troops destroy a band of Dutch rebels near Antwerp, start of the Eighty Years' War

1569 Battle of Jarnac: French Catholic forces led by Gaspard de Saulx and the Duke of Anjou defeat the Huguenots led by Louis de Bourbon and Gaspard de Coligny

• 1591 Battle at Tondibi: Moroccan army under Judar [Jawdar] defeats Sultan Askia Ishaq II of Songhai
• 1634 First meeting of what would become the Academie Francaise in Paris at the house of Valentin Conrart
• 1639 Cambridge College, Massachusetts, renamed Harvard for clergyman John Harvard
• 1656 Jews are denied the right to build a synagogue in New Amsterdam
• 1677 Massachusetts gains title to Maine for $6,000
• 1735 1st US Moravian bishop, David Nitschmann, consecrated in Germany
• 1759 27th recorded perihelion passage of Halley's Comet
• 1772 Gotthold Lessing's "Emilia Galotti" premieres in Brunswick
• 1778 France informs Great Britain of their Treaty of Alliance with the US; Great Britain responds with a declaration of war against France four days later

1781 William Herschel sees what he thinks is a "comet" but actually discovers the planet Uranus

• 1790 John Martin, 1st American-born actor, performs in Philadelphia
• 1797 Luigi Cherubini's opéra-comique "Médée" premieres at the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris, France
• 1846 Friedrich Hebbel's play "Maria Magdalena" premieres in Königsberg
• 1852 Uncle Sam cartoon figure debuts in the New York Lantern Weekly

1865 Confederate President Jefferson Davis signs bill authorizing use of slaves as soldiers during last weeks of the US Civil War

1868 Senate begins US President Andrew Johnson's impeachment trial

• 1869 Arkansas legislature passes anti-Ku Klux Klan law

1877 American Chester Greenwood patents earmuffs after inventing them at age 15

• 1878 Oxford University defeats Cambridge University in their 1st golf match

1881 Alexander II of Russia is assassinated by members of far-left terror group 'People's Will' who throw a bomb at him in the city of St. Petersburg

• 1884 Siege of Khartoum, Sudan, begins by Mahdist forces and lasts ten months
• 1888 Great Blizzard of 1888 rages across the east coast of the USA and Canada
• 1894 J. L. Johnstone of England invents the starting gate for horse racing
• 1897 San Diego State University is founded.
• 1900 British troops occupy Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State (Boer War)
• 1900 In France the length of the working day for women and children is limited by law to 11 hours.
• 1901 Amidst increasing anti-gambling sentiment, wagering on horse racing is banned in San Francisco, CA; Ingleside Race Track closes March 15
• 1903 Fall of the Sokoto Caliphate in Northern Nigeria, British claim supremacy over 500,000 square miles
• 1904 Bronze statue of Christ on Argentine-Chilean border dedicated

1905 Mata Hari first performs her dance act at the Guimet Museum, Paris

• 1911 Ivan Caryll's musical "The Pink Lady" premieres at the New Amsterdam Theatre, NYC; runs for 336 performances
• 1911 Stanley Cup, Dey's Arena, Ottawa, ON: Ottawa Senators beat Galt (ON), 7-4
• 1911 The Colonial-Born and Settlers Indian Association is formed at a meeting in Durban, South Africa, and has at its aim to fight the infamous 3 poll tax
• 1912 Bulgaria and Serbia conclude an alliance pact ostensibly against Austria, but it secretly provides for a possible war against Turkey
• 1912 Stanley Cup, Quebec Skating Rink, Quebec City, Quebec: Quebec Bulldogs rout Moncton Victorias (NB), 8-0 for a 2-0 sweep of the challenge series
• 1913 Kansas legislature approved censorship of motion pictures
• 1915 Brooklyn Robins manager Wilbert Robinson tries to catch a baseball dropped from an airplane, but the pilot substitutes a grapefruit
• 1918 American Red Magen David (Jewish Red Cross) forms

1918 Leon Trotsky gains control of the Red Army

• 1920 After the German government is forced to cut its army to 10,000 men, military groups plot an unsuccessful coup - a revolt ended by a general strike
• 1921 Mongolia (formerly Outer Mongolia) declares independence from China
• 1922 WRR-AM in Dallas TX begins radio transmissions
• 1923 American inventor Lee de Forest demonstrates his sound-on-film moving pictures (NYC)
• 1925 Tennessee makes it unlawful to teach evolution
• 1928 Rudolph Friml's musical "Three Musketeers" premieres in NYC
• 1930 Clyde Tombaugh announces the discovery of Pluto at Lowell Observatory
• 1933 American banks allowed to reopen after a government imposed bank holiday

1933 Joseph Goebbels becomes Nazi Germany's Minister of Information and Propaganda

• 1935 Driving tests introduced in Great Britain
• 1936 Romanian composer George Enescu's opera "Œdipe", inspired by the mythological tale of "Oedipus the King" premieres in Paris, with French libretto by Edmond Fleg
• 1938 In a process known as Anschluss, Austria is annexed into Nazi Germany
• 1938 World News Roundup is broadcast for the first time on CBS Radio in the United States.
• 1940 Finland-Russian cease fire signed, the Winter War ends. Finland gives up Karelische
• 1941 Fons de Boungne and Corneil Dombret found AGRA (Amis du Grand Reich Allemand (Friends of the Greater German Reich)) in Begium
• 1942 Julia Flikke of the Nurse Corps, becomes 1st woman colonel in US army
• 1943 Baseball approves official ball (with cork & balata)

1943 Failed assassin attempt on Adolf Hitler during Smolensk-Rastenburg flight

• 1943 Frank Dixon wins Knights of Columbus mile (4:09.6)

1943 Nazis liquidate the Jewish ghetto in Kraków; Oskar Schindler with advance information, saves his workers by keeping them in his factory overnight

1944 USSR recognizes Italian government of Pietro Badoglio

1945 Dutch monarch Queen Wilhelmina returns to Netherlands at Eede, after five years in exile in the UK

• 1945 Nazi Sicherheitsdienst arrests Dutch resistance fighter Henry Werkman
• 1946 Paul-Henri Spaak (Belgium Socialist Party) forms Belgian government - then shortest Belgian government (ends 31 March)
• 1947 19th Academy Awards: "Best Years of Our Lives", De Havilland, March win

1950 General Motors Corporation reports record net earnings of $656,434,232

• 1951 2nd Dutch government of Willem Drees forms
• 1951 Israel demands DM 6.2 billion compensation from Germany

1954 Braves' Bobby Thomson breaks his ankle, he is replaced by Hank Aaron

1954 Viet Minh General Võ Nguyên Giáp opens the assault on French forces at Dien Bien Phu, northwest Vietnam

• 1955 Bir BSD Mahendra succeeds Tribhubana as king of Nepal

1956 American western film "The Searchers" is released directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne and Natalie Wood

• 1956 NZ bowl out WI for 77 at Eden Park to score their 1st Test Cricket win

1957 Bloody battles in Cuba after the student led "Revolutionary Directorate" attacks the presidential palace in Havana in an unsuccessful attempt to depose dictator Fulgencio Batista

• 1958 Government troops land in Sumatra Indonesia
• 1960 LPGA Titleholders Championship Women's Golf, Augusta CC: Fay Crocker of Uruguay wins by 7 strokes ahead of Kathy Cornelius
• 1960 NFL's Chicago Cardinals moves to St Louis
• 1960 White Sox unveil new road uniforms with players' names above number
• 1961 Elizabeth Gurley Finn (70) becomes President of US Communist Party

1961 Floyd Patterson overcomes two 1st round knockdowns to KO Ingemar Johansson in 6 in Miami Beach and retain the world heavyweight boxing crown

1961 JFK sets up the Alliance for Progress

• 1961 Landslide in USSR, kills 145
• 1961 Old type, black & white notes cease to be legal tender
• 1962 Yugoslavia grants 1,000 prisoners amnesty
• 1963 Indonesia & Netherlands reinstate diplomatic relations

1963 Paul Hindemith and Thornton Wilder's opera "Long Christmas Dinner" premieres in NYC

• 1963 Two Russian reconnaissance flights over Alaska
• 1964 Turkey threatens Cyprus with armed attack

1965 British guitarist Eric Clapton quits the Yardbirds due to the band moving away from traditional blues; Jeff Beck becomes his replacement

• 1965 The Beatles' "Eight Days a Week" single goes #1 and stays #1 for 2 weeks
• 1967 Congo sentences ex-premier Moise Tsjombe to death
• 1967 Robert Anderson's "You Know I Can't Hear You ..." premieres in NYC
• 1968 Beatles release single "Lady Madonna" in the UK
• 1968 Nerve gas accident at Skull Valley, Utah, kills 6,000 sheep
• 1969 Apollo 9 returns to Earth
• 1970 100 year Beehive anniversary ends in brawl in Amsterdam
• 1970 Digital Equipment Corp introduces PDP-11 minicomputer
• 1970 San Francisco city employees begin 4-day strike
• 1973 Minskoff Theater opens at 200 W 45th St NYC
• 1973 Syria adopts constitution
• 1974 Glenn Turner scores twin tons for NZ's 1st win against Aust

1977 Dennis Lillee takes 6-26, England all out 95 in Centenary Test

• 1978 Moluccan "suicide commandos" occupies Province house
• 1979 European Monetary System is established, ECU created
• 1979 Gairy dictatorship in Grenada overthrown by New Jewel Movement

1979 NHL New York Islanders Mike Bossy's 5th career hat trick

1980 American John Wayne Gacy receives the death sentence in Illinois for the murder of 12 people

1980 American speed skater Eric Heiden sets world record 1000m (1:13.60)

• 1980 Ford Motor Co found innocent in death of 3 women in a fiery Pinto

1982 ABC TV crime drama "T.J. Hooker" premieres, starring William Shatner

1982 Ice Dance Championship at Copenhagen won by Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean (Great Britain)

• 1982 Ice Pairs Championship at Copenhagen won by Baess & Thierbach (GDR)

1982 Men's Figure Skating Champions in Copenhagen won by Scott Hamilton (USA)

• 1982 Worlds Ladies' Figure Skating Champs in Copenhagen won by Elaine Zayak (USA) who lands 6 triple jumps
• 1983 1st USFL overtime game-Birmingham Stallions beat Oakld Invaders 20-14
• 1984 Last day of 1st-class cricket for G Chappell, R Marsh, B Laird

1985 Funeral services held for Konstantin Chernenko in Moscow

• 1985 Michael Secrest (US) begins 24-hr ride of 516 miles, 427 yards
• 1986 Microsoft has its initial public offering and lists on the NASDAQ
• 1986 Soyuz T-15 carries 2 cosmonauts to Soviet space station Mir
• 1987 Ice Dance Championship at Cincinnati won by Bestemianova & Bukin (URS)

1987 John Gotti, boss of the Gambino crime family, is acquitted of racketeering

• 1987 Washington Caps score 5 goals against Toronto in 3 mins & 3 secs
• 1988 Japan's Seikan Tunnel, the world's longest tunnel with an underwater segment (53.90 km in total) opens, connecting Honshu-Hokkaido by rail. The Channel Tunnel remains the longest underwater tunnel.
• 1989 27th shuttle, Discovery 8, launched, 1st woman to do the countdown
• 1989 FDA orders recall of all Chilean fruit in US
• 1989 US space shuttle STS-29 launched
• 1990 Nicholoas Braithwaite elected premier of Grenada
• 1991 Exxon pays $1-billion dollars in fines & cleanup of Valdez oil spill
• 1991 Saudi Arabia and Iran say OPEC oil production cuts will take effect April 1
• 1992 FCC rules companies can own 30 AM & 30 FM stations (formerly 12)
• 1992 Magnitude 6.7 earthquake strikes near Erzincan in eastern Turkey, killing over 500 people

1992 Martina Navratilova and Judy Nelson settle their galamony suit

1993 Australian Federal elections: Australian Labor Party headed by Paul Keating re-elected for a fifth term

• 1993 Blizzard of '93 hits north-east USA
• 1994 A third of voters in Austria vote for the far-right Freedom Party
• 1994 Oil tanker Nassia is hit by the cargo ship the Shipbroker in the Bosporus Strait, causing a huge fire, the deaths of 24 crew members, injuries to 29 and 10 missing
• 1994 President Mangope of Bophuthatswana deposed
• 1995 Anti-fascist Kazakhstan anti-parliament forms
• 1995 Hungarian Forint devalued 9%
• 1995 Istanbul police shoot dead 16 Alawite demonstrators
• 1996 At Dunblane Primary School, Scotland, 16 children and 1 teacher are shot dead by Thomas Hamilton who then commits suicide. Results in handguns being banned in the UK.
• 1996 Sri Lanka beats India in a Cricket World Cup semi-final as riots stop play at Eden Gardens in Calcutta
• 1997 India's Missionaries of Charity chooses Sister Nirmala to succeed Mother Teresa as its leader
• 1997 Phoenix lights seen at night over Phoenix, Arizona by hundreds of people, and by millions on television. Now a hotly debated controversy.

1999 Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis fight each other to a split draw after 12 rounds in one of the most controversial decisions in boxing history

• 2003 The journal Nature reports that 350,000-year-old footprints of an upright-walking human have been found in Italy

2004 Luciano Pavarotti performs in his final opera, "Tosca," at New York's Metropolitan Opera

2005 Bob Iger is named CEO of Walt Disney International, succeeding Michael Eisner

• 2005 Terry Ratzmann shoots and kills seven members of the Living Church of God, including the minister, at Sheraton Inn in Brookfield, Wisconsin, before killing himself

2006 21st Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees: Black Sabbath; Blondie; Miles Davis; Lynyrd Skynyrd; Sex Pistols; Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss

• 2008 Price of gold on the New York Mercantile Exchange hits $1,000.00 an ounce for the first time
• 2012 110 people are killed and 63 are missing after a ferry collides with an oil tanker near Dhaka, Bangladesh
• 2012 19 people are shot dead in a bus attack in Ethiopia
• 2012 28 people, including 22 children, are killed in a motorway bus crash near Sierre, Switzerland
• 2012 Encyclopaedia Britannica announces that it will no longer publish printed versions of its encyclopaedia
• 2013 10 people are killed by a suicide bombing in Kunduz province, Afghanistan
• 2013 Aleqa Hammond’s Siumut party wins the Greenland parliamentary elections
• 2013 An Embraer 821 aeroplane crashes and kills 9 people in Para, Brazil

2013 Argentine Catholic Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (76) is elected the new pope, taking the papal name Pope Francis

• 2013 North Korea shreds the Korean Armistice agreement
• 2013 The European Parliament rejects a European Union budget for the first time

2014 "Captain America: The Winter Soldier", directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, starring Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson, premieres in Los Angeles, California

• 2014 After protests earlier this month, the Israeli parliament votes 65 to 1 for legislation that ends exemptions from military service for ultra-Orthodox Jewish seminary students
• 2015 Cyclone Pam causes widespread damage in Vanuatu and the South Pacific, including 15-16 deaths.
• 2016 Suicide Bombing in Ankara, Turkey kills 37 people

2018 National Geographic magazine admits its past coverage was racist in issue to mark 50 years since death of Martin Luther King Jr.

2018 US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is fired via a tweet from President Donald Trump

• 2019 Australian Catholic Cardinal George Pell is sentenced to 6 years in prison for sexual abuse in Australia; conviction overturned in 2020
• 2019 Australian cricketers beat India by 35 runs in Delhi to win ODI series, 3-2; first Australian team to recover from 0-2 in a 5-match series; Usman Khawaja 100, Adam Zampa 3/46
• 2019 British MPs vote to reject a no-deal Brexit, defeating Theresa May's government 321 votes to 278

2019 California Governor Gavin Newsom announces an indefinite moratorium on the death sentence in the state, saying it discriminates against marginalized communities

2019 Home of civil rights activists Medgar and Myrlie Evers established as a national monument in Jackson, Mississippi, by President Donald Trump

• 2019 Member of the New York Gambino mob family Frank Cali shot dead outside his home, first killing of a high-ranking mobster since 1985
• 2019 President Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort sentenced to a further 43 months in jail, to add to his previous 47 months
• 2019 Shooting at school in Suzano, near São Paulo, Brazil, kills six including five children, before former student gunmen turn guns on themselves
• 2019 US grounds all Boeing 737 Max aircraft after bans by other countries following the plane type's second crash in Ethiopia
• 2020 12 hours after PGA Tour cancelled its flagship event, The Players Championship, Augusta National announces postponement of the Masters Tournament to a date to be fixed because of COVID-19 pandemic

2020 African American Breonna Taylor shot and killed by police officers executing a no-knock warrant on her flat with a battering ram in Louisville, Kentucky [1]

• 2020 Elite football in Britain, including England's Premier League, EFL, Women's Super League plus in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, is suspended until at least 3 April because of COVID-19 pandemic

2020 Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates steps down from the company's board to focus on philanthropic activities

• 2020 US President Donald Trump declares a national emergency, freeing up $50 billion to fight COVID-19

2022 After a 40-day retirement, record breaking quarterback Tom Brady announces he will play at least one more season in the NFL with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers

• 2023 Vinyl records outsell CDs in the US for the first time since 1987 (41 million vinyl records vs 33 million CDs), according to new report [1]
• 2024 US House of Representatives votes to force TikTok owner China-based ByteDance to sell the social media platform or face a ban in the US [1]
• 2025 Donatella Versace steps down after 28 years as Chief Creative Officer of Italian fashion house Versace, founded by her brother, with Dario Vitale taking over her role [1]

• 12 Mar
• Historical Events Calendar
• Mar 14

• 

  Wave of Doubt over Britannia

  March 12, 1710
• 

  Sportsman Who Became Larger Than Life

  March 13, 1770
• 

  Boy Wonder Conquers Theatreland

  March 14, 1805
• 

  Nature Blows Gunboat Diplomacy Out of the Water

  March 15, 1889

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