537 – Goths lay siege to Rome
1669 – Volcano Etna in Italy erupts killing 15,000
1702 – First English daily newspaper “Daily Courant” publishes
1789 – Benjamin Banneker with L’Enfant begin to lay out Washington District of Columbia
1824 – US War Dept creates the Bureau of Indian Affairs
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George B. McClellan and Mary Ellen Marcy (Nelly) McClellan |
1862 – Lincoln removes George McClellen as general-in-chief
After a disastrous defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run, President Lincoln named George McClellen as General-in-Chief of the Army. While effectively rebuilding the troops and gaining praise for his initiatives, it was his arrogance and contempt for political leaders that led to his firing by Lincoln.
McClellan wrote to his wife that Lincoln was “nothing more than a well-meaning baboon,” and Secretary of State William Seward was an “incompetent little puppy.”
1867 – Great Mauna Loa eruption
1888 – Great blizzard of ’88 strikes northeastern US
1897 – A meteorite enters the earth’s atmosphere and explodes over New Martinsville, West Virginia.
This was announced in a front-page New York Times article published on March 11, 1897:
A meteor burst over the town of New Martinsville yesterday. The noise of the explosion resembled the shock of a heavy artillery salute, and was heard for twenty miles. The cylindrical shaped ball of fire was forging along in a southwesterly direction when first discovered. The hissing sound of the fire could be heard for miles, and the smoke gave the meteor the appearance of a burning balloon.
When the meteor exploded the pieces flew in all directions, like a volcanic upheaval, and solid walls were pierced by the fragments. David Leisure was knocked down by the force of the air caused by the rapidity with which the body passed, before it broke. The blow rendered him unconscious. One horse had its head crushed and nearly torn from the trunk by a fragment of the meteor, and another horse in the next stall was discovered to be stone deaf.
The coming of the meteor was heralded by a rumbling noise, followed in an instant by the hissing sound, and immediately the ball of fire, spitting and smoking, burst into full view, and before the people had time to collect their senses, the explosion occurred.
More recently, it was reported by the New York Times in a December 8, 1929 article that a wedding party in a small town in Yugoslavia was struck by a meteorite with one person being killed. In August of 1951, a meteorite shower was alleged to have killed twelve people, injured twenty, and killed many animals near Teheran, Iran.
1918 – Moscow becomes capital of revolutionary Russia
1953 – American B-47 accidentally drops a nuclear bomb 15,000 feet on Mars Bluff, South Carolina; it created a crater 75 feet acrosss, but the nuclear core did not detonate, due to 6 safety catches.
1982 – Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat sign peace treaty in Washington DC
1985 – Mikhail Gorbachev replaces Konstantin Chernenko as Soviet leader
1997 – Ashes of Star Trek creator, Gene Roddenberry are launched into space
2004 – Terrorists explode simultaneous bombs on Madrid’s rail network ripping through a commuter train and rocking three stations, killing 190
2011 – An earthquake measuring 9.0 in magnitude strikes 130 km (80 miles) east of Sendai, Japan, triggering a tsunami killing thousands of people. This event also triggered the second largest nuclear accident in history, and one of only two events to be classified as a Level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale.
2013 – North Korea cuts the phone line with South Korea, breaching the 1953 armistice
Birthdays
1544 – Torquato Tasso, Italy, Renaissance poet
1549 – Hendrik Spieghel, Dutch Renaissance writer and poet
1860 – Thomas Hastings, NYC, architect (NY Public Library)
1903 – Dorothy Schiff, publisher (NY Post)
1903 – Lawrence Welk, Strasburg ND, orchestra leader
1926 – Ralph Abernathy, civil rights leader (Southern Christian Leadership)
1931 – Rupert Murdoch, Australia, publisher
Weddings
1302 – Romeo & Juliet’s wedding day, according to Shakespeare
Deaths
1955 – Alexander Fleming, English bacteriologist (penicillin), dies at 73
1957 – Richard E Byrd, US, explorer (Antarctica), dies at 68
1958 – Ole Kirk Christiansen, Danish inventor of Legos (b. 1891)
Various internet sources and searches are used in the making of this document