28 March History


Month:                           Date:     

  • 1774    -    Britain passes the Coercive Act against rebellious Massachusetts.
  • 1854    -    Britain and France declare war on Russia.
  • 1864    -    A group of Copperheads attack Federal soldiers in Charleston, Illinois. Five are killed and twenty wounded.
  • 1885    -    The Salvation Army is officially organized in the United States.
  • 1908    -    Automobile owners lobby Congress in support of a bill that calls for vehicle licensing and federal registration.
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  • 1910    -    The first seaplane takes off from water at Martinques, France.
  • 1917    -    The Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) is founded, Great Britain's first official service women.
  • 1921    -    President Warren Harding names William Howard Taft as chief justice of the United States.
  • 1930    -    Constantinople and Angora change their names to Istanbul and Ankara respectively.
  • 1933    -    Nazis order a ban on all Jews in businesses, professions and schools.
  • 1939    -    The Spanish Civil War ends as Madrid falls to Francisco Franco.
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  • 1941    -    The Italian fleet is routed by the British at the Battle of Battle of Cape Matapan
  • 1941    -    English novelist Virginia Woolf throws herself into the River Ouse near her home in Sussex. Her body is never found.
  • 1942    -    A British ship, the HMS Capbeltown, a Lend-Lease American destroyer, which was specifically rammed into a German occupied dry-dock in France, explodes, knocking the area out of action for the German battleship Tirpitz.
  • 1945    -    Germany launches the last of its V-2 rockets against England.
  • 1946    -    Juan Peron is elected President of Argentina. He will hold the office for six years.
  • 1962    -    The U.S. Air Force announces research into the use of lasers to intercept missiles and satellites.
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  • 1969    -    Dwight D. Eisenhower dies at Walter Reed General Hospital in Washington, D.C.
  • 1979    -    A major accident occurs at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear power plant
  • 1986    -    The U.S. Senate passes $100 million aid package for the Nicaraguan contras.
  • 1990    -    Jesse Owens receives the Congressional Gold Medal from President George Bush.
  • 1999    -    An American Stealth F117 Nighthawk is shot down over northern Yugoslavia during NATO air strikes.

  • 28 March Birthdays

  • 1652    -    Samuel Sewall, British colonial merchant and one of the Salem witch trial judges.
  • 1818    -    Wade Hampton, Confederate general in the American Civil War.
  • 1862    -    Aristide Briand, premier of France (1909-22).
  • 1868    -    Maxim Gorky, Russian short story writer and novelist.
  • 1895    -    James McCudden, the first RAF pilot to receive the Victoria Cross.
  • 1909    -    Nelson Algren, novelist (The Man with the Golden Arm, A Walk on the Wild Side).
  • 1929    -    Frederick Exley, American novelist (A Fan's Notes).
  • 1930    -    Jerome Isaac Friedman, American physicist, helped confirm the existence of quarks.
  • 1936    -    Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian novelist (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Death in the Andes).