28 March History
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).