TODAY IN HISTORY: Hadfield takes command

In 1885, British Columbia passed a law barring Chinese people from entering the province. The federal government disallowed the law 18 days later.

In 1894, a Paris nightclub presented the first professional striptease.

In 1927, Canada’s old age pension bill received royal assent.

In 1928, Eileen Vollick of Hamilton, Ont., took her final flying tests and became the first Canadian woman to receive her pilot’s licence. Vollick said after her first flight that she felt “at home” in the cockpit. Instead of taking companies up on their offers to demonstrate their planes, she entered the world of aerobatic flying and skydiving.

In 1953, the Soviet Union vetoed a recommendation by the UN Security Council that Canada’s External Affairs Minister, Lester Pearson, be named UN secretary-general.

In 1959, more than 12,000 B.C. government employees staged a four-hour strike before returning to work after the province obtained a court injunction.

In 1964, Catherine “Kitty” Genovese was murdered in Queens, N.Y. Dozens of neighbours heard or witnessed the stabbing attack, which lasted nearly half an hour, but did not want to get involved. March 13th is the annual Good Samaritan Involvement Day — named in Genovese’s memory.

In 1971, Paul Rose was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Pierre Laporte, the Quebec labour minister. During the October Crisis of 1970, Laporte and James Cross, the British trade commissioner in Montreal, were kidnapped by members of the separatist Front de Liberation du Quebec. FLQ demands included the release of convicted or detained members, and the broadcast of the FLQ manifesto. Cross was eventually released. In November 1971, Rose was sentenced to an additional life term for kidnapping Laporte. He was granted full parole in 1982.

In 1980, Ford Motor Chairman Henry Ford II announced he was stepping down, the same day a jury in Winamac, Ind., found Ford Motor Co. innocent of reckless homicide in the fiery deaths of three young women in a Ford Pinto.

In 1987, “Heat of the Night” by Bryan Adams became the first commercially released cassette single in the U.S. It reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.

In 1989, Deborah Grey won a byelection in the Alberta riding of Beaver River to become the Reform Party’s first Member of Parliament. The party was formed in 1986 as an attempt to voice the concerns of Western Canada on a national stage. It was focused on reducing the cost and size of government and it was opposed to special status for Quebec.

In 1996, 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton opened fire in a school gymnasium in Dunblane, Scotland. He killed 16 kindergarten students and their teacher, and wounded 12 other children and two teachers, before turning the gun on himself.

In 1997, singer Joni Mitchell was reunited with Kilauren Gibb, the daughter she had given up for adoption 32 years earlier. The reunion took place at Mitchell’s Los Angeles home after both mother and daughter had searched for each other. Gibb said she knew she had found her mother after studying a picture of Mitchell on the singer’s website.

In 2005, a gunman killed seven people at a church service in a Milwaukee, Wis., hotel, including the minister, before killing himself.

In 2010, a massive avalanche swept away dozens of people gathered for the Big Iron Shootout, a high-risk snowmobile rally on Boulder Mountain near Revelstoke, B.C. Two people died with another 30 injured.

In 2013, astronaut Chris Hadfield took over command of the International Space Station, the first time that a Canadian assumed control of the giant orbiting space laboratory.