HISTORY AT A GLANCE
TODAY is Tuesday, March 21, the 80th day of 2017. There are 285 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1935 – Shah of Iran Reza Shah Pahlavi formally asks the international community to call Persia by its native name, Iran.
1945 – World War II: British troops liberate Mandalay, Burma.
1945 – World War II: Operation Carthage: Royal Air Force planes bomb Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark. They also hit a school and 125 civilians are killed.
1960 – Apartheid: Sharpeville massacre, South Africa: Police open fire on a group of unarmed black South African demonstrators, killing 69 and wounding 180.
1963 – Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, on an island in San
Francisco Bay, closes. 1965 – Ranger program: NASA launches Ranger 9, the last in a series of unmanned lunar space probes.
1965 – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. leads 3,200 people on the start of the third and finally successful civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
1968 – Battle of Karameh in Jordan between the Israel Defense Forces and the combined forces of the Jordanian Armed Forces and PLO.
1970 – The first Earth Day proclamation is issued by Mayor of San Francisco Joseph Alioto.
1980 – US President Jimmy Carter announces a United States boycott of the
1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow to protest the Soviet war in Afghanistan.
1980 – Dallas airs its “A House Divided” episode, which leads to eight months of international speculation regarding Who shot J.R.?
1983 – The first cases of the
1983 West Bank fainting epidemic begin; Israelis and Palestinians accuse each other of poison gas, but the cause is later determined mostly to be psychosomatic.
1986 – Debi Thomas became the first African American to win the World Figure Skating Championships
1989 – Sports Illustrated reports allegations tying baseball player Pete Rose to baseball gambling.
1990 – Namibia becomes independent after 75 years of South African rule.
1999 – Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones become the first to circumnavigate the Earth in a hot air balloon.
2000 – Pope John Paul II makes his first ever pontifical visit to Israel.
2006 – The social media site Twitter is founded.
2009 – Four police officers are shot and killed and a fifth is wounded in two shootings at Oakland, California.