Today In History

Today is Monday, March 13, the 72nd day of 2017. There are 293 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

› 1781: The seventh planet of the solar system, Uranus, was discovered by Sir William Herschel.

ON THIS DATE

› 1845: Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64, had its premiere in Leipzig, Germany.

› 1865: Confederate President Jefferson Davis signed a measure allowing black slaves to enlist in the Confederate States Army with the promise they would be set free.

› 1901: The 23rd President of the United States, Benjamin Harrison, died in Indianapolis at age 67.

› 1925: The Tennessee General Assembly approved a bill prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution. (Gov. Austin Peay signed the measure on March 21.)

› 1933: Banks in the U.S. began to reopen after a “holiday” declared by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

› 1954: The Battle of Dien Bien Phu began during the First Indochina War as communist forces attacked French troops, who were defeated nearly two months later.

› 1964: Bar manager Catherine “Kitty” Genovese, 28, was stabbed to death near her Queens, New York, home; the case gained notoriety over the supposed reluctance of Genovese’s neighbors to respond to her cries for help.

› 1980: Ford Motor Co. Chairman Henry Ford II announced he was stepping down, the same day a jury in Winamac, Indiana, found the company not guilty of reckless homicide in the fiery deaths of three young women in a Ford Pinto.

› 1996: A gunman burst into an elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland, and opened fire, killing 16 children and one teacher before killing himself.

› 1997: A Jordanian soldier fired on Israeli junior high school girls on a field trip, killing seven of them. (The soldier, Cpl. Ahmed Daqamseh, was later sentenced by a military court to life in prison.)

› 2013: Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina was elected pope, choosing the name Francis.

› 2007: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales admitted mistakes in the way the Justice Department handled the dismissal of eight federal prosecutors, which Democrats charged were a politically motivated purge, but said he wouldn’t resign. President George W. Bush, on the last stop of a five-nation Latin American tour, sought to soothe strained ties with Mexico by promising to prod Congress to overhaul tough U.S. immigration policies; but his host, Mexican President Felipe Calderon, criticized U.S. plans for a 700-mile border fence.

› 2012: Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. said it would stop publishing print editions of its flagship encyclopedia.