TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Wednesday, March 29, the 88th day of 2017. There are 277 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History

On March 29, 1867, Britain’s Parliament passed, and Queen Victoria signed, the British North America Act creating the Dominion of Canada, which came into being the following July.

On this date

1638 — Swedish colonists settled in present-day Delaware. 1790 — The tenth president of the United States, John Tyler, was born in Charles City County, Virginia. 1792 — Sweden’s King Gustav III died, nearly two weeks after he had been shot and mortally wounded by an assassin during a masquerade party. 1910 — Former Roman Princess Ruspoli, daughter of the late Thomas Berry and sister of Martha Berry, returned to the U.S. after the death of her husband. 1912 — British explorer Robert Falcon Scott, his doomed expedition stranded in an Antarctic blizzard after failing to be the first to reach the South Pole, wrote the last words of his journal: “For Gods sake look after our people.” 1936 — German Chancellor Adolf Hitler claimed overwhelming victory in a plebiscite on his policies. 1943 — World War II rationing of meat, fats and cheese began. 1951 — Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted in New York of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union. (They were executed in June 1953.) 1971 — Army Lt. William L. Calley Jr. was convicted of murdering 22 Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai massacre. (Calley ended up serving three years under house arrest.) 1973 — The last United States combat troops left South Vietnam, ending America’s direct military involvement in the Vietnam War. 1992 — Democratic presidential front-runner Bill Clinton acknowledged experimenting with marijuana “a time or two” while attending Oxford University, adding, “I didn’t inhale and I didn’t try it again.”