Today in history In 1806 explorers Meriwether

On March 23, 1743, George Frideric Handel’s oratorio “Messiah” had its London premiere. (During the “Hallelujah Chorus,” King George II rose excitedly to his feet. The audience followed suit, and a tradition was born.)

In 1752 the first Canadian newspaper, the Halifax Gazette, was published.

In 1775 Patrick Henry made his famous call for American independence from Britain, telling the Virginia Provincial Convention, “Give me liberty, or give me death!”

In 1792 Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 94 in G Major (the “Surprise” symphony) was performed publicly for the first time, in London.

In 1801 Russia’s Tsar Paul I was assassinated and was succeeded by Alexander I. Lewis and William Clark, having reached the Pacific coast, began their journey back east.

In 1857 cooking expert Fannie Farmer was born in Boston.

In 1908 actress Joan Crawford was born in San Antonio.

In 1910 filmmaker Akira Kurosawa was born in Tokyo.

In 1919 Benito Mussolini founded his Fascist political movement in Milan, Italy.

In 1933 the German Reichstag adopted the Enabling Act, which effectively granted Adolf Hitler dictatorial legislative powers.

In 1938 Maynard Jackson, the first African-American mayor of Atlanta, was born in Dallas.

In 1942, during World War II, the U.S. government began evacuating Japanese-Americans from their West Coast homes to detention centers.

In 1956 Pakistan became an independent republic within the British Commonwealth.

In 1965 America’s first twoperson spaceflight began as Gemini 3 blasted off from Cape Kennedy, Fla., with astronauts Virgil Grissom and John Young aboard.

In 1966 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Arthur Ramsey, met with Pope Paul VI at the Vatican in the first official meeting between the heads of the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches in four centuries.

In 1973 an Israeli government report disclosed that millions of dollars in property that belonged to Egyptians in the Sinai had been looted by the Israelis in the months after the 1967 Six-Day War.