TODAY IN HISTORY
1781: The seventh planet of the solar system, Uranus, was discovered by Sir William Herschel.
1862: President Abraham Lincoln signed a measure prohibiting Union military officers from returning fugitive slaves to their owners.
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 Austin Peay signed the measure on March 21; Tennessee repealed the law in 1967.
1933: Banks in the U.S. began to reopen after a “holiday” declared by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
1938: Famed attorney Clarence S. Darrow died in Chicago.
1943: Financier and philanthropist J.P. Morgan Jr., 75, died in Boca Grande, Florida.
1946: U.S. Army Pfc. Sadao Munemori was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for sacrificing himself to save fellow soldiers from a grenade explosion in Seravezza, Italy; he was the only Japanese-American service member so recognized in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
1954: The Battle of Dien Bien Phu began during the First Indochina War as Viet Minh forces attacked French troops, who were defeated nearly two months later.
1995: Two Americans working for U.S. defense contractors in Kuwait, David Daliberti and William Barloon, were seized by Iraq after they strayed across the border; sentenced to eight years in prison, both were freed later the same year.
2011: The estimated death toll from Japan’s earthquake and tsunami climbed past 10,000 as authorities raced to combat the threat of multiple nuclear reactor meltdowns while hundreds of thousands of people struggled to find food and water.
2013: In 2013, Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina was elected pope, choosing the name Francis. he was the first pontiff from the Americas and the first from outside Europe in more than a millennium. A man went on a shooting rampage in the small villages of Mohawk and Herkimer in New York state, killing four and wounding two more at a barbershop and a car wash. (Police would shoot and kill the suspect, 64-year-old Kurt Myers, the following day.)