TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Monday, March 20, the 79th day of 2023. There are 286 days left in the year. On this date in:

1413: England’s King Henry IV died; he was succeeded by Henry V.

1815: Napoleon Bonaparte returned to Paris after escaping his exile on Elba, beginning his “Hundred Days” rule.

1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential novel about slavery, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” was first published in book form after being serialized.

1854: The Republican Party of the United States was founded by slavery opponents at a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin.

1922: The decommissioned USS Jupiter, converted into the first U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, was recommissioned as the USS Langley.

1952: The U.S. Senate ratified, 66-10, a Security Treaty with Japan.

1969: John Lennon married Yoko Ono in Gibraltar.

1976: Kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst was convicted of armed robbery for her part in a San Francisco bank holdup carried out by the Symbionese Liberation Army. (Hearst was sentenced to seven years in prison; she was released after serving 22 months, and was pardoned in 2001 by President Bill Clinton.)

1995: In Tokyo, 12 people were killed, more than 5,500 others sickened when packages containing the deadly chemical sarin were leaked on five separate subway trains by Aum Shinrikyo cult members.

1996: A jury in Los Angeles convicted Erik and Lyle Menendez of first-degree murder in the shotgun slayings of their wealthy parents. (They were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.)

2014: President Barack Obama ordered economic sanctions against nearly two dozen members of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle and a major bank that provided them support, raising the stakes in an East-west showdown over Ukraine.

2020: The governor of Illinois ordered residents to remain in their homes except for essential needs, joining similar efforts in California and New York to limit the spread of the coronavirus.