TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1988

Avianca Flight 410, a Boeing 727, crashed after takeoff into a mountain in Colombia, killing all 143 people on board.

ALSO ON THI DATE

1762

New York held its first St. Patrick’s Day parade.

1776

The Revolutionary War Siege of Boston ended as British forces evacuated the city.

1912

The Camp Fire Girls organization was incorporated in Washington, D.C., two years to the day after it was founded in Thetford, Vermont. (The group is now known as Camp Fire.)

1936

Pittsburgh’s Great St. Patrick’s Day Flood began as the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers and their tributaries, swollen by rain and melted snow, started exceeding flood stage; the high water was blamed for more than 60 deaths.

1958

The U.S. Navy launched the Vanguard 1satellite.

1959

The Dalai Lama fled Tibet for India in the wake of a failed uprising by Tibetans against Chinese rule.

1969

Golda Meir became prime minister of Israel.

1970

The United States cast its first veto in the U.N. Security Council, killing a resolution that would have condemned Britain for failing to use force to overthrow the white-ruled government of Rhodesia.

1973

U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm, a freed prisoner of the Vietnam War, was joyously greeted by his family at Travis Air Force Base in California in a scene captured in a Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photograph.

1992

29people were killed in the truck bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In Illinois, Sen. Alan Dixon was defeated in his primary reelection bid by Carol Moseley-Braun, who went on to become the first black woman in the U.S. Senate. 2005 Baseball players told Congress that steroids were a problem in the sport; stars Rafael Palmeiro and Sammy Sosa testified they hadn’t used them while Mark McGwire refused to say whether he had. (McGwire owned up to steroid use in January 2010.)

2009

U.S. journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee were detained by North Korea while reporting on North Korean refugees living across the border in China.

2010

Idaho Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter became the first state chief executive to sign a measure requiring his attorney general to sue Congress if it passed health reforms requiring residents to buy insurance (a symbolic action on Idaho’s part, since federal laws supersede those of the states). Michael Jordan became the first ex-player to become a majority owner in the league as the NBA’s Board of Governors approved Jordan’s $275million bid to buy the Charlotte Bobcats from Bob Johnson. Singer-guitarist Alex Chilton, 59, died in New Orleans.