TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

March 17, 1762

New York held its first St. Patrick’s Day parade. ALSO ON THIS DATE

1776

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

1906

President Theodore Roosevelt first likened crusading journalists to a man with “the muckrake in his hand” in a speech to the Gridiron Club in Washington.

1912

The Camp Fire Girls organization was incorporated in Washington D.C., two years to the day after it was founded in Thetford, Vermont.

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 1 satellite.

1959

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

1968

A peaceful anti-Vietnam War protest in London was followed by a riot outside the U.S. Embassy; more than 200 people were arrested and over 80 people were reported injured.

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.

2013

Two members of Steubenville, Ohio’s celebrated high school football team were found guilty of raping a drunken 16-year-old girl and sentenced to at least a year in juvenile prison in a case that rocked the Rust Belt city of 18,000.