Today in history

Today is Saturday, March 18, the 77th day of 2017. There are 288 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History

On March 18, 1937, in America’s worst school disaster, nearly 300 people, most of them children, were killed in a natural gas explosion at the New London Consolidated School in Rusk County, Texas.

On this date

In 1766, Britain repealed the Stamp Act of 1765.

In 1837, the 22nd and 24th president of the United States, Grover Cleveland, was born in Caldwell, New Jersey.

In 1917, the Mexican newspaper Excelsior published its first edition.

In 1925, the Tri-State Tornado struck southeastern Missouri, southern Illinois and southwestern Indiana, resulting in some 700 deaths.

In 1940, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met at the Brenner Pass, where the Italian dictator agreed to join Germany’s war against France and Britain.

In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing the War Relocation Authority, which was put in charge of evacuating “persons whose removal is necessary in the interests of national security,” with Milton S. Eisenhower (the youngest brother of Dwight D. Eisenhower) as its director.

In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Hawaii statehood bill. (Hawaii became a state on Aug. 21, 1959.)

In 1962, France and Algerian rebels signed the Evian Accords, a cease-fire agreement which took effect the next day, ending the Algerian War.

In 1965, the first spacewalk took place as Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov went outside his Voskhod 2 capsule, secured by a tether. Farouk I, the former king of Egypt, died in exile in Rome.

In 1974, most of the Arab oil-producing nations ended their 5-month-old embargo against the United States that had been sparked by American support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War.

In 1980, Frank Gotti, the 12-year-old youngest son of mobster John Gotti, was struck and killed by a car driven by John Favara, a neighbor in Queens, New York. (The following July, Favara vanished, the apparent victim of a gang hit.)

In 1990, thieves made off with 13 works of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (the crime remains unsolved).

Ten years ago: Pakistan’s national cricket team coach, Bob Woolmer, 58, was found dead in his hotel room in Kingston, Jamaica, during cricket’s World Cup tournament. (An inquest into Woolmer’s death ended with the Jamaican jury unable to reach a ruling on the cause.)

Five years ago: Mitt Romney scored an overwhelming win in Puerto Rico’s Republican presidential primary, trouncing chief rival Rick Santorum.

One year ago: A jury in St. Petersburg, Florida, sided with ex-pro wrestler Hulk Hogan, awarding him $115 million in compensatory damages in his sex tape lawsuit against Gawker Media. (Three days later, the jury awarded $25 million in punitive damages; Gawker, which ended up going bankrupt, finally settled with Hogan for $31 million.) Police in Brussels captured Europe’s most wanted fugitive, Salah Abdeslam, who was the prime suspect in the deadly 2015 Paris attacks. North Korea ignored U.N. resolutions by firing a medium-range ballistic missile into the sea.

Thought for Today: “To start is easy, to persist is an art.” — German proverb.