Today in history
Today is Thursday, March 21, the 80th day of 2019. There are 285 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1556 — The Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas
Cranmer, is burned at the stake as a heretic.
1791 — Bangalore in India is seized by the British
under Lord Cornwallis in the Third Mysore War.
1801 — French forces are defeated at Alexandria, Egypt, by the British under Sir Ralph Abercromby.
1831 — Austrian troops enter Italy to put down a
revolt.
1871 — Chancellor Otto von Bismarck opens the first Reichstag (parliament) in the newly created German Reich.
1884 — France legalises trade unions.
1894 — A vote for prohibition in New Zealand falls 18 votes short of the required number to be enacted into law.
1917 — Tsar Nicholas II and his family are arrested
by revolutionary forces in Russia.
1918 — The Second Battle of the Somme, the last
German offensive in World War 1, begins.
1919 — The Soviet Republic is proclaimed; a proSoviet coup headed by Bela Kun overthrows the government of Hungary.
1927 — The Nationalist Chinese forces of
Chiang Kaishek take the city of Shanghai.
1933 — The first Reichstag under the rule of Adolf Hitler is opened in Germany on the same day the very first was opened in 1871.
1945 — British warplanes destroy Gestapo
headquarters in Copenhagen, killing over 70 Nazis, but the raid also kills civilians, including 86 schoolchildren, in Denmark’s worst civilian disaster of the war.
1960 — Almost 70 people are killed and more than 180 wounded when South African police fire on a peaceful black demonstration against pass laws at Sharpeville in the Transvaal.
1963 — Alcatraz Prison in San Francisco Bay is
closed.
1965 — Martin Luther King jun leads the start of a 4000strong civilrights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
1970 — New Zealand historian John Beaglehole, authoritative biographer of James Cook and editor of Cook’s journals, is made a member of the British Order of Merit.
1977 — A number of girls are taken to hospital as a precaution following fumes being released in an accident with phosphorus at a St Hilda’s Collegiate science laboratory; India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, resigns after losing her seat in parliamentary elections.
1979 — The Egyptian Parliament unanimously approves a peace treaty with Israel.
1985 — Police in Langa, South Africa, fire on blacks marching to mark the 25th anniversary of the Sharpeville shootings, killing at least 21. 1989 — Australian prime minister Bob Hawke weeps on television as he admits to having an extramarital affair.
1991 — A Saudi transport plane trying to land in bad weather and heavy smoke from burning Kuwaiti oil wells crashes, killing 92 Senegalese soldiers and six Saudi crew.
1997 — US president Bill Clinton and Russian president Boris Yeltsin hold a summit in Helsinki, and agree to slash their nuclear arsenals.
2000 — Pope John Paul II arrives for his first official papal visit to Israel. The same day, Israel withdraws its troops from 6.1% of the occupied West Bank as part of a landforsecurity deal with the Palestinians. 2003 — Eight British soldiers and four US airmen are killed in a helicopter crash on the Iraqi border, the first known allied casualties of the Iraq War.