March 24 in History
1603 — Tokugawa Ieyasu, one of the three “Great Unifiers” of Japan, receives the title of shogun from Emperor Go-Yozei. He establishes the Tokugawa shogunate, which rules until imperial rule is restored under Emperor Meiji in 1868.
1721 — Johann Sebastian Bach dedicates six concertos to Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt and a military officer of the Prussian Army, under the title “Six Concertos for several instruments ”— commonly known as the “Brandenburg Concertos”.
1832 — In Hiram, Ohio, a group of men beat and tar and feather Mormon leader Joseph Smith. 1896 — Russian physicist Alexander Popov makes the first radio signal transmission in history, over 250m between different campus buildings in St Petersburg.
1906 — The 1901 Census of the British Empire shows that the Empire comprises, “as nearly as can be ascertained”, 11,908,378 square miles — “more than one-fifth of the land surface of the Globe”. The report, submitted in December 1905 and released on this day, was delayed, inter alia, due to “the postponement, on account of the War, of Census operations in the South African Colonies”, which was eventually taken in 1904. 1933 — The Dependency Act of 24 March 1933 establishes that Norwegian criminal law, private law and procedural law apply to its dependencies, as do other laws explicitly valid in each. Norway has three dependencies, all uninhabited and in the Southern Hemisphere — Bouvet Island (since January 23 1928), Peter I Island (March 6 1931) and Queen Maud Land (January 14 1939).
1945 — Operation Varsity: In the largest one-day, one-place airborne operation of all time — involving 16,870 paratroopers and several thousand aircraft — British, American and Canadian paratroopers land east of the Rhine in Northern Germany.
1976 — The armed forces, headed by Jorge
Rafael Videla, overthrow the constitutional Argentine government of President Isabel Perón, starting a seven-year dictatorial period and the country’s Dirty War.
1999 — A Belgian truck carrying margarine and flour catches fire inside the Mont Blanc Tunnel between France and Italy. The resulting inferno kills 39 people.
2008 — The Kingdom of Bhutan holds its first ever general election. The Constitution is enacted on July 18 by the Royal Government of Bhutan.