TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IS MONDAY, MARCH 18, the 78th day of 2024. There are 288 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT IN HISTORY:

On March 18, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing the War Relocation Authority, which was put in charge of interning Japanese-Americans, with Milton S. Eisenhower (the younger brother of Dwight D. Eisenhower) as its director.

ON THIS DATE:

In 1766, Britain repealed the Stamp Act of 1765.

In 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.

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 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Gideon v. Wainwright, ruled unanimously that state courts were required to provide legal counsel to criminal defendants who could not afford to hire an attorney on their own.

In 1965, the first spacewalk took place as Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov went outside his Voskhod 2 capsule, secured by a tether.

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 2018, a self-driving Uber SUV struck and killed a pedestrian in suburban Phoenix in the first death involving a fully autonomous test vehicle; Uber suspended its autonomous vehicle testing program in Arizona, California, Pittsburgh and Toronto after the crash.

In 2020, the U.S. and Canada agreed to temporarily close their shared border to nonessential travel in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS: Singersongwriter James McMurtry is 62. Singer-actor Vanessa L. Williams is 61. Rapper-actor-talk show host Queen Latifah is 54. Actor-singer-dancer Sutton Foster is 49. Rock singer Adam Levine (Maroon 5) is 45. Actor Lily Collins is 35.