This day in history
Today is Thursday, March 28, the 88th day of 2024. There are 278 days left in the year.
Birthdays: Author Mario Vargas Llosa is 88. Country musician Charlie McCoy is 83. Movie director Mike Newell is 82. Actor Dianne Wiest is 78. Country singer Reba McEntire is 69. Olympic gold medal gymnast Bart Conner is 66. Rapper Salt is
58. Actor Tracey Needham is 57. Movie director Brett Ratner is
55. Actor Vince Vaughn is 54. Rapper Mr. Cheeks of Lost Boyz is 53. Singer-songwriter Matt Nathanson is 51. Rock musician Dave Keuning of The Killers is
48. Singer Lady Gaga is 38. Electronic musician Clayton Knight of Odesza is 36.
▶ In 1797, Nathaniel Briggs of New Hampshire received a patent for a washing machine.
▶ In 1841, Dorothea Dix, a teacher and writer, began her campaign to ensure humane conditions for the mentally ill. The effort was launched with a visit to an East Cambridge jail, where she found mentally ill women confined next to hardened criminals.
▶ In 1847, The USS Jamestown sailed out of Boston Harbor laden with 800 tons of lifesaving supplies for Ireland, in the depths of a famine. With famed sailor Robert Bennet Forbes at the helm, the vessel arrived two weeks later to cheering but desperate throngs in Cork and a band playing “Yankee Doodle.”
▶ In 1854, during the Crimean War, Britain and France declared war on Russia.
▶ In 1898, the US Supreme Court, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, ruled 6-2 that Wong, who was born in the United States to Chinese immigrants, was an American citizen.
▶ In 1939, the Spanish Civil War neared its end as Madrid fell to the forces of Francisco Franco.
▶ In 1941, novelist and critic Virginia Woolf, 59, drowned herself near her home in Lewes, England.
▶ In 1969, the 34th president, Dwight Eisenhower, died in Washington, D.C., at age 78.
▶ In 1979, America’s worst commercial nuclear accident occurred with a partial meltdown inside the Unit 2 reactor at the Three Mile Island plant near Middletown, Pa.
▶ In 1987, Maria von Trapp, whose life story inspired the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “The Sound of Music,” died in Morrisville, Vt., at age 82.
▶ In 1999, NATO broadened its attacks on Yugoslavia to target Serb military forces in Kosovo in the fifth straight night of airstrikes; thousands of refugees flooded into Albania and Macedonia from Kosovo.