TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

March 21, 2006

The social media website Twitter was established with the sending of the first “tweet” by co-founder Jack Dorsey, who wrote: “just setting up my twttr.” ALSO ON THIS DATE

1788

Fire broke out in New Orleans on Good Friday, destroying 856 out of more than 1,100 structures; one death was reported.

1918

During World War I, Germany launched its Spring Offensive on the Western Front, hoping to break through the Allied lines before American reinforcements could arrive.

1925

Tennessee Gov. Austin Peay signed the Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of the Theory of Evolution in public schools.

1945

During World War II, Allied bombers began four days of raids over Germany.

1963

The Alcatraz federal prison island in San Francisco Bay was emptied of its last inmates and closed at the order of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

1981

Michael Donald, a black teenager in Mobile, Alabama, was abducted, tortured and killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

1990

Namibia became an independent nation as the former colony marked the end of 75 years of South African rule.

2007

Former Vice President Al Gore made an emotional return to Congress as he pleaded with House and Senate committees to fight global warming; skeptical Republicans questioned the science behind his climate-change documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

2009

In Oakland, Calif., parolee Lovelle Mixon shot and killed two motorcycle officers, then killed two SWAT team members while holed up in an apartment before he was killed by law enforcement.