POPnews - March 20th

[When John Lennon and Yoko Ono first met in November 1966 at an exhibition of hers in London's Indica Gallery she claimed to have never heard of either him or the Beatles, which isn't quite as disingenuous as it sounds; he was still married to Cynthia Lennon when he wrote The Ballad of John and Yoko, which is about the early stages of their relationship, by which time she was better informed.]
1760 - The first Great Fire of Boston destroyed 349 buildings; another even greater fire would cause considerably more damage to that city in November 1872.

1815 - Napoleon entered Paris after escaping from Elba - with a regular army of 140,000 and a volunteer force of around 200,000 - to begin his so-called Hundred Days rule.

1848 - Bavaria's King Ludwig I abdicated during the Revolutions of 1848 which swept through the German states; he was succeeded by his son, Maximilian II.

1852 - Harriet Beecher Stowe's controversial novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was published, having first appeared in June 1851 as a 40-week serial in the abolitionist newspaper National Era.

1888 - Children of the Forests, the very first Romani language operetta, was staged at Moscow's Maly Theatre; to call it a success would be an understatement, as it would eventually run for 18 years.

1899 - Having been sentenced to death for killing her stepdaughter Ida in February 1898 - and having been denied clemency by New York Governor Theodore Roosevelt - Martha M. Place became the first woman to be executed in an electric chair; executioner Edwin Davis did the deed at Sing Sing prison. Although she was the first woman to die in this way, the first woman sentenced to die in the electric chair was Maria Barbella, who following her acquittal disappears from history.

1913 - Sung Chiao-jen - founding member of the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang - was wounded in an assassination attempt; he died 2 days later.

1922 - The USS Langley was commissioned as the US Navy's first aircraft carrier, having previously served as the collier USS Jupiter.

1933 - Giuseppe Zangara was executed in Florida's electric chair for fatally shooting Chicago mayor Anton Cermak in an assassination attempt against President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt the month before.

1951 - Fujiyoshida - a city located in Japan's Yamanashi Prefecture, in the center of that country's main island of Honshū - was founded.

1956 - Tunisia gained its independence from France.

1964 - The precursor of the European Space Agency (once it merged with ELDO in 1975) the European Space Research Organization (ESRO) was established when the ESRO Convention - signed on June 1962 - went into force.

1966 - Football's World Cup trophy was stolen from where it was being exhibited at Westminster Central Hall; it was found a week later in a garden in the South Norwood neighbourhood of London by a dog named Pickles.

1969 - John Lennon married Yoko Ono in Gibraltar.

1985 - Libby Riddles became the first woman to win the 1,868 km (1,161 mile) Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

1995 - A sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway killed 12 and wounded more than 1,300.

1999 - Legoland California opened in Carlsbad, California.

2004 - Stephen Harper won the leadership of the newly created Conservative Party of Canada, thus becoming the first leader in the party's history.

2006 - Cyclone Larry made landfall near Innisfail in the eastern Australian state of Queensland, destroying most of the country's banana crop for that year.
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POPnews - March 19th

[Although the Sydney Harbour Bridge was set to be officially opened by Jack Lang, the Labour premier of New South Wales, on this day in 1932 it was actually opened by a nutjob named Francis de Groot, himself a member of the ultra-right New Guard, who interrupted the ceremony by riding up on horseback and slashing the ribbon with a sword, declaring the bridge open 'in the name of the decent and respectable people of New South Wales'. He was promptly arrested and, after being declared sane, fined £5 for trespassing. Meanwhile, the ribbon was promptly retied and dutifully re-cut by Lang.]
1279 - A Mongolian victory at the Battle of Yamen ended China's Song Dynasty.

1286 - Scotland's King Alexander III died; his succession, by his grand-daughter Margaret, the 'Maid of Norway', was disputed to the degree that is has been held responsible for the Wars of Scottish Independence - a situation not even settled by her death in 1290 and the inauguration of her successor John Balliol in November 1292.

1687 - While searching for the mouth of the Mississippi River along the Gulf Coast of Texas, explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle was murdered by Pierre Duhaut, one of his own men, during a mutiny.

1721 - Pope Clement XI died; he was succeeded by Pope Innocent XIII on May 8th.

1863 - The SS Georgiana - said to have been the most powerful Confederate cruiser - was sunk on her maiden voyage with cargo of munitions, medicines and merchandise then valued at over $1,000,000; the wreck was discovered on the same day and month, exactly 102 years later by then teenage diver and pioneer underwater archaeologist E. Lee Spence.

1865 - The Battle of Bentonville began, during the American Civil War; by the end of the battle two days later, Confederate forces had retreated from Four Oaks, North Carolina.

1915 - Pluto was photographed for the first time - at the Lowell Observatory - but was not recognized at the time as a planet.

1931 - The Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra played its first concert at the William Penn High School in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

1932 - Australia's Sydney Harbour Bridge was opened.

1941 - The 99th Pursuit Squadron - also known as the Tuskegee Airmen, the first all-black unit of the Army Air Corp - was activated.

1943 - Frank Nitti - Chicago Outfit second in command under Al Capone - committed suicide at the Chicago Central Railyard.

1945 - Allied forces having irrevocably turned the tide of World War II against him, Adolf Hitler issued the Nero Decree, ordering all industries, military installations, shops, transportation facilities and communications facilities in Germany to be destroyed.

1958 - The Monarch Underwear Company fire in Manhattan left 24 dead and 15 injured.

1969 - The 385 metre (1,263 ft) tall television mast at Emley Moor collapsed due to ice build-up.

1979 - The US House of Representatives began broadcasting its day-to-day business via the cable television network C-SPAN.

1982 - Argentinian naval forces landed on South Georgia, precipitating the Falklands War.

1987 - Televangelist Jim Bakker resigned as head of the PTL Club due to a brewing sex scandal; he handed over control to Jerry Falwell, himself a bastion of those Christian virtues of forgiveness and tolerance.

2004 - Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian was shot the day before that country's presidential election; relatively unharmed, he went on to win the next day's election by a slim margin.

2008 - A gamma-ray burst dubbed GRB 080319B that was the farthest object visible to the naked eye was briefly observed.
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POPnews - March 18th

[The globular cluster in the constellation Hercules now known as M92 was first discovered by Johann Elert Bode in 1777, but was named for Charles Messier who independently rediscovered it* in 1781; located 26,000 light years from Earth, it contains a shitload** of stars and potentially an equal number of inhabited Earth-like planets. Although one of the larger globular clusters visible from the Northern Hemisphere, it is easily outshone by the even bigger and brighter Messier 13, just like Nick Jonas outshines his equally talented brothers Joe and the ugly one***.]

1227 - Pope Honorius III died; he was succeeded by Gregory IX the following day.

1229 - Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II was crowned King of Jerusalem during the Sixth Crusade.

1314 - Jacques de Molay - the 23rd and last Grand Master of the Knights Templar - was burned at the stake at Paris' Île de la Cité on the orders of France's King Philip IV.

1608 - Susenyos was formally crowned Emperor of Ethiopia.

1781 - Charles Messier rediscovered the global cluster M92.

1871 - Following the Declaration of the Paris Commune, Adolphe Thiers - the President of the French Republic - ordered the evacuation of Paris.

1913 - Greece's King George I was assassinated by Alexandros Schinas in the recently liberated city of Thessaloniki.

1922 - The first public celebration of a Bat mitzvah, for the daughter of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, was held in New York City at the headquarters of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism.

1937 - An explosion caused by a natural gas leak killed and/or injured hundreds, most of them children, at a school in New London, Texas; of the approximately 600 students and 40 teachers in the building at the time, only about 130 escaped without serious injury.

1940 - Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met at Brenner Pass in the Alps, when they agreed to form an alliance against France and the United Kingdom.

1950 - The Belgian government fell after a referendum in which 57% of Belgians favoured the return of King Leopold III from exile in Switzerland; his return to Belgium was nevertheless met by widespread unrest, following which he abdicated in favour of his son Baudouin in July 1951.

1962 - The Evian Accords put an end to the Algerian War of Independence, which had begun in November 1954.

1967 - The oil supertanker Torrey Canyon (chartered by British Petroleum) ran aground on Pollard's Rock in the Seven Stones reef off the Cornish coast, spilling 100,000 tons of crude oil; 15,000 sea birds were killed in the aftermath, many from the toxic detergents used in an attempt to clean them.

1982 - Britain's Attorney General Sir Michael Havers halted an obscenity trial brought by Mary Whitehouse against director Michael Bogdanov and the National Theatre for its production of Howard Brenton's The Romans in Britain.

1990 - In the largest art theft in US history, 12 paintings (collectively worth around $300 million) were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts.

1992 - South Africa voted to end apartheid in a special referendum.

2003 - British Sign Language was recognized as a language, but not as an official language of Britain, meaning it has no legal protections.

2005 - Terri Schiavo's feeding tube was removed at the request of her husband, fueling a worldwide debate on euthanasia; Schiavo died less than two weeks later.

2009 - Iranian blogger Omid Reza Mir Sayafi was murdered in Tehran's Evin Prison, where he'd been incarcerated for telling the truth about the mullahs and their Islamic Republic. He was 29. Despite the removal of his blog - which was ostensibly concerned with traditional Persian music - by the authorities, his work will live on thanks to the power of the Internet and foes of tyranny like the Pop Culture Institute. The March 18 Movement was created to honour his memory, and to oppose any attempts to silence new media and citizen journalists; it's a movement which this humble blog is proud to have joined.

*Hard as it may be for modern minds to comprehend, in the olden days e'rybody wasn't up in e'rybody else's bidness like they are today; there was no Twitter in 1781 - except by birds - so two different people could easily discover something at around the same time without it devolving into a spate of name-calling on YouTube. Geez, huh? Old-timey guys were some messed up shizzle!
**In Canada, a 'shitload' is an official measure; all's I know is it's bigger than a 'buttload'. Maybe it's metric... Look it up!
***Ummm... In the interest of full disclosure I should say that this photo caption is a blatant hit grab... Not unlike the Jonas Brothers themselves!
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POPnews - March 17th

[As Attorney-General of New York, Eliot Spitzer led (amongst others) a campaign against high-end prostitution; his promising career as governor - which some said could have taken him all the way to the White House - cooled when, within weeks of his taking office in 2007, his inner douchebag (which had been so useful in his previous job) began to emerge and terrorize the sensitive burghers of Albany. A year later, on this day in 2008, Spitzer was busted for hypocrisy and hounded from office to live out the rest of his days in tabloid ignominy and on a very short leash indeed - one which his wife, alas, would be holding. Not hot...]

45 BCE - In his last victory, at the Battle of Munda - two days short of one year before his murder - Julius Caesar defeated the forces of Titus Labienus (who was killed that day, alongside 3,000 of his men) and Pompey the Younger (who was later captured and executed for treason).

180 CE - Marcus Aurelius died, leaving Commodus the sole emperor - although he wasn't murdered by Commodus as depicted in the Ridley Scott film Gladiator (2000).

1337 - Edward, the Black Prince, was made the first Duke of Cornwall; this was also England's first duchy - although it is not intended to be passed around the left hand side, but rather automatically to the eldest son of the sovereign by birthright.

1776 - At the outset of the American Revolution, following the 11-month long siege of Boston, British forces under General William Howe evacuated several thousand troops and loyalists after George Washington and Henry Knox fortified Dorchester Heights by placing artillery overlooking the city in order to secure what was then the busiest port in the Thirteen Colonies; the day is still commemorated there as Evacuation Day, which ties in quite nicely with the after-effects of drink copious quantities of green beer.

1805 - The Italian Republic, with Napoleon as president, became the Kingdom of Italy, with Napoleon as King. Coincidence? No... Not at all.

1845 - The rubber band was first patented, in England, by Stephen Perry.

1861 - The Kingdom of Italy (1861-1946) was proclaimed; its first King was Victor Emmanuel II of the House of Savoy. This is not to be confused with the Kingdom of Italy declared on this day in 1805 - see above - which was a vassal state of France, and did not comprise the entire Italian Peninsula (which even this one would not control until 1870).

1941 - The National Gallery of Art was officially opened by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in Washington, DC.

1950 - Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley announced the creation of element 98, which they named Californium.

1957 - A plane crash in Cebu killed Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay and 24 others.

1958 - The United States launched Vanguard 1 as part of Project Vanguard; the first solar-powered satellite, it is still aloft (although no longer is use), and is thus the oldest piece of space junk orbiting the Earth.

1959 - One week after an unsuccessful uprising in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, fled Tibet for India, hotly pursued by the Chinese, who have illegally occupied his country since 1950.

1966 - Off the Mediterranean coast of Spain the Alvin submarine found the fourth 70-kiloton warhead accidentally dropped during the Palomares Incident two months earlier, the other three having fallen on land, thankfully without detonating.

1969 - Golda Meir was sworn in as the first woman Prime Minister of Israel.

1979 - The Penmanshiel Tunnel - first opened in 1846 - collapsed during engineering improvements, killing two workers; the tunnel is no longer in use, its collapse having rather effectively, if drastically, closed it.

1985 - Having already raped and murdered Jennie Vincow, serial killer Richard Ramirez - aka the 'Night Stalker' - committed the second and third of his 14 murders, killing Maria Hernandez and Dayle Okazaki in a spree which terrorized Los Angeles prior to his capture on August 24th.

1992 - A suicide car-bomb killed 29 and injured 242 during an attack on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires.

2000 - The Ugandan cult Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God - a breakaway Catholic sect founded by Credonia Mwerinde and Joseph Kibweteere - celebrated what they considered to be the apocalypse by roasting and eating three bulls washed down with 70 crates of soft drinks before killing more than 800 of its members in an explosion.

2008 - New York Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned after a scandal involving a high-end prostitute; he was succeeded by Lieutenant-Governor David Paterson, whose own past was also less than pristine.
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POPnews - March 16th

[From its commanding position on the western bank of the Hudson River adjacent to Highland Falls 80 km (50 miles) north of New York City, West Point has been witness to the sweep of American history from the treason of Benedict Arnold in July 1780 (during which he attempted to turn the fort over to the British, an event known to history as the Betrayal at West Point) to the first graduate Joseph Gardner Swift in 1794 right through to the current day, although it's a little-known fact that most of its pupils have been trained as engineers. The entire site was made a national landmark in 1960.]
1190 - At least 150 Jews were massacred at York (on the day of the Jewish feast of Shabbat ha-Gadol, which is the shabbat before Passover) when an angry mob led by Richard de Malbis which had been laying siege to a building on the site of Clifford's Tower - a prominent part of York Castle where they'd earlier sought and been granted refuge - breached their ersatz Masada*; it was more likely his massive debt with agents of the banker Aaron of Lincoln**, though, that inspired de Malbis to encourage the frenzy in the first place, rather than any religious conviction***. Many of those trapped inside, including Yom Tov of Joigny, committed suicide rather than submit to the worst ravages of the mob; it turns out they didn't honour the promise they made to not harm the survivors after all... 

*Eventually setting it ablaze with all the compassion and integrity we've come to associate with his co-religionists ever since the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE made them as uppity as all get out!
**Who had - under the aegis of his bank - made possible the building of the Abbey of St. Albans, Lincoln Minster, Peterborough Cathedral, and no fewer than nine Cistercian abbeys, and who was, at the time of his death in 1186, the second wealthiest man in England, after only the King, Henry II, who was nevertheless heavily in his debt.
***Religious self-righteousness being the most convenient cover for a multitude of sins, including greed. 

1322 - At the Battle of Boroughbridge during the First War of Scottish Independence Edward II's troops led by Sir Andrew Harclay defeated forces loyal to the King's cousin, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster; also killed in the fracas was Humphrey de Bohun, 4th Earl of Hereford. The rest of the rebellious nobles were captured, charged with treason, and executed - three of them (the Lords Clifford, Mowbray, and Deynville) by being hung in chains from York Castle. 

1521 - Ferdinand Magellan reached the Philippines during his circumnavigation of the world. 

1621 - Samoset, of the Mohegan nation, visited the settlers of Plymouth Colony, greeting them in their own language with the words 'Welcome, Englishmen! My name is Samoset' - which gave them quite a shock let me tell you. 

1660 - England's aptly-named Long Parliament - originally called in November 1640 - finally disbanded itself after having executed Charles I, survived Oliver Cromwell, and made way for the triumphant return of Charles II. 

1689 - The 23rd Regiment of Foot or Royal Welch Fusiliers was founded to oppose the impending Catholicization of England under James II, finally earning the honorific 'royal' during the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713. Having seen much action during the American Revolution, the Boer War, and World War I, in February 2006 they were amalgamated with the Royal Regiment of Wales to form a new large regiment called the Royal Welsh. 

1792 - King Gustav III of Sweden was fatally shot by Jacob Johan Anckarström (aided by Claes Horn and Adolf Ribbing) during a masked ball at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm, finally succumbing to his injuries on March 29th. 

1802 - The United States Military Academy at West Point was established. 

1815 - Prince Willem of the House of Orange-Nassau proclaimed himself King Willem I of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, making him Holland's first constitutional monarch. 

1861 - Edward Clark became Governor of Texas, replacing Sam Houston, who was evicted from office for refusing to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy. 

1939 - Egypt's Princess Fawzia married Iran's Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi; they were divorced 'for her safety' in November 1948 following the birth of their only offspring, Princess Shahnaz Pahlavi.   In March 1949 Her Majesty married Ismail Hussain Shirin Bey and thus forfeited her Iranian titles; her ex-husband, meanwhile, would marry Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiari and Farah Diba in turn.

1952 - In Cilaos - a town on the tiny French holding of Réunion in the Indian Ocean - 1,870mm (73 inches) of rain fell in one day, setting a new world record. 

1953 - Yugoslavia's Marshal Josip Broz Tito arrived for a five-day State Visit to the United Kingdom, during which time he was entertained by Her Majesty The Queen. 

1968 - Between 350 and 500 Vietnamese villagers - men, women, and children - were killed by American troops during the My Lai massacre. 

1976 - Britain's Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, resigned, taking the Nation quite by surprise; unbeknownst to most people, Wilson was then in the first stages of Alzheimer's disease. 

1978 - The supertanker Amoco Cadiz split in two after running aground on Portsall Rocks, three miles off the coast of Brittany, resulting in what is now the 5th-largest oil spill in history - but which was then the largest. In all 1.6 million barrels (219,797 tons) were lost, of which less than 20% was recovered... 

1985 - American Associated Press journalist Terry Anderson was taken hostage in Beirut; after six years and nine months in captivity he would be released in December 1991. 

1988 - On the orders of Saddam Hussein the Kurdish town of Halabjah in Iraq was bombed with a mix of poison gas and nerve agents during the Halabja poison gas attack, killing thousands of people in the process.  On the plus side, the attacks used up the weapons of mass destruction Hussein had bought from the very same Western powers who years later invaded Iraq in search of those very same weapons! 

1995 - Mississippi formally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last state to approve the abolition of slavery, 130 years after such a measure had been approved by Congress.
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POPnews - March 15th

[Considered a detached object but too far out to be considered a scattered disk object, the planetoid Sedna is the largest body so far detected in the Oort cloud, almost a quarter of the way to the next star, Proxima Centauri.]
44 BCE - Roman dictator perpetuo (or 'dictator in perpetuity') Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus, Decimus Junius Brutus and several others on this, the Ides of March. Even though the assassins popularized the world's rockingest reason for murder - tyrannicide! - for some reason their actions have cast a pall on the day ever since...

351 CE - Constantius II elevated his cousin Gallus to the rank of Caesar, putting him in charge of the Eastern part of the Roman Empire.

933 CE - After a ten-year truce, German King Henry I defeated a Hungarian army at the Battle of Riade, near the Unstrut river.

1311 - At the Battle of Halmyros the Catalan Company defeated Walter V of Brienne to take control of the Duchy of Athens, a Crusader state in Greece.

1493 - Christopher Columbus returned to Spain at the end of his First Voyage of Discovery to the Americas.

1672 - England's Charles II issued the Royal Declaration of Indulgence, which many Protestants in Parliament construed as being proof of his own latent Roman Catholicism.

1781 - During the American Revolutionary War, at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse - near present-day Greensboro, North Carolina - 1,900 British troops under General Charles Cornwallis defeated an American force numbering 4,400.

1783 - In an emotional speech in Newburgh, New York, George Washington asked his officers not to support the Newburgh Conspiracy; the plea was successful and the threatened coup d'etat never took place.

1820 - Maine became the 23rd US state.

1827 - The University of Toronto was established by a royal charter from George IV, mainly due to the efforts of John Strachan, who became the school's first president.

1909 - London's Selfridges department store opened.

1917 - Nicholas II abdicated the Russian throne, initially in favour of his son the Tsarevich Alexei, and later still his brother the Grand Duke Mikhail, although a republic was declared before he could become Tsar.

1931 - The SS Viking exploded off the coast of Newfoundland (near the Horse Islands) killing 27 of the 147 on board including Varick Frissel, who had chartered the vessel in order to make a film of that year's seal hunt. Alas, in amongst the cameras and lights, the erstwhile producer had also brought along a considerable quantity of dynamite in order to sex-up his footage... The bodies of Frissel and his dog Cabot have never been found.

1952 - In Cilaos, a city on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, 1,870 mm (73 inches) of rain fell in a single day, setting a new world record.

1956 - My Fair Lady opened on Broadway at the Mark Hellinger Theatre and ran for 2,717 performances, setting a record for the time.

1961 - South Africa was kicked out of the Commonwealth due to its adherence to a policy of apartheid.

1972 - Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, based on the novel by Mario Puzo, premiered.

1990 - The government of Saddam Hussein hanged Iranian-born UK-based journalist Farzad Bazoft as an Israeli spy, having arrested him during his investigation of a mysterious August 1989 explosion at the al-Iskandaria military complex, 48 km (30 miles) south of Baghdad, which may have killed as many as 7000 people while badly damaging the Al Qaqaa munitions plant; Bazoft had been tried and convicted by a kangaroo court five days earlier, on March 10th, despite assurances to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by the Iraqi president himself that Bazoft would get a fair trial. Mere months later the West undertook the first Gulf War against the rogue regime - not due to their judicial murder of a member of the press doing yeoman service by exposing a dangerous tyrant's nuclear capabilities (a feat intelligence agents around the world hadn't even thought to do, let alone done, for themselves) or for any such righteous reason - but because its tin-pot dictator had jeopardized their precious oil supply by ordering an invasion of Kuwait.

2004 - The discovery of Sedna was announced; whether categorized as a dwarf planet or merely a trans-Neptunian object, it is the farthest thing from Earth ever discovered. Named for the Inuit goddess of the sea, Sedna is (in technical terms) a bloody great long way away. One year on Sedna lasts 12,000 Earth years, giving it something in common with where I grew up.
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POPnews - March 14th

[The final resting place of President John F. Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery is adorned with this Eternal Flame, intended to represent both his undying spirit and the legacy of his presidency; Kennedy shares the grave site with his widow, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and two of their children - Patrick Bouvier Kennedy and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr. - while two of his brothers, slain New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy and long-serving Massachusetts senator Edward M. Kennedy, are buried nearby.]
1457 - China's Jingtai Emperor died, having ascended the throne in September 1449 after his older brother the Zhengtong Emperor was militarily defeated and taken prisoner by the Oirat Mongols of Esen Khan, and just three days after abdicating in favour of that same brother, who for some reason took the unprecedented step of changing his regnal name to the Tianshun emperor upon his ascension.

1590 - Henry of Navarre (the future Henri V) and his army of Huguenots defeated the forces of the Catholic League under the Duc de Mayenne at the Battle of Ivry during the French Wars of Religion.

1647 - Bavaria, Cologne, France and Sweden signed the Truce of Ulm, ending the Thirty Years' War.

1757 - On-board the HMS Monarch, Admiral John Byng of Britain's Royal Navy was executed by firing squad for neglecting his duty in failing to prevent Minorca falling to the French following the Battle of Minorca.

1794 - Eli Whitney was granted a patent for the cotton gin.

1889 - German Ferdinand von Zeppelin patented his Navigable Balloon.

1903 - The Hay-Herran Treaty, granting the United States the right to build the Panama Canal, was ratified by the US Senate, although it would later be rejected by the Colombian Senate.

1910 - The Lakeview Gusher, the largest oil well gusher in US history, vented to atmosphere near Bakersfield, California; in all an estimated 9 million barrels (1.4 billion liters/378 million gallons) of oil were spilled before the gusher was brought under control within 18 months, by about September 1911.

1915 - Cornered off the coast of Chile by the Royal Navy after fleeing the Battle of the Falkland Islands during World War I, the German light cruiser SMS Dresden was abandoned and scuttled by her crew.

1942 - John Bumstead and Orvan Hess became the first in the world to successfully treat a patient, Anne Miller, using penicillin.

1943 - The Kraków Ghetto was declared liquidated after less than 48 hours.

1958 - When Prince Albert (a male heir to the House of Grimaldi and therefore the throne of Monaco) was born to the reigning Prince Rainier III and his wife, the former Hollywood film star Grace Kelly, the populace of the tiny Mediterranean principality became very publicly overjoyed at the disinheritance of the couple's previous child - Princess Caroline, born in January 1957 - who ever since her brother's April 2005 ascension has nevertheless been heiress presumptive.

1960 - The Lovell Telescope at the UK's Jodrell Bank Observatory contacted the Pioneer 5 probe, which was then 655,000 km (407,000 miles) from the Earth.

1964 - A jury in Dallas found nightclub owner Jack Ruby guilty of killing Lee Harvey Oswald, assassin of John F. Kennedy, and sentenced him to death.

1967 - The body of President John F. Kennedy was moved to a permanent burial place at Arlington National Cemetery.

1978 - The Israeli Defense Force invaded and occupied southern Lebanon during Operation Litani.

1984 - Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Féin, was seriously wounded during an assassination attempt carried out by the Ulster Freedom Fighters in central Belfast.

1991 - The so-called Birmingham Six were freed after spending 16 years in jail for the Birmingham pub bombings; all were eventually awarded damages from £840,000 to £1.2 million.

1995 - Astronaut Norman Thagard became the first American to ride into space on-board a Russian launch vehicle.
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POPnews - March 13th

[Although mentions of Uncle Sam first occurred during the War of 1812 - when he was a counterpart to the British John Bull - this more common representation first appeared in 1917, when J. M. Flagg created it for a US military recruitment poster, which itself was based on a similar poster of Britain's Lord Kitchener, designed by Alfred Leete.]
1138 - Cardinal Gregorio Conti was elected Antipope as Victor IV, succeeding Anacletus II.

1781 - Sir William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus, along with a raft of puerile jokes.

1845 - Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto was premièred at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, featuring soloist Ferdinand David.

1852 - Uncle Sam made his debut as a cartoon in the New York Lantern, according to The New York Times.

1881 - Tsar Alexander II of Russia was killed* near his palace when a bomb was thrown at him by Ignacy Hryniewiecki, with the radical group Narodnya Volya, who also died in the attack; it had been the fifth attempt on the Tsar's life.

1884 - Troops loyal to Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad led the siege of Khartoum, which would continue until January 1885 when the commander of the city's defense - Charles George Gordon - was killed.

1897 - San Diego State University was founded.

1900 - British forces occupied Bloemfontein, in the Orange Free State, during the Second Boer War.

1920 - The Kapp Putsch briefly ousted the government of the Weimar Republic from Berlin.

1921 - Mongolia, under Baron Roman Ungern von Sternberg, declared its independence from China.

1925 - A law was passed in Tennessee known as the Butler Act which prohibited the teaching of evolution in that state's schools; the law would later be challenged during the famous Scopes Trial.

1943 - Nazi forces began liquidating the Jewish ghetto in Kraków under the supervision of SS-Sturmbannführer Amon Goth, who sent 8,000 to the Plaszow labor camp, ordered some 2,000 whom he deemed unfit to work summarily executed, and sent the remainder to Auschwitz; among the survivors of this horrific event was famed film director Roman Polanski.

1947 - The musical Brigadoon opened on Broadway at the Ziegfeld Theatre, where it ran for 581 performances.

1957 - Cuban student revolutionaries stormed the presidential palace in Havana in a failed attempt on the life of President Fulgencio Batista.

1962 - Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, proposed committing either simulated or real acts of terrorism or other false flag operations against US forces in Guantanamo Bay (only to then blame them on Cuba) to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in a document called Operation Northwoods; not only was the proposal rightly scrapped but President John F. Kennedy refused to re-appoint Lemnitzer to his position. Far from being forced to live the rest of his life in disgrace, Lemnitzer later served as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO.

1969 - Apollo 9 returned safely to Earth, having successfully tested the Lunar Module.

1986 - Microsoft made its initial public offering.

1996 - At the Dunblane Massacre in Dunblane, Scotland, 16 children and 1 adult teacher were shot dead by a spree killer named Thomas Watt Hamilton, who then committed suicide.

1997 - India's Missionaries of Charity chose Sister Nirmala to succeed Mother Teresa as its leader, apparently.

*Although Russia was then on the Julian calendar - meaning this event took place on March 1st for them - Pop Culture Institute is on the Gregorian calendar; we therefore always try to post POPnews events accordingly.
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POPnews - March 12th

[It doesn't really matter what I write here, does it? In fact, I can even forego a caption altogether since the succulent image of this Girl Scout cookie - called a Samoa, probably because once you have one you want samoa - came on screen. Well, just click on the image and you can enjoy one or two (boxes, let's face it) as soon as those short little legs can carry her and her iconic badge-studded sash/unflattering green smock combo to your home or office.]
1832 - Filippo Taglioni's ballet La Sylphide had its première performance at the Paris Opéra.

1868 - Henry James O'Farrell attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria's second son Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, during a royal visit to a Sailor's Home at Clontarf (near Sydney) by firing a revolver into his back. Not only was he unsuccessful, it was only the quick actions of the Prince's police escort who saved O'Farrell from suffering rough justice on the spot; after two weeks in hospital the Prince returned to England, having made a full recovery, whereas his putative assassin wasn't so lucky. He was executed on April 21st despite the insanity plea of his barrister Butler Cole Aspinall and even the intercession of the Prince himself!

1881 - Andrew Watson made his Scotland debut as the world's first black international football player and captain.

1894 - Coca-Cola was sold in bottles for the first time, allowing busy people the opportunity to get tooth decay and diabetes without having to waste time standing at a counter in a drug store.

1912 - The Girl Guides (later renamed the Girl Scouts of the USA) are founded in the United States.

1913 - On the first Canberra Day (today celebrated in the Australian Capital Territory on the second Monday in March - same as Commonwealth Day) the future capital of Australia was officially named Canberra by Lady Denman, wife of the Governor-General; Melbourne would remain the temporary capital until 1927 while the new capital was still under construction.

1928 - California's St. Francis Dam - built as part of the Los Angeles Aqueduct - failed, killing 400 people in Santa Clarita.

1930 - Mahatma Gandhi led the Dandi March 200 miles from Sabarmati Ashram to the sea at the village of Dandi to protest the British monopoly on salt.

1938 - Nazi troops occupied Austria during the Anschluss; the country's annexation was declared the following day.

1947 - The Truman Doctrine was proclaimed to help stem the spread of Communism.

1967 - Suharto assumed the Presidency of Indonesia, having taken over from Sukarno.

1968 - Mauritius achieved its independence from Britain; on the same day in 1992 the country became a republic within the Commonwealth of Nations.

1969 - Beatle Paul McCartney married photographer Linda Eastman at London's Marylebone Register Office.

1971 - The March 12 Memorandum was sent to the Demirel government of Turkey, prompting their mass resignation; this second coup in the history of modern Turkey came 11 years after the first one.

1993 - 13 bombs exploded in Mumbai, killing about 300 and injuring hundreds more; the attacks are thought to have been plotted by Dawood Ibrahim, head of the organized crime syndicate D-Company.

1994 - The Church of England ordained its first female priests.

2003 - Zoran Đinđić, Prime Minister of Serbia, was assassinated in Belgrade.

2004 - South Korea's President Roh Moo-hyun was impeached by its national assembly, a first in that country's history.

2005 - Tung Chee Hwa, the first Chief Executive of Hong Kong, stepped down from his post after his resignation was approved by the Chinese central government.
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