March 31
Today is the last day of March.
There are 275 days remaining in the year, and 268 days until Christmas.
Also observed today is
International Transgender Day of Visibility, as well as New Jersey's
Thomas Mundy Peterson Day, and the U.S. Virgin Islands'
Transfer Day.
Events
1492 Queen
Isabella of Castile issues the
Alhambra Decree, ordering her 150,000 Jewish and Muslim subjects to convert to Christianity or face expulsion.
1774 American Revolutionary War: The Kingdom of Great Britain orders the port of Boston, Massachusetts closed pursuant to the
Boston Port Act.
1889 The
Eiffel Tower is officially opened.
1906 The Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (later the
National Collegiate Athletic Association) is established to set rules for college sports in the United States.
1917 The United States takes possession of the
Danish West Indies after paying $25 million to Denmark, and renames the territory the
United States Virgin Islands.
1918
Daylight saving time goes into effect in the United States for the first time.
1921 The
Royal Australian Air Force is formed.
1930 The
Motion Picture Production Code is instituted, imposing strict guidelines on the treatment of sex, crime, religion and violence in film, in the U.S., for the next thirty-eight years.
1931
TWA Flight 599 crashes near Bazaar, Kansas, killing eight, including University of Notre Dame head football coach
Knute Rockne.
1945 World War II: A defecting German pilot delivers a
Messerschmitt Me 262A-1, the world's first operational jet-powered fighter aircraft, to the Americans, the first to fall into Allied hands.
1951 Remington Rand delivers the first
UNIVAC I computer to the United States Census Bureau.
1959 The
14th Dalai Lama, crosses the border into India and is granted political asylum.
1985 The first
WrestleMania, the biggest wrestling event from the WWE (then the WWF), takes place in Madison Square Garden in New York City.
1990 Approximately
200,000 protesters take to the streets of London to protest against the newly introduced
Poll Tax.
1991
Georgian independence referendum, 1991: Nearly
99 percent of the voters support the country's independence from the Soviet Union.
1992 The
USS Missouri, the last active United States Navy battleship, is decommissioned in Long Beach, California.
1997 The first episode of
Teletubbies is aired on BBC.
1998
Netscape releases
Mozilla source code under an open source license.
2004 Iraq War in Anbar Province: In Fallujah, Iraq, four American private military contractors working for
Blackwater USA, are killed
after being ambushed. Their beaten, burned bodies were dragged through the streets of Fallujah before being hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River.
Births
1596 Renι Descartes, 1685 Johann Sebastian Bach, 1732 Joseph Haydn, 1809 Nikolai Gogol, 1878 Jack Johnson, 1922 Richard Kiley, 1924 Leo Buscaglia, 1927 Cesar Chavez, 1927 William Daniels, 1927 Vladimir Ilyushin, 1928 Lefty Frizzell, 1928 Gordie Howe, 1929 Liz Claiborne, 1934 Shirley Jones, 1934 John D. Loudermilk, 1935 Herb Alpert, 1940 Barney Frank, 1940 Patrick Leahy, 1942 Michael Savage, 1943 Christopher Walken, 1944 Mick Ralphs, 1945 Gabe Kaplan, 1948 Al Gore, 1948 Rhea Perlman, 1950 Ed Marinaro, 1955 Angus Young, 1965 William McNamara, 1971 Ewan McGregor, 1972 Evan Williams, 1980 Kate Micucci, 1981 Ryan Bingham
Deaths
32 BC Titus Pomponius Atticus, 1850 John C. Calhoun, 1855 Charlotte Brontλ, 1913 J. P. Morgan, 1931 Knute Rockne, 1976 Paul Strand, 1980 Jesse Owens, 1981 Enid Bagnold, 1993 Brandon Lee, 1995 Selena, 1998 Bella Abzug, 1998 Tim Flock, 2005 Frank Perdue, 2014 Charles Keating, 2016 Ronnie Corbett