March 13 - Events

Events

• 1138 – Cardinal Gregorio Conti is elected Antipope as Victor IV, succeeding Anacletus II.
• 1639 – Harvard College is named for clergyman John Harvard.
• 1781 – William Herschel discovers Uranus.
• 1809 – Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden is deposed in a coup d'état.
• 1845 – Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto receives its première performance in Leipzig with Ferdinand David as soloist.
• 1862 – American Civil War: The U.S. federal government forbids all Union army officers to return fugitive slaves, thus effectively annulling the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and setting the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation.
• 1865 – American Civil War: The Confederate States of America agree to the use of African American troops.
• 1881 – Alexander II of Russia is killed near his palace when a bomb is thrown at him. (Gregorian date: it was March 1 in the Julian calendar then in use in Russia.)
• 1884 – The Siege of Khartoum, Sudan begins, ending on January 26, 1885.
• 1897 – San Diego State University is founded.
• 1900 – Second Boer War: British forces occupy Bloemfontein, Orange Free State.
• 1920 – The Kapp Putsch briefly ousts the Weimar Republic government from Berlin.
• 1921 – Mongolia, under Baron Roman Ungern von Sternberg, declares its independence from China.
• 1925 – Scopes Trial: A law in Tennessee prohibits the teaching of evolution.
• 1930 – The news of the discovery of Pluto is telegraphed to the Harvard College Observatory.
• 1933 – Great Depression: Banks in the U.S. begin to re-open after President Franklin D. Roosevelt mandates a "bank holiday".
• 1938 – World News Roundup is broadcast for the first time on CBS Radio in the United States.
• 1938 – Anschluss of Austria to the Third Reich.
• 1940 – The Russo-Finnish Winter War ends.
• 1943 – World War II: In Bougainville, Japanese troops end their assault on American forces at Hill 700.
• 1943 – The Holocaust: German forces liquidate the Jewish ghetto in Kraków.
• 1954 – Battle of Điện Biên Phủ: Viet Minh forces attack the French.
• 1957 – Cuban student revolutionaries storm the presidential palace in Havana in a failed attempt on the life of President Fulgencio Batista.
• 1962 – Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, delivers a proposal, called Operation Northwoods, regarding performingterrorist attacks upon Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The proposal is scrapped and PresidentJohn F. Kennedy removes Lemnitzer from his position.
• 1969 – Apollo program: Apollo 9 returns safely to Earth after testing the Lunar Module.
• 1979 – The New Jewel Movement, headed by Maurice Bishop, ousts Prime Minister Eric Gairy in a nearly bloodless coup d'etat inGrenada.
• 1991 – The United States Department of Justice announces that Exxon has agreed to pay $1 billion for the clean-up of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.
• 1992 – An earthquake registering 6.8 on the Richter scale kills over 500 in Erzincan, eastern Turkey.
• 1996 – Dunblane massacre: in Dunblane, Scotland, 16 kindergarten children and 1 teacher are shot dead by a spree killer, Thomas Watt Hamilton who then committed suicide.
• 1997 – India's Missionaries of Charity chooses Sister Nirmala to succeed Mother Teresa as its leader.
• 1997 – The Phoenix lights are seen over Phoenix, Arizona by hundreds of people, and by millions on television.
• 2003 – Human evolution: The journal Nature reports that 350,000-year-old footprints of an upright-walking human have been found in Italy.
• 2005 – Terry Ratzmann shoots and kills six members of the Living Church of God and the minister at Sheraton Inn in Brookfield,Wisconsin before killing himself.
• 2008 – Gold prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange hit $1,000 per ounce for the first time.