March 20
1815: Napoleon Bonaparte returned to Paris after escaping his exile on Elba, beginning his “Hundred Days” rule.
1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential novel about slavery, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” was first published in book form; it would become the best-selling novel of the 19th century.
1976: Kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst was convicted of armed robbery for her part in a San Francisco bank holdup carried out by the Symbionese Liberation Army.
March 21
1952: The Moondog Coronation Ball, considered the first rock and roll concert, took place at Cleveland Arena.
1963: The United States closed Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary; over 1,500 inmates had been jailed at the island prison off the coast of San Francisco.
1965: Civil rights demonstrators led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. began their third attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
March 22
1765: The British Parliament passed the Stamp Act to raise money from the American colonies, which fiercely resisted the tax.
1894: Ice hockey’s first Stanley Cup championship game was played, in which the Montreal Hockey Club defeated the Ottawa Hockey Club, 3-1.
1963: The Beatles’ debut album, “Please Please Me,” was released in the United Kingdom.
March 23
1775: Patrick Henry delivered an address to the Virginia Provincial Convention in which it is said he declared, “Give me liberty or give me death!”
1919: Benito Mussolini founded his Fascist political movement in Milan, Italy.
1942: The first Japanese Americans incarcerated by the U.S. Army during World War II arrived at the internment camp at Manzanar, California.
March 24
1882: German scientist Robert Koch announced in Berlin that he had discovered the bacillus responsible for tuberculosis.
1980: Catholic Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero of El Salvador was shot to death by a sniper as he celebrated Mass in San Salvador.
1989: The supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on a reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound and began leaking an estimated 11 million gallons of crude oil.
March 25
1894: Jacob S. Coxey began a march from Massillon, Ohio, leading an “army” of as many as 500 unemployed workers to Washington D.C. to demand help from the federal government.
1931: In the so-called “Scottsboro Boys” case, nine young Black men were taken off a train in Alabama, accused of raping two white women; after years of convictions, death sentences and imprisonment, the nine were eventually vindicated.
1965: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led 25,000 people to the Alabama state capitol in Montgomery, completing a five-day march from Selma to protest the denial of voting rights to Black Americans.
March 26
1812: An earthquake devastated Caracas, Venezuela, causing as many as 30,000 deaths.
1917: The Seattle Metropolitans became the first American ice hockey team to win the Stanley Cup, defeating the Montreal Canadiens 9-1 to win the championship series, three games to one.
1997: The bodies of 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate religious cult who took their own lives were found inside a rented mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California.
