March 19
1931: Nevada Gov. Fred B. Balzar signed a measure making the state the first to legalize gambling.
1945: During World War II, more than 800 service members were killed when a Japanese dive bomber attacked the aircraft carrier USS Franklin near Japan.
1953: The 25th Academy Awards ceremony became the first to be televised; “The Greatest Show on Earth” won the Oscar for best picture.
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 anti-slavery novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was first published in book form after being serialized in the abolitionist newspaper “The National Era.”
1976: Kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst was convicted of armed robbery for her role in a San Francisco bank holdup carried out by the Symbionese Liberation Army.
March 21
1873: The Spanish National Assembly abolished slavery in Puerto Rico, then a Spanish colony.
1933: Germany’s Nazi government established its first concentration camp in the town of Dachau, ostensibly for political prisoners. More than 200,000 prisoners were held there and more than 40,000 died.
1965: Civil rights demonstrators led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. began their third march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, escorted by U.S. Army and National Guard troops assigned by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
March 22
1765: The British Parliament passed the Stamp Act to raise revenue from the American colonies, which fiercely resisted the tax. The act was repealed a year later.
1894: The first Stanley Cup championship game was played as the Montreal Hockey Club defeated the Ottawa Hockey Club 3-1.
1963: The Beatles released their debut album, “Please Please Me,” in the United Kingdom on the Parlophone label.
March 23
1775: Patrick Henry addressed the Virginia Provincial Convention, declaring, “Give me liberty, or give me death!”
1806: Explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark began their return to St. Louis after completing the first U.S. overland expedition to the Pacific coast.
1919: Benito Mussolini founded his Fascist political movement in Milan, Italy.
March 24
1882: German scientist Robert Koch announced in Berlin that he had discovered the bacillus responsible for tuberculosis.
1921: The Women’s Olympiad, the first international women’s sporting event, began in Monte Carlo, Monaco.
1989: The supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on a reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, spilling an estimated 11 million gallons of crude oil.
March 25
1911: A fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. garment factory in New York killed 146 people, mostly young immigrant women, prompting major workplace safety and labor reforms.
1894: Jacob S. Coxey began a march from Massillon, Ohio, to Washington, leading hundreds of unemployed workers demanding federal relief following the Panic of 1893.
1931: In the Scottsboro Boys case, nine Black teenagers were taken off a train in Alabama and falsely accused of raping two white women; after years of trials and imprisonment, they were eventually vindicated.
