This Week in History

USPA NEWS - Queen Elizabeth II shares her first Instagram post, the Zodiac Killer shoots his first victim, Space Shuttle Discovery makes its final landing, and the first telephone call is made – all this and more in this week in history.

March 7 (1876) – Alexander Graham Bell granted patent for invention of the telephone. (1936) – Adolf Hitler breaks the Treaty of Versailles by sending troops into the Rhineland. (1962) – The Beatles made their broadcasting debut on BBC radio. (1973) – Comet (Lubos) Kohoutek discovered at Hamburg Observatory. (1981) – First homicide at Disneyland, 18 year old is stabbed to death. (1983) – TNN (The Nashville Network) begins on cable television. (1994) – US Navy issues 1st permanent order assigning women on combat ship. (2005) – Mass protest outside the National Assembly of Kuwait building for women’s voting rights in Kuwait. (2013) – UN Security Council approves further North Korean sanctions for its nuclear testing. (2019) – Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain shares her first Instagram post, a letter between mathematician Charles Babbage and Prince Albert.

March 8 (1782) – Gnadenhutten Massacre – Ohio militia kills 90 Native American. (1817) – The New York Stock Exchange is founded. (1910) – Baroness Raymonde de Laroche of Paris becomes the first ever licensed female pilot. (1913) – The US Internal Revenue Service begins to levy and collect income taxes. (1965) – First US combat forces arrive in Vietnam, on the beaches of Da Nang. (1983) – US House Foreign Affairs Committee endorses nuclear weapons freeze with USSR. (1990) – New York City’s Zodiac killer shoots first victim, Mario Orosco. (2013) – North Korea terminates all peace pacts with South Korea. (2014) – Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 with 239 passengers loses contact and disappears. (2020) – Italy announces it is locking down northern region of Lombardy, including Milan, with 16 million people, as COVID-19 cases reach 5,800 with 233 deaths.

March 9 (1522) – Martin Luther begins preaching his “Invocavit Sermons” in the German city of Wittenberg, reminding citizens to trust God’s word rather than violence. (1822) – Charles Graham of New York granted first US patent for artificial teeth. (1839) – Prussian government limits work week for children to 51 hours. (1935) – Adolf Hitler publicly announces the creation of a new air force, the Luftwaffe. (1945) – 334 US B-29 Superfortresses attack Tokyo with 120,000 fire bombs. (1974) – Last Japanese soldier, a guerrilla operating in the Philippines, surrenders 29 years after World War II ended. (1989) – Soviet Union officially submits to jurisdiction of the World Court. (2011) – Space Shuttle Discovery makes its final landing after 39 flights. (2013) – Asteroid 2013 ET comes within 960,000 km from Earth’s surface. (2021) – China and Russia agree to build a research station on or around the Mood and collaborate on lunar missions.

March 10 (1876) – First telephone call. Alexander Graham Bell says “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you” to his assistant Thomas Watson. (1906) – Europe’s worst mining accident, when a coal dust explosion kills 1,060 at Courrieres, France. (1964) – US reconnaissance plane shot down over East Germany. (1969) – James Earl Ray pleads guilty to the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1988) – Avalanche at Swiss Ski resort nearly kills Prince Charles. (1997) – The PalmPilot, as developed by Jeffery Hawkins, is released. (2014) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel warns Russia’s Vladimir Putin that making Crimea part of Russia is illegal and in violation of Ukraine’s constitution. (2019) – Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302 crashes after take-off from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 on board. (2020) – Three months into the COVID-19 epidemic, Chinese President Xi Jinping travels to Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak. (2020) – Russian lower house of Parliament passes legislation to allow Vladimir Putin to hold office of President for life.

March 11 (1812) – Citizenship granted to Prussian Jews. (1897) – A meteorite enters the Earth’s atomosphere and explodes over New Martinsville, West Virginia. The debris causes damage, but no human injuries are reported. (1918) – Moscow becomes capital of revolutionary Russia. (1918) – US Army mess cook Private Albert Gitchell of Fort Riley, Kansas becomes the first documented case of Spanish flu. The start of the worldwide pandemic killing 50-100 million. (1942) – First deportation train leaves Paris for Auschwitz Concentration Camp. (1953) – First woman US Army doctor, F.M. Adams, commissioned (1958) – American B-47 accidentally drops nuclear bomb 15,000 feet on a family home in Mars Bluff, South Carolina. It creates a crater 75 feet across, without its nuclear capsule. (2011) – 9.0 magnitude earthquake strikes 130 km east of Sendai, Japan, triggering a tsunami killing thousands of people. (2013) – North Korea cuts the phone line with South Korea, breaching the 1953 armistice. (2020) – Eleven year bull market ends as the Dow Jones Industrial average falls more than 20%, becoming a bear market.

March 12 (1664) – First naturalization act in American colonies. (1894) – Coca-Cola is sold in bottles for the first time in a candy store in Vicksburg, Mississippi. (1917) – A German submarine sinks an unarmed US merchant ship, the Algonquin, on the same day that US President Woodrow Wilson gives executive order to arm US merchant ships. (1938) – Nazi Germany invades Austria. (1969) – 120 cannabis joints found at the home of Beatles’ George Harrison and his wife Patti. (1980) – Jury finds serial killer, John Wayne Gacy, guilty of murdering 33 in Chicago. (1994) – The Church of England ordains its first ever 33 female priests. (2011) – A reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant melts and explodes and releases radioactivity into the atmosphere, a day after Japan’s earthquake. (2019) – More than 3,000 ISIS fighters surrendered amid battle for last ISIS stronghold in Baghouz, Syria. (2020) – US President Trump bans travel with 26 European countries, due to COVID-19.

March 13 (1881) – Alexander II of Russia is assassinated by members of far-left terror group “People’s Will” who throw a bomb at him in the city of St. Petersburg. (1918) – Marxist Revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, gains control of the Red Army. (1923) – American inventor, Lee de Forest, demonstrates his sound-on-film moving pictures in New York City. (1943) – Failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler, during Smolensk-Rastenburg flight. (1943) – Nazis liquidate the Jewish ghetto in Krakow. Oskar Schindler, with advance information, saves his workers by keeping them in his factor overnight. (1961) – Landslide in USSR kills 145. (1968) – Nerve gas accident at Skull Valley, Utah, kills 6,000 sheep. (2019) – US grounds all Boeing 737 Max aircraft after bans by other countries, folling the plane type’s second crash in Ethiopia. (2019) – Member of the New York Gambino mob family, Frank Call, shot dead outside his home. This is the first killing of a high-ranking mobster since 1985. (2020) – US President Donald Trump declares a national emergency, freeing up $50 billion to fight COVID-19.

Thank you for reading my article. These are merely my thoughts and insights based on the facts. I use only verified sources. No fake news here. You can check out my website – Small Village Life at smallvillagelife.com, where I share useful articles and news.

Wendy writes for the United States Press Agency and is a former columnist with the Fulton County Expositor, Wauseon, Ohio.