421 – Venice is founded at twelve o’clock noon, according to legend.
1199 – Richard I is wounded by a crossbow bolt while fighting France, leading to his death on April 6.
1584 – Sir Walter Raleigh is granted a patent to colonize Virginia.
1634 – The first settlers arrive in Maryland.
1655 – Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is discovered by Christiaan Huygens.
1802 – The Treaty of Amiens is signed as a “Definitive Treaty of Peace” between France and the United Kingdom.
1807 – The Slave Trade Act becomes law, abolishing the slave trade in the British Empire.
1865 – American Civil War: In Virginia, Confederate forces temporarily capture Fort Stedman from the Union.
1917 – The Georgian Orthodox Church restores its autocephaly abolished by Imperial Russia in 1811.
1920 – Patrick Troughton, English actor (Second Doctor Who) (d. 1987) was born
1920 – France considered the possibility of giving Germany more time to pay reparation debts that it owed after World War I. They had refused to pay the 12 billion of the 20 billion gold marks (equivalent to millions of dollars) balance owed. The motion to pay this debt was agreed upon as of the signing of the World War I Treaty of Versailles, which was first signed in 1919. However, the Germans resented the conditions of the treaty, and were still fighting the terms of it well over a year later. Eventually, Germany’s refusal to comply with the peace treaty signed in 1919 lead to the Second World War.
1931 – The Scottsboro Boys are arrested in Alabama and charged with rape.
1941 – The Kingdom of Yugoslavia joins the Axis powers with the signing of the Tripartite Pact.
1949 – The extensive deportation campaign known as March deportation is conducted in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to force collectivisation by way of terror. The Soviet authorities deport more than 92,000 people from the Baltics to remote areas of the Soviet Union.
1957 – United States Customs seizes copies of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” on the grounds of obscenity.
1957 – The European Economic Community is established (West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg).
1958 – Canada’s Avro Arrow makes its first flight.
1965 – Civil rights activists led by Martin Luther King, Jr. successfully complete their 4-day 50-mile march from Selma to the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama.
1967 – Doug Stanhope, American comedian and actor was born.
1969 – During their honeymoon, John Lennon and Yoko Ono hold their first Bed-In for Peace at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel (until March 31).
1979 – The first fully functional space shuttle orbiter, Columbia, is delivered to the John F. Kennedy Space Center to be prepared for its first launch.
1980 – The British Olympic Association has defied the British Government and will be sending a team to the Moscow Olympics later in the year. The British and US government and other Governments around the world have called for a boycott of the Moscow Olympics. Although many governments pressurised thier Olympic Atheletes only 16 countries did not compete including The United States, Japan, West Germany, China, Canada and 9 others.
1990 – The Happy Land fire was an arson fire that kills 87 people trapped inside an illegal nightclub in the New York City borough of The Bronx.
1993 – Warrington Bomb victim Tim Parry dies five days after the IRA bomb detonated in Warrington, Cheshire on 20 March 1993 in the second of the Warrington bomb attacks.
1996 – An 81-day-long standoff between the anti-government group Montana Freemen and law enforcement near Jordan, Montana, begins.
1996 – The European Union’s Veterinarian Committee bans the export of British beef and its by-products as a result of mad cow disease (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy).
2004 – Congress passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004 making it a separate offense to harm a fetus during a violent federal crime. In the 2004 Scott Peterson trial California’s fetal homicide law was used during the trial when he was convicted of first-degree murder with special circumstances for killing Laci and second-degree murder for killing his unborn son.
2006 – Capitol Hill massacre: A gunman kills six people before taking his own life at a party in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.
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