This Day in History

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March 31

Today is the last day of March.

There are 275 days remaining in the year, and 268 days until Christmas.

Also observed today is International Transgender Day of Visibility, as well as New Jersey's Thomas Mundy Peterson Day, and the U.S. Virgin Islands' Transfer Day.


Events

1492 – Queen Isabella of Castile issues the Alhambra Decree, ordering her 150,000 Jewish and Muslim subjects to convert to Christianity or face expulsion.

1774 – American Revolutionary War: The Kingdom of Great Britain orders the port of Boston, Massachusetts closed pursuant to the Boston Port Act.

1889 – The Eiffel Tower is officially opened.

1906 – The Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (later the National Collegiate Athletic Association) is established to set rules for college sports in the United States.

1917 – The United States takes possession of the Danish West Indies after paying $25 million to Denmark, and renames the territory the United States Virgin Islands.

1918 – Daylight saving time goes into effect in the United States for the first time.

1921 – The Royal Australian Air Force is formed.

1930 – The Motion Picture Production Code is instituted, imposing strict guidelines on the treatment of sex, crime, religion and violence in film, in the U.S., for the next thirty-eight years.

1931 – TWA Flight 599 crashes near Bazaar, Kansas, killing eight, including University of Notre Dame head football coach Knute Rockne.

1945 – World War II: A defecting German pilot delivers a Messerschmitt Me 262A-1, the world's first operational jet-powered fighter aircraft, to the Americans, the first to fall into Allied hands.

1951 – Remington Rand delivers the first UNIVAC I computer to the United States Census Bureau.

1959 – The 14th Dalai Lama, crosses the border into India and is granted political asylum.

1985 – The first WrestleMania, the biggest wrestling event from the WWE (then the WWF), takes place in Madison Square Garden in New York City.

1990 – Approximately 200,000 protesters take to the streets of London to protest against the newly introduced Poll Tax.

1991 – Georgian independence referendum, 1991: Nearly 99 percent of the voters support the country's independence from the Soviet Union.

1992 – The USS Missouri, the last active United States Navy battleship, is decommissioned in Long Beach, California.

1997 – The first episode of Teletubbies is aired on BBC.

1998 – Netscape releases Mozilla source code under an open source license.

2004 – Iraq War in Anbar Province: In Fallujah, Iraq, four American private military contractors working for Blackwater USA, are killed after being ambushed. Their beaten, burned bodies were dragged through the streets of Fallujah before being hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River.

Births

1596 – René Descartes, 1685 – Johann Sebastian Bach, 1732 – Joseph Haydn, 1809 – Nikolai Gogol, 1878 – Jack Johnson, 1922 – Richard Kiley, 1924 – Leo Buscaglia, 1927 – Cesar Chavez, 1927 – William Daniels, 1927 – Vladimir Ilyushin, 1928 – Lefty Frizzell, 1928 – Gordie Howe, 1929 – Liz Claiborne, 1934 – Shirley Jones, 1934 – John D. Loudermilk, 1935 – Herb Alpert, 1940 – Barney Frank, 1940 – Patrick Leahy, 1942 – Michael Savage, 1943 – Christopher Walken, 1944 – Mick Ralphs, 1945 – Gabe Kaplan, 1948 – Al Gore, 1948 – Rhea Perlman, 1950 – Ed Marinaro, 1955 – Angus Young, 1965 – William McNamara, 1971 – Ewan McGregor, 1972 – Evan Williams, 1980 – Kate Micucci, 1981 – Ryan Bingham

Deaths

32 BC – Titus Pomponius Atticus, 1850 – John C. Calhoun, 1855 – Charlotte Brontë, 1913 – J. P. Morgan, 1931 – Knute Rockne, 1976 – Paul Strand, 1980 – Jesse Owens, 1981 – Enid Bagnold, 1993 – Brandon Lee, 1995 – Selena, 1998 – Bella Abzug, 1998 – Tim Flock, 2005 – Frank Perdue, 2014 – Charles Keating, 2016 – Ronnie Corbett