March 13: What Happened on This Day in History (High_school Level)?

(Page last edited 10/12/2017)

1. 1781 - William Herschel discovers Uranus.
2. 1862 - American Civil War: The U.S. federal government forbids all Union army officers to return fugitive slaves, thus effectively annulling the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and setting the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation.
3. 1930 - The news of the discovery of Pluto is telegraphed to the Harvard College Observatory.
4. 1963 - Police in Phoenix, Arizona arrest Ernesto Miranda and charge him with kidnap and rape. His conviction is ultimately set aside by the United States Supreme Court in Miranda v. Arizona
5. 1964 - American Kitty Genovese is murdered, reportedly in view of neighbors who did nothing to help her, prompting research into the bystander effect.
6. 1969 - Apollo program: Apollo 9 returns safely to Earth after testing the Lunar Module.
7. 1988 - The Seikan Tunnel, the longest undersea tunnel in the world, opens between Aomori and Hakodate, Japan.
8. 1997 - India's Missionaries of Charity chooses Sister Nirmala to succeed Mother Teresa as its leader.
9. 2003 - Human evolution: The journal Nature reports that 350,000-year-old footprints of an upright-walking human have been found in Italy.
10. 2013 - Pope Francis is elected in the papal conclave to succeed Pope Benedict XVI.
11. Famous Birthdays: Georges de La Tour (French painter), Charles Bonnet (Swiss historian and author), Percival Lowell (American astronomer and mathematician), John Hasbrouck Van Vleck (American physicist and mathematician, Nobel Prize laureate), Giorgos Seferis (Greek poet, Nobel Prize laureate)

For famous birthdays and other daily events in history, visit our Daily Dose Activities.

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Click Here for Tomorrow in History: March 14

For more history resources on Internet 4 Classrooms, visit our Social Studies and History index. For Pre K-8th Grade Level History and Social Studies Resources, visit our Grade Level Index.