Today in History: March 17
Today is Sunday, March 17, the 76th day of 2019.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On March 17, 1762, New York held its first St. Patrick’s Day parade.
On this date:
In 1776, the Revolutionary War Siege of Boston ended as British forces evacuated the city.
In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt first likened crusading journalists to a man with “the muckrake in his hand” in a speech to the Gridiron Club in Washington.
In 1912, the Camp Fire Girls organization was incorporated in Washington D.C., two years to the day after it was founded in Thetford, Vermont. (The group is now known as Camp Fire.)
In 1936, Pittsburgh’s Great St. Patrick’s Day Flood began as the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers and their tributaries, swollen by rain and melted snow, started exceeding flood stage; the high water was blamed for more than 60 deaths.
In 1958, the U.S. Navy launched the Vanguard 1 satellite.
In 1959, the Dalai Lama fled Tibet for India in the wake of a failed uprising by Tibetans against Chinese rule.
In 1968, a peaceful anti-Vietnam War protest in London was followed by a riot outside the U.S. Embassy; more than 200 people were arrested and over 80 people were reported injured.
In 1970, the United States cast its first veto in the U.N. Security Council, killing a resolution that would have condemned Britain for failing to use force to overthrow the white-ruled government of Rhodesia.
In 1973, U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm, a freed prisoner of the Vietnam War, was joyously greeted by his family at Travis Air Force Base in California in a scene captured in a Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photograph.
In 1988, Avianca Flight 410, a Boeing 727, crashed after takeoff into a mountain in Colombia, killing all 143 people on board.
In 2006, Federal regulators reported the deaths of two women in addition to four others who had taken the abortion pill RU-486; Planned Parenthood said it would immediately stop disregarding the approved instructions for the drug’s use. Fashion designer Oleg Cassini died on Long Island, New York, at age 92.
In 2013, two members of Steubenville, Ohio’s celebrated high school football team were found guilty of raping a drunken 16-year-old girl and sentenced to at least a year in juvenile prison in a case that rocked the Rust Belt city of 18,000.
Ten years ago: U.S. journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee were detained by North Korea while reporting on North Korean refugees living across the border in China. (Both were convicted of entering North Korea illegally and were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor; both were freed in August 2009 after former President Bill Clinton met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.) The Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its final print edition.
Five years ago: Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula as an “independent and sovereign country,” ignoring sanctions imposed by the United States and European countries. Fashion designer L’Wren Scott, 49, was found dead in New York, a suicide. British cinematographer Oswald Morris, who’d won an Oscar for “Fiddler on the Roof,” died in Dorset, England, at age 98.
One year ago: Superstore company Fred Meyer announced that it would stop selling guns and ammunition; in the aftermath of the Florida high school shooting, the company had earlier said it would stop selling firearms to anyone under 21. Russia said it was expelling 23 British diplomats in a growing diplomatic dispute over a nerve agent attack on a former spy in Britain.