Napoleon Bonaparte’s “100 Days” began on March 20, 1815, when he triumphantly marched into Paris with hundreds of thousands of supporters, causing Louis XVIII to flee in terror at the return of the former emperor. His return to the seat of power gained the…
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The Republican Party of the United States was officially founded on March 20, 1854, in Ripon, Wisconsin, as a direct response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act—a divisive law that threatened to extend slavery into new territories. The party’s formation reflected the increasing sectional tensions of…
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On March 19, 1982, a small and seemingly obscure landing on a remote sub-Antarctic island set in motion one of the last conventional wars of the late Cold War era. That morning, a group of Argentine personnel—nominally scrap metal workers but accompanied by military…
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The first recorded bank heist in U.S. history took place in 1831 when burglars infiltrated the City Bank of New York (now Citibank) on Wall Street, escaping with an astounding $245,000—an enormous sum in early 19th-century America. This audacious crime, carried out in the…
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On March 19, 1965, an underwater archaeologist by the name of E. Lee Spence found the wreckage of the CSS Georgiana, a Confederate blockade runner that was sunk by the Union on the same date 102 years before. Ofren called the “mystery ship of the…
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On March 18, 1766, the British Parliament retreated—reluctantly, strategically—from one of the most consequential miscalculations of its imperial administration: the Stamp Act. Barely a year after its passage, the law had ignited a colonial resistance that revealed, with startling clarity, the limits of parliamentary…
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At 1:24 a.m. on March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers walked into Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and said four words that rocked the art world: “Gentlemen, this is a robbery.” The Smithsonian Magazine writes, “The pair proceeded to remove 13 treasured…
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On March 18, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Hawaii Admission Act into law, paving the way for Hawaii to become the 50th state of the United States later that year. This landmark legislation was the culmination of decades of political struggle, economic…
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On the morning of March 17, 1776, the people of Boston watched a sight that would have seemed impossible only months earlier: the most powerful army in the world quietly abandoning the city it had occupied since the opening shots of rebellion. Red-coated soldiers…
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On March 17, 1992, a huge majority of White South African voters backed a referendum to dismantle apartheid, the South Africa’s severe system of racial segregation. The results of the vote gave President F.W. de Klerk a mandate to end apartheid and share power…
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