March 26
In a ceremony at the White House, Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin sign an historic peace agreement to end three decades of hostilities between Egypt and Israel. – 1979.
Police enter a mansion in San Diego, Calif., and discover 39 victims of a mass suicide. The deceased all were found lying peaceably in matching dark clothes and Nike sneakers. It was later revealed that the deceased were members of the Heaven’s Gate religious cult, whose leaders preached that suicide would allow them to leave their bodily containers and enter an alien spacecraft hidden behind the Hale-Bopp comet. – 1997.
March 27
The University of Oregon defeats The Ohio State University, 46–33, to win the first NCAA men’s basketball tournament at Northwestern University in Evanston. The Final Four, which is the tournament’s four remaining teams, has grown exponentially in size and popularity since 1939. – 1939.
U.S. Supreme Court rules that undocumented workers do not have the same rights as Americans when they are wrongly fired. – 2002.
March 28
Martin Luther King, Jr., leads a march of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn.. Violence during the march persuades him to return the following week to Memphis, where he was assassinated. – 1968.
At 4 a.m. the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry begins when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at Three Mile Island in Dauphin County, Pa. fails to close. Cooling water, contaminated with radiation, drained from the open valve into adjoining buildings, and the core began to dangerously overheat. – 1979.
March 29
Two months after the signing of the Vietnam peace agreement, the last U.S. combat troops leave South Vietnam and Hanoi, the controlling operation headquarters of North Vietnam, frees the remaining American prisoners of war held in North Vietnam. America’s direct eight-year intervention in the Vietnam War was at an end. In Saigon, some 7,000 U.S. Department of Defense civilian employees remained behind to aid South Vietnam in conducting what looked to be a fierce and ongoing war with communist North Vietnam. – 1973.
March 30
At the height of the Great Depression, 35,000 unemployed march in New York’s Union Square. Police beat many demonstrators and injure 100. – 1930.
President Ronald Reagan is shot in the chest and injured outside a Washington, D.C., hotel by a deranged drifter. – 1981.
March 31
President Martin Van Buren issues a broadly-applicable executive order granting the 10-hour day to all government employees engaged in manual labor. – 1840.
The Eiffel Tower is dedicated in Paris in a ceremony presided over by Gustave Eiffel, the tower’s designer, and attended by Pierre Tirard, French prime minister, a handful of other dignitaries, and 200 construction workers. – 1889.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs legislation to establish the Civilian Conservation Corps, to help alleviate suffering during the Depression. By the time the program ended after the start of World War II it had provided jobs for more than six Million men and boys. The average enrollee gained 11 pounds in his first three months. – 1933.
The Dalai Lama flees the Chinese suppression of a national uprising in Tibet and crosses the border into India, where he is granted political asylum. – 1959.
April 1
English pranksters begin popularizing the annual tradition of April Fools’ Day by playing practical jokes on each other. – 1700.
An undersea earthquake off the Alaskan coast triggers a massive tsunami that kills 159 residents in Hawaii. – 1946.
Longest newspaper strike in U.S. history until then, 114 days, ends in New York City. Workers at nine newspapers were involved. – 1963.
Major League Baseball players begin what is to become a 13-day strike and ends when owners agree to increase pension fund payments and to add salary arbitration to the collective bargaining agreement. – 1972.
Eleven-day strike by 34,000 New York City transit workers begins, and halts bus and subway service in all five boroughs before strikers return to work with a 17% raise over two years plus a cost-of-living adjustment. – 1980.