Exxon Valdez crashes, causing one of the worst oil spills in history

After 44 years of rule, Queen Elizabeth I of England dies, and King James VI of Scotland ascends to the throne, uniting England and Scotland under a single British monarch. The daughter of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth succeeded to the throne in 1558 upon the death of her half-sister Queen Mary. The […]

On March 24, 1918, German forces cross the Somme River, achieving their first goal of the major spring offensive begun three days earlier on the Western Front. Operation Michael, engineered by the German chief of the general staff, Erich von Ludendorff, aimed to decisively break through the Allied lines on the Western Front and destroy […]

German occupiers shoot more than 300 Italian civilians as a reprisal for an Italian partisan attack on an SS unit. Since the Italian surrender in the summer of 1943, German troops had occupied wider swaths of the peninsula to prevent the Allies from using Italy as a base of operations against German strongholds elsewhere, such […]

Tennessee Williams’ play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opens in New York, two days before his 44th birthday. The play would win Williams his second Pulitzer Prize. Williams had been an award-winning playwright since 1945, when his first hit play, The Glass Menagerie, opened, winning the Drama Critics Circle Award. Two years later, he […]

The first “teach-in” is conducted at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; two hundred faculty members participate by holding special anti-war seminars. Regular classes were canceled, and rallies and speeches dominated for 12 hours. On March 26, a similar teach-in took place at Columbia University in New York City; this form of protest eventually […]

On March 24, 1987, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) holds its first-ever demonstration on Wall Street—the world’s financial center—targeting pharmaceutical companies that were profiting off the AIDS pandemic. At the busy intersection of Wall Street and Broadway in New York City, 250 protestors disrupted morning rush hour traffic. Demonstrators laid in the […]

On March 24, 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) commences air strikes against Yugoslavia with the bombing of Serbian military positions in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo. The NATO offensive came in response to a new wave of ethnic cleansing launched by Serbian forces against the Kosovar Albanians on March 20. The Kosovo region […]

On March 24, 2015, the co-pilot of a German airliner deliberately flies the plane into the French Alps, killing himself and the other 149 people onboard. When it crashed, Germanwings flight 9525 had been traveling from Barcelona, Spain, to Dusseldorf, Germany. The plane took off from Barcelona around 10 a.m. local time and reached its […]