“Cops” makes TV debut

On March 11, 1779, Congress establishes the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to help plan, design and prepare environmental and structural facilities for the U.S. Army. Made up of civilian workers, members of the Continental Army and French officers, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers played an essential role in the critical Revolutionary War battles […]

In Montgomery, Alabama, delegates from South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas adopt the Permanent Constitution of the Confederate States of America. The constitution resembled the Constitution of the United States, even repeating much of its language, but was actually more comparable to the Articles of Confederation—the initial post-Revolutionary War U.S. constitution—in its […]

On March 11, 1903, musician and entertainer Lawrence Welk is born. For the generation that grew up on the big bands of the 1930s and ’40s, The Lawrence Welk Show was a blessed island of calm in a world gone mad for rock and roll, and it aired like clockwork every Saturday night from 1955 […]

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, the first Broadway play written by a Black woman, opens at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York on March 11, 1959. Taking its title from the Langston Hughes poem “Harlem,” Hansberry’s story follows a working-class Black family from the South Side of Chicago hoping to improve their lives. […]

Capping his rapid rise through the Communist Party hierarchy, Mikhail Gorbachev is selected as the new general secretary of the Soviet Union, following the death of Konstantin Chernenko the day before. Gorbachev oversaw a radical transformation of Soviet society and foreign policy during the next six years. Gorbachev was born in 1931, the son of […]

On March 11, 2004, 193 people are killed and nearly 2,000 are injured when 10 bombs explode on four trains in three Madrid-area train stations during a busy morning rush hour. The bombs were later found to have been detonated by mobile phones. The attacks, the deadliest against civilians on European soil since the 1988 […]

A massive earthquake in Japan causes the the Fukushima disaster—considered the second-worst nuclear disaster in history. Over 100,000 people were forced to relocate.