Also on this day
Lead Story
1959
On this day in 1959, the first Barbie doll goes on display at the American Toy Fair in New York City.
Eleven inches tall, with a waterfall of blond hair, Barbie was the first mass-produced toy doll in the United States with adult features. The woman behind Barbie was Ruth Handler,...
American Revolution
1781
After successfully capturing British positions in Louisiana and Mississippi, Spanish General Bernardo de Galvez, commander of the Spanish forces in North America, turns his attention to the British-occupied city of Pensacola, Florida, on this day in 1781. General Galvez and a Spanish naval force of more than 40 ships and...
Automotive
1985
On March 9, 1985, the first-ever Adopt-a-Highway sign is erected on Texas’s Highway 69. The highway was adopted by the Tyler Civitan Club, which committed to picking up trash along a designated two-mile stretch of the road.
The Adopt-a-Highway program really began the year before, when James Evans, an engineer for...
Civil War
1862
On this day in 1862, one of the most famous naval battles in American history occurs as two ironclads,the U.S.S.Monitor and the C.S.S. Virginiafight to a draw off Hampton Roads, Virginia. The ships pounded each other all morning but their armor plates easilydeflected the cannon shots, signaling a new era...
Cold War
1954
Senate Republicans level criticism at fellow Republican Joseph McCarthy and take action to limit his power. The criticism and actions were indications that McCarthy’s glory days as the most famous investigator of communist activity in the United States were coming to an end.
A Republican senator from Wisconsin, McCarthy had risen...
Disaster
1981
A nuclear accident at a Japan Atomic Power Company plant in Tsuruga, Japan, exposes 59 workers to radiation on this day in 1981. As seems all too common with nuclear-power accidents, the officials in charge failed to timely inform the public and nearby residents, endangering them needlessly. Tsuruga lies...
General Interest
1841
At the end of a historic case, the U.S. Supreme Court rules, with only one dissent, that the African slaves who seized control of the Amistad slave ship had been illegally forced into slavery, and thus are free under American law.
In 1807, the U.S. Congress joined with Great Britain in...
1847
During the Mexican-American War, U.S. forces under General Winfield Scott invade Mexico three miles south of Vera Cruz. Encountering little resistance from the Mexicans massed in the fortified city of Vera Cruz, by nightfall the last of Scott’s 10,000 men came ashore without the loss of a single life. It...
1862
During the American Civil War, the CSS Virginia, a captured and rebuilt Union steam frigate formerly known as the Merrimac, engages the USS Monitor in the first battle between iron-fortified naval vessels in history.The Confederate navy’s addition of iron plates to the captured USS Merrimac steam frigate temporarily made it...
1916
In the early morning of March 9, 1916, several hundred Mexican guerrillas under the command of Francisco “Pancho” Villa cross the U.S.-Mexican border and attack the small border town of Columbus, New Mexico. Seventeen Americans were killed in the raid, and the center of town was burned. It was unclear...
1932
Henry Pu Yi, who reigned as the last emperor of China from 1908 to 1912, becomes regent of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, comprising the Rehe province of China and Manchuria.
Enthroned as the emperor Hsian-T’ung at the age of three, he was forced to abdicate four years later in...
Hollywood
1996
On this day in 1996, the legendary cigar-chomping performer George Burns dies at his home in Beverly Hills, California, just weeks after celebrating his 100th birthday.
Born Nathan Birnbaum in New York City, Burns was one of 12 children. As a young child, he sang for pennies on street corners and...
Literary
1913
Thirty-one-year-old writer Virginia Woolf delivers the manuscript of her first novel, The Voyage Out, to her publisher. Coincidentally, this date was also the 21st birthday of Woolf’s future lover, Vita Sackville-West, who Woolf would not meet until 1925.
Woolf, born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London in 1882, grew up surrounded by...
Music
1997
If all publicity is good publicity, then New York-based Bad Boy Entertainment and Los Angeles-based Death Row Records got better publicity than they ever could have purchased as a result of the feud that broke out between the two companies in the mid-1990s. As the artists associated with the two...
Old West
1916
Angered over American support of his rivals for the control of Mexico, the peasant-born revolutionary leader Pancho Villa attacks the border town of Columbus, New Mexico.
In 1913, a bloody civil war in Mexico brought the ruthless general Victoriano Huerta to power. American President Woodrow Wilson despised the new regime,...
Presidential
1954
On this day in 1954, President Eisenhower writes a letter to his friend, Paul Helms, in which he privately criticizes Senator Joseph McCarthy’s approach to rooting out communists in the federal government. Two days earlier, former presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson had declared that the president’s silence on McCarthy’s actions was...
Sports
1943
On this day in 1943, Bobby Fischer is born in Chicago, Illinois. Fischer went on to become the only American ever to win the chess world championship. He also became well-known for his strange behavior, which paranoia and anti-Semitic and anti-American rants, in spite of his Jewish background and American...
Vietnam War
1965
The 3,500 Marines of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade under Brig. Gen. Frederick J. Karch continue to land at Da Nang. The Marines had begun disembarking from the USS Henrico, Union, and Vancouver on March 8 and were the first U.S. combat troops in South Vietnam. Among the arrivals on...
1970
The U.S. Marines turn over control of the five northernmost provinces in South Vietnam to the U.S. Army. The Marines had been responsible for this area since they first arrived in South Vietnam in 1965. The change in responsibility for this area was part of President Richard Nixon’s initiative to...
World War I
1916
On this day in 1916, Germany declares war on Portugal, who earlier that year honored its alliance with Great Britain by seizing German ships anchored in Lisbon’s harbor.
Portugal became a republic in 1910 after a revolution led by the country’s military toppled King Manuel II (his father, King Carlos, and...
World War II
1945
On this day, U.S. warplanes launch a new bombing offensive against Japan, dropping 2,000 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo over the course of the next 48 hours. Almost 16 square miles in and around the Japanese capital were incinerated, and between 80,000 and 130,000 Japanese civilians were killed in...
