On March 11, 1669, Mount Etna, on the island of Sicily in modern-day Italy, begins rumbling. Multiple eruptions over the next few weeks killed more than 20,000 people and left thousands more homeless. Most of the victims could have saved themselves by fleeing, but stayed, in a vain attempt to save their city. Mount Etna […]

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 […]

After struggling against great odds to save the Philippines from Japanese conquest, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur abandons the island fortress of Corregidor under orders from President Franklin Roosevelt. Left behind at Corregidor and on the Bataan Peninsula were 90,000 American and Filipino troops, who, lacking food, supplies and support, would soon succumb to the Japanese […]

On March 11, 1973, the first formal meeting of “Parents of Gays,” co-founded by the parents of a gay son, is held in a church in Greenwich Village in New York. In 1982, it became a national organization called “Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays,” or PFLAG—the largest family and ally organization in […]

On March 11, 1997, Paul McCartney, a former member of the most successful rock band in history, The Beatles, is knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his “services to music.” The 54-year-old from Liverpool became Sir Paul in a centuries-old ceremony of pomp and solemnity at Buckingham Palace in central London. Fans waited outside in […]

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.