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 […]

Maj. Gen. Orde Wingate, leader of the 77th Indian Brigade, also called the Chindits, dies in a transport plane crash. He was 41 years old. Wingate, a graduate of the Royal Military Academy, was a famous eccentric who both quoted the Bible and advocated irregular warfare tactics. His career as a guerrilla fighter began as […]

In conclusion to an extremely tense situation of the early Cold War, the Soviet Union announces that its troops in Iran will be withdrawn within six weeks. The Iranian crisis was one of the first tests of power between the United States and the Soviet Union in the postwar world. The Iranian crisis began during […]

On March 24, 1958, Elvis Presley is inducted into the U.S. Army, starting his day as the King of Rock and Roll, but ending it as a lowly buck private in the United States Army. When Elvis Presley turned 18 on January 8, 1953, he fulfilled his patriotic duty and legal obligation to register his […]

On March 24, 1972, The Godfather—a three-hour epic chronicling the lives of the Corleones, an Italian-American crime family led by the powerful Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando)—is released in theaters nationwide. The Godfather was adapted from the best-selling book of the same name by Mario Puzo, a novelist who grew up in New York City’s Hell’s […]

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 […]