On March 14, 1776, Alexander Hamilton receives his commission as captain of a New York artillery company. Throughout the rest of 1776, Captain Hamilton established himself as a great military leader as he directed his artillery company in several battles in and around New York City. In March 1777, Hamilton’s performance came to the attention of General George Washington and he was commissioned lieutenant colonel and personal aide to General Washington in the Continental Army.

On March 18, 1889, Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte becomes the first Native American woman to graduate from medical school. She was top of her class at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania.

In a burst of caustic, moralistic grandstanding, U.S. Senator Edwin C. “Big Ed” Johnson of Colorado launches a verbal attack on Swedish movie star Ingrid Bergman for her extramarital affair with Italian film director Roberto Rossellini. The fiery senator also calls for the licensing of performers and filmmakers, so that they can lose their license for scandalous personal behavior. (His proposal didn’t pass.)

The Soviet government announces that Nikita Khrushchev has been selected as one of five men named to the new office of Secretariat of the Communist Party. Khrushchev’s selection was a crucial first step in his rise to power in the Soviet Union—an advance that culminated in Khrushchev being named secretary of the Communist Party in September 1953, and premier in 1958.

Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who killed Lee Harvey Oswald—the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy—is found guilty of the “murder with malice” of Oswald and sentenced to die in the electric chair. It was the first courtroom verdict to be televised in U.S. history.

On March 14, 1979, Judy Chicago’s art installation "The Dinner Party" opens at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The piece remains one of the most famous—and controversial—works of feminist art.

Cult leader Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo sacrifices another human victim at his remote Mexican desert compound Rancho Santa Elena. When the victim didn’t beg for mercy before dying, Constanzo sent his people out to find another subject for torture and death. When they abducted American college student Mark Kilroy outside a bar in Matamoros, Mexico, Constanzo inadvertently set in motion the downfall of his cult.

In the face of widespread questioning of their guilt, British authorities release the so-called “Birmingham Six,” six Irish men who had been sent to prison 16 years earlier for the 1974 terrorist bombings of two Birmingham, England, pubs.