March 26 - Events

Events

• 1027 – Pope John XIX crowns Conrad II as Holy Roman Emperor.
• 1351 – Combat of the Thirty : Thirty Breton Knights call out and defeat thirty English Knights
• 1484 – William Caxton prints his translation of Aesop's Fables.
• 1552 – Guru Amar Das becomes the Third Sikh Guru.
• 1636 – Utrecht University is founded in the Netherlands.
• 1812 – An earthquake destroys Caracas, Venezuela.
• 1830 – The Book of Mormon is published in Palmyra, New York.
• 1839 – The first Henley Royal Regatta is held.
• 1881 – Thessaly is freed and becomes part of Greece again.
• 1885 – The Métis people of the District of Saskatchewan under Louis Riel begin the North-West Rebellion against Canada.
• 1913 – Balkan War: Bulgarian forces capture Adrianople.
• 1917 – World War I: First Battle of Gaza – British troops are halted after 17,000 Turks block their advance.
• 1931 – SwissAir is founded as the national airline of Switzerland.
• 1934 – The driving test is introduced in the United Kingdom.
• 1939 – Spanish Civil War: Nationalists begin their final offensive of the war.
• 1942 – World War II: The first female prisoners arrive at Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
• 1958 – The United States Army launches Explorer 3.
• 1958 – The African Regroupment Party is launched at a meeting in Paris.
• 1967 – Ten thousand people gather for one of many Central Park be-ins in New York City
• 1971 – East Pakistan declares its independence from Pakistan to form the People's Republic of Bangladesh and the Bangladesh Liberation War begins.
• 1974 – Gaura Devi leads a group of 27 women of Laata village, Henwalghati, Garhwal Himalayas, to form circles around trees to stop them being felled and giving rise to the Chipko Movement in India.
• 1975 – The Biological Weapons Convention comes into force.
• 1977 – Focus on the Family is founded by Dr. James Dobson.
• 1978 – Four days before the scheduled opening of Japan's Narita International Airport, a group of protestors destroys much of the equipment in the control tower with Molotov cocktails.
• 1979 – Anwar al-Sadat, Menachem Begin and Jimmy Carter sign the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty in Washington, D.C..
• 1982 – A groundbreaking ceremony for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is held in Washington, D.C..
• 1991 – Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay sign the Treaty of Asunción, establishing Mercosur, the South Common Market.
• 1991 – Five South Korean boys, nicknamed the Frog Boys, disappear while hunting for frogs and are murdered in a case that remains unsolved.
• 1995 – The Schengen Treaty comes into effect.
• 1997 – Thirty-nine bodies are found in the Heaven's Gate cult suicides.
• 1998 – Oued Bouaicha massacre in Algeria: 52 people are killed with axes and knives, 32 of them babies under the age of 2.
• 1999 – The "Melissa worm" infects Microsoft word processing and e-mail systems around the world.
• 1999 – A jury in Michigan finds Dr. Jack Kevorkian guilty of second-degree murder for administering a lethal injection to a terminally ill man.
• 2005 – The Taiwanese government calls on 1 million Taiwanese to demonstrate in Taipei, in opposition to the Anti-Secession Law of the People's Republic of China. Around 200,000 to 300,000 attend the demonstration.