March 21 – Some Important Events on this day
1152 👉🏼 In what was the most expensive divorces in history, French King Louis VII is granted an annulment from Eleanor of Aquitaine on the grounds of consanguinity (being from the same kinship as another person)
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1349 👉🏼 Between 100 and 3,000 Jews are killed in Black Death riots in Erfurt, Germany 🇩🇪
1804 👉🏼 Napoleonic Code adopted in France, stresses clearly written and accessible law 🇫🇷
1826 👉🏼 Beethoven’s “String Quartet No. 13” in B flat major premieres in Vienna 🎶
1860 👉🏼 English novelist George Eliot finishes her novel “The Mill on the Floss” in Wandsworth, London 📖
1871 👉🏼 Journalist Henry Morton Stanley begins his famous expedition to Africa.
He was a newspaper reporter who was hired by the New York Herald in 1871 to find the famous missionary David Livingstone who was missing. The search and subsequent expedition won Stanley significant wealth and reputation. Kalulu, an African personal servant and adopted child of Stanley can be seen in the background. This Carte de visite, a type of small photograph was taken in 1872.
1933 👉🏼 Day of Potsdam in Nazi Germany, a ceremony to open the new Reichstag after the fire in February. Adolf Hitler and German President and WWI General Paul von Hindenburg shake hands in public 🤝
1943 👉🏼 Assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler fails
1962 👉🏼 Yogi the bear becomes the 1st creature to be ejected at supersonic speeds by the US military testing ejection seats 🐻
1963 👉🏼 Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay is closed.
In that year Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary closed after serving 29 years as America’s toughest prison. It was designed as a maximum security prison for the most violent prisoners and those most likely to attempt escape. Some of its famous inmates included Al Capone, George “Machine-Gun” Kelly, Alvin Karpis (the first “Public Enemy #1”), and Robert Stroud, the “Birdman of Alcatraz”. There were 14 attempts to escape Alcatraz and officially no-one ever made it out. However 5 individuals are still listed as “missing and presumed drowned”. The prison eventually closed after it became too costly to run and was then incorporated into a new National Park. It opened as a tourist attraction in 1973.
1975 👉🏼 Ethiopia abolishes its monarchy after 3,000 years 🇪🇹
2013 👉🏼 The European Space Agency reveals new data that indicates that the universe is 13.82 billion years old
2014 👉🏼 Russia formally annexes Crimea amid international condemenation
2018 👉🏼 Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg admits they “made mistakes” after data on 50 million users is harvested by Cambridge Analytica 👤