World/nation trivia: The week of March 16-22

March 16:

1802, President Thomas Jefferson signed a measure authorizing the establishment of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.

1968, during the Vietnam War, U.S. Army soldiers hunting for Viet Cong fighters and sympathizers killed as many as 500 unarmed villagers in two hamlets of Son My village, in what became known as the My Lai massacre.

1985, Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson was kidnapped in Beirut by Hezbollah militants; he would spend nearly seven years in captivity before being freed in December 1991.

March 17:

1762, New York held its first St. Patrick’s Day parade.

1776, the Revolutionary War Siege of Boston ended as British forces evacuated the city.

1992, white South Africans voted 68.7% to 31.3% to end over 40 years of apartheid in a national referendum.

2010, Michael Jordan became the first ex-player to become a majority owner in the NBA as the league’s Board of Governors unanimously approved his $275 million bid to buy the Charlotte Bobcats from Bob Johnson.

March 18:

1925, nearly 700 people died when the Tri-State Tornado struck southeastern Missouri, southern Illinois and southwestern Indiana; it remains the deadliest single tornado in U.S. history.

1937, in America’s worst school disaster, nearly 300 people — most of them children — were killed in a natural gas explosion at the New London Consolidated School in Rusk County, Texas.

1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing the War Relocation Authority, which forced Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II.

1965, the first spacewalk took place as Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov went outside his Voskhod 2 capsule, secured by a tether.

March 19:

1931, Nevada Gov. Fred B. Balzar signed a measure that made the state the first to legalize gambling.

1966, Texas Western (now the University of Texas at El Paso) became the first team to start five Black players in the NCAA basketball tournament’s championship game; they defeated top-ranked Kentucky in the final 72-65.

1995, 17 months after announcing his retirement from basketball, Michael Jordan returned to play in the NBA with his former team, the Chicago Bulls.

2003, in a televised address, President George W. Bush announced that coalition forces had begun an invasion of Iraq.

March 20:

1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential novel about slavery, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” was first published in book form after being serialized in the abolitionist newspaper The National Era; it would become the best-selling novel of the 19th century.

1995, in Tokyo, packages containing the deadly chemical sarin were opened on five separate subway trains in a domestic terror attack by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, causing 14 deaths and injuring more than 1,000.

1996, a jury in Los Angeles convicted Erik and Lyle Menendez of first-degree murder in the shotgun slayings of their wealthy parents. (They were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.)

March 21:

1952, the Moondog Coronation Ball, considered the first rock and roll concert, took place at Cleveland Arena.

1963, the United States closed Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary; over 1,500 inmates had been jailed at the island prison off the coast of San Francisco, California, over its three decades of use.

1980, President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would boycott the Summer Olympic Games in Moscow because of the Soviet Union’s failure to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan.

March 22:

1765, the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act to raise money from the American colonies, which fiercely resisted the tax. (The Stamp Act was repealed a year later.)

1894, ice hockey’s first Stanley Cup championship game was played, in which the Montreal Hockey Club defeated the Ottawa Hockey Club 3-1.

1941, the Grand Coulee hydroelectric dam in Washington state officially went into operation; it remains the largest capacity power station in the United States.

1978, Karl Wallenda, the 73-year-old patriarch of “The Flying Wallendas” high-wire act, fell to his death while attempting to walk a cable strung between two hotel towers in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

– Associated Press