This week in history: the most important dates and events

This is the week starting 17th of March and ending 23rd of March. We want to remind you of various events that occurred in the past years during these days. This is a walk into the past where many things had happened, both positive and negative. Here we go; 

March 17

On the 17th of March, 1992, nearly 69 percent of white South African voters backed F.W. de Klerk’s reforms—which included the repeal of racially discriminatory laws—and effectively endorsed the dismantling of apartheid.

Apartheid is racial segregation, sanctioned by law, has been practiced in South Africa before 1948.

The policy was extended in 1948 by the incoming government and was given the name apartheid.



The new rule that ended apartheid was made in 1993 and implemented in 1994. This resulted into an all-race election that produced a black President, Nelson Mandela.

March 18

On this day in 1974, seven member countries of OPEC lifted a five-month oil embargo against the United States.

The embargo by oil producing Arab nations was to punish the U. S. for supplying Israel when she was under attack from Egypt and Syria in early 1973.

Also on the same day in 1906, the first monoplane, constructed by the Romanian inventor Trajan Vuia, made a flight of 12 metres (40 feet).

The monoplane is a type of aircraft with a single pair of wings. Monoplane design proved itself conclusively during World War II, and since then the craft has completely supplanted the biplane except for special purposes.

You may be curious, the Wright brothers actually invented the biplanes (airplane with two wings, one above the other).

March 19

On March 19, 2003, U.S. President George W. Bush ordered air strikes against Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, thus launching the Second Persian Gulf War to oust Iraqi dictator Ṣaddām Ḥussein.

March 20

On this day in 2004, the U.S. Army announced that charges were being brought against six American soldiers in connection with the reported abuse of Iraqi prisoners of war being held in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq during the Iraq War.

March 21

The U.S. federal prison on San Francisco Bay’s Alcatraz Island, which had held some of the most dangerous civilian prisoners—including Al Capone and Robert Stroud, the “Birdman of Alcatraz”—was closed this day in 1963.

Al Capone was the most famous American gangster who dominated organized crime in Chicago from 1925 to 1931.

American civil rights activists led by Martin Luther King, Jr., began a protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama on March 21, 1965.

The protest march was aimed at dramatizing the need for a federal voting-rights law that would provide legal support for the enfranchisement of African Americans in the South.

On this day in 1960, about 70 black African demonstrators were killed by police during a protest in Sharpeville, Gauteng province, against South Africa's pass laws.

March 23

Having completed the first U.S. overland expedition to the Pacific coast, explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark this day in 1806 began their return to St. Louis, Missouri, where their journey had begun in May 1804.

Although designed for only 5 years of service, the Soviet/Russian space station Mir ended 15 years in orbit when it reentered Earth's atmosphere, falling into the South Pacific Ocean on the 23rd of March, 2001.

On March 23, 1983, in a nationwide television address, U.S. President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars, a proposed strategic defensive system against potential nuclear attacks.

[Credits: Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia]

Posted in history, politics, technology