Today in History
March 28
March 28
| 1774 | Britain passes the Coercive Act against rebellious Massachusetts. | |
| 1854 | Britain and France declare war on Russia. | |
| 1864 | A group of Copperheads attack Federal soldiers in Charleston, Illinois. Five are killed and twenty wounded. | |
| 1885 | The Salvation Army is officially organized in the United States. | |
| 1908 | Automobile owners lobby Congress in support of a bill that calls for vehicle licensing and federal registration. | |
| 1910 | The first seaplane takes off from water at Martinques, France. | |
| 1917 | The Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) is founded, Great Britain's first official service women. | |
| 1921 | President Warren Harding names William Howard Taft as chief justice of the United States. | |
| 1930 | Constantinople and Angora change their names to Istanbul and Ankara respectively. | |
| 1933 | Nazis order a ban on all Jews in businesses, professions and schools. | |
| 1939 | The Spanish Civil War ends as Madrid falls to Francisco Franco. | |
| 1941 | The Italian fleet is routed by the British at the Battle of Battle of Cape Matapan | |
| 1941 | English novelist Virginia Woolf throws herself into the River Ouse near her home in Sussex. Her body is never found. | |
| 1942 | A British ship, the HMS Capbeltown, a Lend-Lease American destroyer, which was specifically rammed into a German occupied dry-dock in France, explodes, knocking the area out of action for the German battleship Tirpitz. | |
| 1945 | Germany launches the last of its V-2 rockets against England. | |
| 1946 | Juan Peron is elected President of Argentina. He will hold the office for six years. | |
| 1962 | The U.S. Air Force announces research into the use of lasers to intercept missiles and satellites. | |
| 1969 | Dwight D. Eisenhower dies at Walter Reed General Hospital in Washington, D.C. | |
| 1979 | A major accident occurs at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear power plant | |
| 1986 | The U.S. Senate passes $100 million aid package for the Nicaraguan contras. | |
| 1990 | Jesse Owens receives the Congressional Gold Medal from President George Bush. | |
| 1999 | An American Stealth F117 Nighthawk is shot down over northern Yugoslavia during NATO air strikes. | |
| Born on March 28 | ||
| 1652 | Samuel Sewall, British colonial merchant and one of the Salem witch trial judges. | |
| 1818 | Wade Hampton, Confederate general in the American Civil War. | |
| 1862 | Aristide Briand, premier of France (1909-22). | |
| 1868 | Maxim Gorky, Russian short story writer and novelist. | |
| 1895 | James McCudden, the first RAF pilot to receive the Victoria Cross. | |
| 1909 | Nelson Algren, novelist (The Man with the Golden Arm, A Walk on the Wild Side). | |
| 1929 | Frederick Exley, American novelist (A Fan's Notes). | |
| 1930 | Jerome Isaac Friedman, American physicist, helped confirm the existence of quarks. | |
| 1936 | Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian novelist (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Death in the Andes). | |
