1593: The Church of England tried and sentenced English Separatist Puritans John Greenwood and Henry Barrowe for devising and circulating seditious books.
1801: At St. Michael's Castle in St. Petersburg, conspirators rushed the bedroom of Tsar Paul I, struck him with a sword, strangled him, and finally him trampled to death.
1882: The U.S. adopted the Edmunds Act, declaring polygamy a felony and making “unlawful cohabitation” illegal. 1300 men were later imprisoned under the act.
1896: The New York State Legislature passed the Raines Law, restricting the Sunday sale of alcohol to hotels. Tavernkeepers added small bedrooms to their premises and sold rubber sandwiches over and over to circumvent the new law.
1901: Socialist Nikolai Lagovski attempted to assassinate Privy Councilor Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the symbol of Russian monarchal absolutism. Lagovski fired shots through Pobedonostsev’s office window in St. Petersburg, but missed. He was sentenced to six years of hard labor in Siberia.
1908: Korean-American assassins Jeon Myeong-un and Jang In-hwan attacked American diplomat Durham Stevens, an advisor to the Korean government who favored Japanese rule there. Stevens died two days later.
1931: Indian authorities hanged social revolutionaries Bhagat Singh, Shivaram Rajguru, and Sukhdev Thapar for the killing of British police officer John Saunders during the Indian struggle for independence. They intended to kill British police superintendent James Scott, whom they blamed for the death of nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai. Their request to be shot by a firing squad was refused.
1965: What began as a peaceful demonstration of Moroccan students demanding their right to public higher education on March 22 turned into an anti-government riot the next day. The Moroccan Army shot and killed as many as 1,000 protestors.
1981: The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law making statutory rape a crime for men but not women.
1989: A New York court sentenced Joel Steinberg to 25 years for killing his adopted daughter in 1987. The case brought national attention to the issue of child abuse. Steinberg served nearly 17 years.
1990: An Alaska state judge ordered former Exxon Valdez Captain Joseph Hazelwood to help clean up Prince William Sound and pay $50,000 in restitution for the 1989 oil spill.
1994: At an election rally in Tijuana, Mario Aburto Martínez assassinated leading Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, the hand-picked successor to President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Although Martinez was arrested at the scene and confessed, there is widespread belief that President Salinas had grown dissatisfied with his candidate and orchestrated the attack.
1994: A New York prison released Joey Buttafuoco after serving four months for having sex with underage Amy Fisher. Fisher served seven years for shooting Buttafuoco's wife in the head.
1999: Gunmen assassinated Paraguay's Vice President Luis María Argaña, who was set to take over the country once the legislature impeached corrupt President Raúl Cubas. The public blamed Cubas and his cohorts for the attack and forced him to resign.
2005: A major explosion at the BP refinery in Texas City, Texas killed 15 workers and injured 180 others. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined BP $21 million for hundreds of safety violations and later imposed an additional $87 million fine for failing to correct them. BP reports it has paid more than $1.6 billion in victim compensation.
2012: The U.S. Army formally charged Staff Sgt. Robert Bales with 17 counts of premeditated murder in the deaths of 17 villagers, more than half of them children, during a shooting rampage in southern Afghanistan.
2016: A GPR investigation of Shakespeare's tomb at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford concluded the Bard's skull probably had been stolen. Rumors started circulating 200 years ago that trophy hunters pinched it.
2018: Facing certain impeachment, Peruvian president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigned amid a corruption scandal.
2019: An ethnic Dogon militia disguised as hunters and wielding guns and machetes killed 134 Fulani people and burned down their huts in Ogossagou, Mali. The Dogon blamed the Mali government for not protecting them from terrorists and claimed the villagers were harboring jihadists. In response to the attack, the Mali government, which at the time was hosting U.N. ambassadors on a peacekeeping mission, banned the militia. The Dogon and Fulani have been fighting over water rights for hundreds of years.
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