Shimla, March
2015
American architect and designer Michael Graves, who was one of the principal figures of the postmodernist movement, died at age 80.
2009
American hedge-fund investment manager Bernie Madoff pled guilty to various crimes related to his operation of a Ponzi scheme that was one of the largest in the world; he was sentenced to 150 years in prison.
2003
The World Health Organization (WHO) issued a worldwide health alert, one of the first in a decade, regarding an illness it later called severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) that struck hundreds of people in China, Hong Kong, and Vietnam.
1999
Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic became members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) shortly before the group’s 50th anniversary.
1993
American lawyer and public official Janet Reno was sworn in as U.S. attorney general, becoming the first woman to hold the office.
1948
American singer, songwriter, and guitarist James Taylor was born.
1947
American businessman and politician Mitt Romney, a Republican who served as governor of Massachusetts (2002–06), was born.
1940
Finland agreed to Soviet peace terms, including the cession of western Karelia and the construction of a Soviet naval base on the Hanko Peninsula, to end the Russo-Finnish War.
1930
Mahatma Gandhi, leader of the Indian nationalist movement, began the Salt March, a nonviolent protest against British rule that brought him international attention.
1922
American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac—who was a leader of the Beat movement, perhaps best known for On the Road (1957)—was born.
1912
Juliette Gordon Low formed the first troop of American Girl Guides (later Girl Scouts), in Savannah, Georgia.
1849
The Sikh army surrendered to the British at the end of the Second Sikh War, conceding to the annexation of the Punjab in northwestern India.
1831
American manufacturer Clement Studebaker, founder of the Studebaker automobile company, was born in Pinetown, Pennsylvania.
1804
Samuel Chase became the first (and, so far, only) U.S. Supreme Court justice to be impeached.
1613
André Le Nôtre—one of the greatest French landscape architects, whose masterpiece is the gardens of Versailles—was born in Paris.
