more events on March 23
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1981
U.S. Supreme Court upholds a law making statutory rape a crime for men but not women.
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1972
The United States calls a halt to the peace talks on Vietnam being held in Paris.
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1970
Mafia boss Carlo Gambino is arrested for plotting to steal $3 million.
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1967
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. calls the Vietnam War the biggest obstacle to the civil rights movement.
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1956
Pakistan becomes the first Islamic republic, although it is still within the British Commonwealth.
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1951
U.S. paratroopers descend from flying boxcars in a surprise attack in Korea.
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1942
The Japanese occupy the Anadaman Islands in the Indian Ocean.
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1933
The Reichstag gives Adolf Hitler the power to rule by decree.
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1929
Sir Roger Bannister, the first man to run the mile in less than four minutes.
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1927
Captain Hawthorne Gray sets a new balloon record soaring to 28,510 feet.
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1921
Arthur G. Hamilton sets a new parachute record, safely jumping 24,400 feet.
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1920
Great Britain denounces the United States because of its delay in joining the League of Nations.
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1917
Austrian Emperor Charles I makes a peace proposal to French President Poincare.
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1912
Werner von Braun, German-born rocket pioneer.
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1910
Akira Kurosawa, film director (Rashomon, The Seven Samurai).
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1909
Theodore Roosevelt begins an African safari sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and National Geographic Society.
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British Lt. Ernest Shackleton finds the magnetic South Pole.
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1908
Joan Crawford, American actress.
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1907
Daniel Bovet, Swiss-born Italian pharmacologist and Nobel Prize Winner.
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1903
The Wright brothers obtain an airplane patent.
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1901
A group of U.S. Army soldiers, led by Brigadier General Frederick Funston, capture Emilio Aguinaldo, the leader of the Philippine Insurrection of 1899.
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1900
Erich Fromm, German psychologist (The Sane Society).
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1880
John Stevens of Neenah, Wis., patents the grain crushing mill. This mill allows flour production to increase by 70 percent.
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1862
Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson faces his only defeat at the Battle of Kernstown, Va
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1858
Eleazer A. Gardner of Philadelphia patents the cable street car, which runs on overhead cables.
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1857
Elisha Otis installs the first modern passenger elevator in a public building, at the corner of Broome Street and Broadway in New York City.
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1848
Hungary proclaims its independence of Austria.
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1791
Etta Palm, a Dutch champion of woman’s rights, sets up a group of women’s clubs called the Confederation of the Friends of Truth.
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1775
American revolutionary hero Patrick Henry, while addressing the House of Burgesses, declares “give me liberty, or give me death!”
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1743
Handel’s Messiah is performed for the first time in London.
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1657
France and England form an alliance against Spain.