- 80th Day of 2012 / 286 Remaining
- First Day Of Spring
- Sunrise:7:12
- Sunset:7:23
- 11 Hr 11 Min
- Moon Rise:5:56am
- Moon Set:5:57pm
- Moon’s Phase: 3 %
- The Next Full Moon
- April 6 @ 2:20pm
- Full Pink Moon
- Full Fish Moon
- Full Sprouting Grass Moon
This name came from the herb moss pink, or wild ground phlox, which is one of the earliest widespread flowers of the spring. Other names for this month’s celestial body include the Full Sprouting Grass Moon, the Full Fish Moon, and among coastal tribes the Full Fish Moon, because this was the time that the shad swam upstream to spawn.
- Tides
- High:10:15am/10:59pm
- Low:4:17am/4:29pm
- Rainfall
- This Year:10.35
- Last Year:21.37
- Normal To Date:19.38
- Annual Average: 22.28
- Holidays
- Great American Meatout
- Kiss Your Fiance Day
- National Agriculture Day
- National Jump Out! Day
- Proposal Day
- Vernal Equinox
- Won't You Be MyNeighbor Day
- National Ravioli Day
- National Jump Out! Day
- Independence Day (Tunisia)
- Holi (Hindu - India)
- Ostara (Wiccan)
- Abolition Day-Puerto Rico
- Legba Zaou-Haiti
- World Frog Day
- On This Day In …
- 0141 --- The 6th recorded perihelion passage of Halley's Comet took place.
1816 --- The Supreme Court affirmed its right to review state court decisions.
- 1852 --- Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, is published. The novel sold 300,000 copies within three months and was so widely read that when President Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1862, he reportedly said, "So this is the little lady who made this big war." Stowe was born in 1811, the seventh child of the famous Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher. She studied at private schools in Connecticut, then taught in Hartford from 1827 until her father moved to Cincinnati in 1832. She accompanied him and continued to teach while writing stories and essays. In 1836, she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, with whom she had seven children. She published her first book, Mayflower, in 1843. While living in Cincinnati, Stowe encountered fugitive slaves and the Underground Railroad. Later, she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin in reaction to recently tightened fugitive slave laws. The book had a major influence on the way the American public viewed slavery. The book established Stowe's reputation as a woman of letters. She traveled to England in 1853, where she was welcomed as a literary hero. Along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, she became one of the original contributors to The Atlantic, which launched in November 1857. In 1863, when Lincoln announced the end of slavery, she danced in the streets. Stowe continued to write throughout her life and died in 1896.
- 1865 --- A plan by John Wilkes Booth to abduct President Abraham Lincoln was foiled when Lincoln changed plans and failed to appear at the Soldier’s Home near Washington, DC. Booth would later assassinate the President while Lincoln was attending a performance at Ford’s Theatre in the nation’s capital.
- 1897 --- The first intercollegiate basketball game that used five players per team was held. The contest was Yale versus Pennsylvania. Yale won by a score of 32-10.
- 1899 --- At Sing Sing prison, Martha M. Place became the first woman to be executed in the electric chair. She was put to death for the murder of her stepdaughter.
- 1948 --- Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra were featured in the first televised symphonic concert. CBS-TV, with help from its then Philadelphia television station, WCAU-TV 10, carried the program from the Philadelphia Academy of Music, the home of the world-famous orchestra. The concert was televised live, at 5 p.m. Ninety minutes later, NBC-TV carried TV’s second symphonic concert. This one was from Carnegie Hall in New York City. Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra was featured in a presentation of Wagner compositions.
- 1965 --- President Lyndon B. Johnson notifies Alabama's Governor George Wallace that he will use federal authority to call up the Alabama National Guard in order to supervise a planned civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. Intimidation and discrimination had earlier prevented Selma's black population--over half the city--from registering and voting. On Sunday, March 7, 1965, a group of 600 demonstrators marched on the capital city of Montgomery to protest this disenfranchisement and the earlier killing of a black man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, by a state trooper. In brutal scenes that were later broadcast on television, state and local police attacked the marchers with billy clubs and tear gas. TV viewers far and wide were outraged by the images, and a protest march was organized just two days after "Bloody Sunday" by Martin Luther King, Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). King turned the marchers around, however, rather than carry out the march without federal judicial approval. After an Alabama federal judge ruled on March 18 that a third march could go ahead, President Johnson and his advisers worked quickly to find a way to ensure the safety of King and his demonstrators on their way from Selma to Montgomery. The most powerful obstacle in their way was Governor Wallace, an outspoken anti-integrationist who was reluctant to spend any state funds on protecting the demonstrators. Hours after promising Johnson--in telephone calls recorded by the White House--that he would call out the Alabama National Guard to maintain order, Wallace went on television and demanded that Johnson send in federal troops instead. Furious, Johnson told Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to write a press release stating that because Wallace refused to use the 10,000 available guardsmen to preserve order in his state, Johnson himself was calling the guard up and giving them all necessary support. Several days later, 50,000 marchers followed King some 54 miles, under the watchful eyes of state and federal troops. Arriving safely in Montgomery on March 25, they watched King deliver his famous "How Long, Not Long" speech from the steps of the Capitol building. The clash between Johnson and Wallace--and Johnson's decisive action--was an important turning point in the civil rights movement. Within five months, Congress had passed the Voting Rights Act, which Johnson proudly signed into law on August 6, 1965.
- 1969 --- Beatle John Lennon married Yoko Ono at the Rock of Gibraltar on this day. Lennon called the location, “quiet, friendly and British.” He was the second Beatle to marry in eight days. Paul McCartney and Linda Eastman were wed a week earlier.
- 1976 --- Patricia Hearst was convicted of armed robbery for her role in the hold up of a San Francisco Bank.
- 1985 --- Libby Riddles won the $50,000 top prize in the 1,135-mile Anchorage-to-Nome dog race. The Iditarod was called Alaska’s ultimate endurance test and this was the first time a woman had won. Libby completed the course in 18 days, twenty minutes and seventeen seconds. Another woman, Susan Butcher, won the next three Iditarod trail-sled dog races. The first race was run in 1973. The annual race commemorates the emergency during a 1925 diphtheria epidemic when medical supplies had to be rushed to Nome by dog sled.
- 1990 --- Namibia became an independent nation ending 75 years of South African rule.
- 1995 --- In Tokyo, 12 people were killed and more than 5,500 others were sickened when packages containing the nerve gas Sarin was released on five separate subway trains. The terrorists belonged to a doomsday cult in Japan.
- Birthdays
- Fred "Mr." Rodgers
- Spike Lee
- William Hurt
- Tracy Chapman
- Tracy Chapman
- Holly Hunter
- Henrik Ibsen
- Carl Reiner
- Michael Rapaport
- Sir Michael Redgrave
- John Ehrlichman
- Ozzie Nelson
- Marian McPartland
- Ray Goulding