- 79 Day of 2013 / 286 Remaining
- The First Day of Spring
- Sunrise:7:11
- Sunset:7:22
- 12 Hours 11 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:1:08pm
- Moon Set:2:52am
- Moon’s Phase:60 %
- The Next Full Moon
- March 27 @ 2:30am
- Full Worm Moon
- Full Crust Moon
- Full Lenten Moon
- Full Crow Moon
- Full Sap Moon
As the temperature begins to warm and the ground begins to thaw, earthworm casts appear, heralding the return of the robins. The more northern tribes knew this Moon as the Full Crow Moon, when the cawing of crows signaled the end of winter; or the Full Crust Moon, because the snow cover becomes crusted from thawing by day and freezing at night. The Full Sap Moon, marking the time of tapping maple trees, is another variation. To the settlers, it was also known as the Lenten Moon, and was considered to be the last full Moon of winter.
- Tides
- High:5:29am/8:13pm
- Low:12:07am.12:57pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:14.59
- Last Year:10.32
- Normal To Date:20.49
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- Great American Meatout
- Kiss Your Fiance Day
- National Agriculture Day
- National Jump Out! Day
- Vernal Equinox
- Won't You Be MY Neighbor Day
- National Ravioli Day
- International Frog Day
- Independence Day-Tunisia
- Holi-Hinduism
- Ostara-Wiccan
- Proposal Day
- Purim-Judaism
- Abolition Day-Puerto Rico
- Legba Zaou-Haiti
- Persian New Year
- On This Day In …
- 0141 --- The 6th recorded perihelion passage of Halley's Comet took place.
- 1345 --- According to scholars at the University of Paris, the Black Death is created, from what they call "a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius, occurring on the 20th of March 1345". The Black Death, also known as the Plague, swept across Europe, the Middle East and Asia during the 14th century, leaving an estimated 25 million dead in its wake. Despite what these scholars claimed, it is now known that bubonic plague, the most common ailment known as the Black Death, is caused by the yersinia pestis bacterium. The plague was carried by fleas that usually traveled on rats, but jumped off to other mammals when the rat died. It most likely first appeared in humans in Mongolia around 1320.
- 1739 --- In India, Nadir Shah of Persia occupied Delhi and took possession of the Peacock throne.
- 1815 --- Napoleon Bonaparte entered Paris after his escape from Elba and began his "Hundred Days" rule.
- 1816 --- The Supreme Court affirmed its right to review state court decisions.
- 1852 --- Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic book was published. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, subtitled Life Among the Lowly became an instant success, selling 300,000 copies in its first year. It has since been translated into twenty languages and performed as a play the world over. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was even spotlighted in the Broadway musical and film, The King and I. Maybe you remember the haunting chant from the show, “Run Eliza, Run!” Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel remains a must-read for school children -- and a reminder to all of us of an ugly time in the history of the United States. The antislavery novel and the adapted plays all feature the elderly, kind slave, Uncle Tom; the slave child, Topsy; Little Eva, the daughter of Tom’s owner; Eliza, a young mulatto woman and the cruel, northern-born overseer who beat Tom to death, Simon LeGree. The book brought much sympathy from around the world toward the American “peculiar institution” of slavery. In fact, Abraham Lincoln told Harriet Beecher Stowe she was “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war,” referring of course, to the Civil War.
- 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.
- 1890 --- The General Federation of Womans' Clubs was founded.
- 1897 --- The first U.S. orthodox Jewish Rabbinical seminary was incorporated in New York.
- 1932 --- The German dirigible, Graf Zepplin, made the first flight to South America on regular schedule.
- 1934 --- Mildrid "Babe" Didrikson pitches one inning of exhibition baseball for the Philadelphia Athletics in a game against the Brooklyn Dodgers. She started the first inning, and allowed just one walk and no hits. Though Didrickson was not the first woman to play baseball with major league ballplayers, she had attained national-hero status with an unprecedented performance at the 1932 Olympics.
- 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.
- 1982 --- Joan Jett onto the scene as a solo artist with "I Love Rock 'n' Roll," the three-chord anthem that topped the Billboard pop chart on March 20, 1982."I Love Rock 'n' Roll" was originally written and recorded in 1975 by a British group called the Arrows, who never made an impact on this side of the Atlantic. Joan Jett heard the song in 1977 while touring the U.K. with the Runaways. Following the demise of the Runaways, Jett kicked off her solo career with a roughed-up version of Lesley Gore's "You Don't Own Me" in 1979 and a debut album called Bad Reputation in 1980. While that album's title track has since become regarded as a classic, it was not until 1982's "I Love Rock 'n' Roll," from the album of the same name, that Joan Jett truly became a household name.
- 1987 --- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved AZT. The drug was proven to slow the progress of AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome).
- 1990 --- Namibia became an independent nation ending 75 years of South African rule.
- 1991 --- The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that employers could not exclude women from jobs where exposure to toxic chemicals could potentially damage a fetus.
- 1995 --- At the height of the morning rush hour in Tokyo, Japan, five two-man terrorist teams from the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult, riding on separate subway trains, converge at the Kasumigaseki station and secretly release lethal sarin gas into the air. The terrorists then took a sarin antidote and escaped while the commuters, blinded and gasping for air, rushed to the exits. Twelve people died, and 5,500 were treated in hospitals, some in a comatose state. Most of the survivors recovered, but some victims suffered permanent damage to their eyes, lungs, and digestive systems. A United States Senate subcommittee later estimated that if the sarin gas had been disseminated more effectively at Kasumigaseki station, a hub of the Tokyo subway system, tens of thousands might have been killed.
- 1999 --- Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones became the first men to circumnavigate the Earth in a hot air balloon. The non-stop trip began on March 3 and covered 26,500 miles.
- Birthdays
- Spike Lee
- Carl Reiner
- Hal Linden
- PM Brian Mulroney
- William Hurt
- Holly Hunter
- Michael Rapaport
- Ovid
- B F Skinner
- John Erlichman
- Henrik Ibsen
- Fred "Mr." Rodgers
- Frederick W. Taylor
- Ozzie Nelson
- Dame Vera Lynn
- Marian McPartland
- Ray Goulding
- Marcia Ball