[CaptainCrunch]

March 25th


708 – Pope Constantine succeeds Pope Sisinnius as the 88th pope.

717 – Theodosius III resigns the throne to the Byzantine Empire to enter the clergy.




919 – Romanos Lekapenos seizes the Boukoleon Palace in Constantinople and becomes regent of the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII.

1000 – Fatimid caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah assassinates the eunuch chief minister Barjawan and assumes control of the government.

1199 – Richard I is wounded by a crossbow bolt while fighting France, leading to his death on April 6.

1306 – Robert the Bruce becomes King of Scots (Scotland).




1409 – The Council of Pisa opens.

1555 – The city of Valencia is founded in present-day Venezuela.

1576 – Jerome Savage takes out a sub-lease to start the Newington Butts Theatre outside London.

1584 – Sir Walter Raleigh is granted a patent to colonize Virginia.

1655 – Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is discovered by Christiaan Huygens.




1802 – The Treaty of Amiens is signed as a "Definitive Treaty of Peace" between France and the United Kingdom.

1807 – The Slave Trade Act becomes law, abolishing the slave trade in the British Empire.

1807 – The Swansea and Mumbles Railway, then known as the Oystermouth Railway, becomes the first passenger-carrying railway in the world.

1811 – Percy Bysshe Shelley is expelled from the University of Oxford for publishing the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism.

1821 – Traditional date of the start of the Greek War of Independence. The war had actually begun on 23 February 1821 (Julian calendar).

1845 – New Zealand Legislative Council pass the first Militia Act constituting the New Zealand Army[1].

1865 – American Civil War: In Virginia, Confederate forces temporarily capture Fort Stedman from the Union.

1894 – Coxey's Army, the first significant American protest march, departs Massillon, Ohio for Washington, D.C.




1911 – In New York City, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire kills 146 garment workers.

1917 – The Georgian Orthodox Church restores its autocephaly abolished by Imperial Russia in 1811.

1918 – The Belarusian People's Republic is established.

1924 – On the anniversary of Greek Independence, Alexandros Papanastasiou proclaims the Second Hellenic Republic.

1931 – The Scottsboro Boys are arrested in Alabama and charged with rape.

1941 – The Kingdom of Yugoslavia joins the Axis powers with the signing of the Tripartite Pact.




1947 – An explosion in a coal mine in Centralia, Illinois kills 111.

1948 – The first successful tornado forecast predicts that a tornado will strike Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma.

1949 – More than 92,000 kulaks are suddenly deported from the Baltic states to Siberia.

1957 – United States Customs seizes copies of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" on obscenity grounds.




1957 – The European Economic Community is established with West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg as the first members.

1965 – Civil rights activists led by Martin Luther King Jr. successfully complete their 4-day 50-mile march from Selma to the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama.




1969 – During their honeymoon, John Lennon and Yoko Ono hold their first Bed-In for Peace at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel (until March 31).




1971 – Bangladesh Liberation War: Beginning of Operation Searchlight by the Pakistan Armed Forces against East Pakistani civilians.

1971 – The Army of the Republic of Vietnam abandon an attempt to cut off the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos.

1975 – Faisal of Saudi Arabia is shot and killed by a mentally ill nephew.

1979 – The first fully functional Space Shuttle orbiter, Columbia, is delivered to the John F. Kennedy Space Center to be prepared for its first launch.

1988 – The Candle demonstration in Bratislava is the first mass demonstration of the 1980s against the communist regime in Czechoslovakia.

1995 – WikiWikiWeb, the world's first wiki, and part of the Portland Pattern Repository, is made public by Ward Cunningham.

1996 – The European Union's Veterinarian Committee bans the export of British beef and its by-products as a result of mad cow disease (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy).

2006 – Capitol Hill massacre: A gunman kills six people before taking his own life at a party in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood.

2006 – Protesters demanding a new election in Belarus, following the rigged Belarusian presidential election, 2006, clash with riot police. Opposition leader Aleksander Kozulin is among several protesters arrested.