On This Day In History – March 11

Birthdays

• 1596 Isaac Elsevier, book publisher
• 1870 Louis Bachelier, French mathematician (d. 1946)

• 1903 Dorothy Schiff, American owner and publisher (NY Post), born in NYC, New York (d. 1989)
• 1903 James Franklin Hyde, American inventor who created silica, born in Solvay, New York (d. 1999)
• 1916 Harold Wilson, British Prime Minister (Labour: 1964-70, 1974-76), born in Huddersfield, England (d. 1995)
• 1931 Rupert Murdoch, Australian-born American media mogul (NY Post, News of the World, FOX-TV), born in Melbourne, Victoria

Events

• 537 Goths lay siege to Rome

• 1744 English auction house Sotheby’s holds its first-ever auction (of books) in London
• 1789 Benjamin Banneker and Pierre Charles L’Enfant begin to lay out Washington, D.C.
• 1862 Abraham Lincoln removes George McClellen as general-in-chief

• 1892 1st public basketball game (Springfield, Massachusetts)
• 1917 British forces occupy Baghdad, the capital of Mesopotamia, after Turkish forces evacuated
• 1918 Moscow becomes capital of revolutionary Russia
• 1935 Hermann Goering officially creates the Luftwaffe (German Air Force)
• 1954 US Army charges Senator Joseph McCarthy used undue pressure tactics
• 1966 Military coup led by Indonesian General Suharto breaks out
• 1967 Pink Floyd releases 1st single “Arnold Layne”
• 1971 Jim Morrison leaves for Paris to reorient himself emotionally and creatively and to avoid the jail sentence given to him in Miami. He will never return to the US
• 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev replaces Konstantin Chernenko as Soviet leader

• 1988 British pound note ceases to be legal tender, replaced by one pound coin
• 1997 Beatle Paul McCartney knighted by Queen Elizabeth II
• 2006 Michelle Bachelet is inaugurated as the first female president of Chile
• 2011 9.0 magnitude earthquake strikes 130 km (80 miles) east of Sendai, Japan, triggering a tsunami killing thousands of people and causing the second worst nuclear accident in history
• 2018 China’s National People’s Congress approves removal of term limits for a leader, will allow Xi Jinping presidency for life