This Day in History

In Alaska and in the Nation

In Alaska

• In 1913, Sen. Henry Roden of Iditarod introduced a bill requiring a maximum eight-hour day on all work for the territory of Alaska.

• In 1959, U.S. Interior Secretary Fred Seaton closed Bristol Bay to commercial fishing to provide for adequate escapement.

In the nation

• In 1925, a law went into effect in Tennessee prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution.

• In 1928, hundreds of people died when the San Francisquito Valley in California was inundated with water after the St. Francis Dam burst just before midnight the evening of March 12.

• In 1933, banks began to reopen after a "holiday" declared by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

• In 1964, bar manager Catherine "Kitty" Genovese, 28, was stabbed to death near her New York home; the case generated controversy over charges that Genovese's neighbors had failed to respond to her cries for help.

• In 1980, Ford Motor Co. Chairman Henry Ford II announced he was stepping down, the same day a jury in Winamac, Ind., found the company innocent of reckless homicide in the fiery deaths of three young women in a Ford Pinto.

• In 1988, yielding to student protests, the board of trustees of Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., a liberal arts college for the hearing-impaired, chose I. King Jordan to become the school's first deaf president.

• In 1998, Sgt. Maj. Gene McKinney, once the Army's top enlisted man, was acquitted at his court-martial of pressuring military women for sex but was convicted of trying to persuade his chief accuser to lie. U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II, D-Mass., announced he would not seek a seventh term.