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ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY: MARCH 13 Calendar

FEATURED EVENT

False-colour image of Uranus and its rings, based on observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope. The rings, which are dark in normal viewing, have been brightened greatly. The layers of the atmosphere of Uranus are also made visible, represented by different colours.

1781

The planet Uranus discovered

English astronomer William Herschel observed this day in 1781 the seventh planet from the Sun, Uranus—first described by him as “a curious either nebulous star or perhaps a comet” and named for the father of the god Saturn.

Featured Biography

At Mouquin’s, oil on canvas by William J. Glackens, 1905; in The Art Institute of Chicago.

William Glackens

American painter

born

March 13, 1870

Philadelphia , Pennsylvania

died

May 22, 1938

Westport , Connecticut

Born on This Day

1957

John Hoeven

United States senator

1954

Valerie Ann Amos, Baroness Amos of Brondesbury

British politician

1942

Mahmoud Darwish

Palestinian poet

1935

Zulfikar Ghose

American author

1935

Kofi Awoonor

Ghanaian author

1925

John Tate

American mathematician

MORE EVENTS ON THIS DAY

TIME CAPSULE

From Britannica Book Of The Year

March 13, 2004

Spain reveals that a videotape has surfaced in which al-Qaeda claims responsibility for the train bombings in Madrid on March 11.

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Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, was elected pope of the Roman Catholic Church; taking the name Francis I, he succeeded Benedict XVI, who had resigned.

2013

First edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., announced that it was ceasing publication of its print version, the oldest and longest continually published English-language general print encyclopaedia.

2012

Russian space station Mir, backdropped against Cook Strait near New Zealand’s South Island, as photographed March 23, 1996, from the space shuttle orbiter Atlantis prior to docking of the two spacecraft.

Soviet cosmonauts Leonid Kizim and Vladimir Solovyev were sent aloft aboard a Soyuz spacecraft to rendezvous with the space station Mir and become its first occupants.

1986

Nazi storm troopers guarding a Jewish-owned business in Vienna shortly after the Anschluss. The graffito on the store window reads, “You Jewish pig, may your hands rot off!”

The Anschluss, political union between Austria and Germany, was announced.

1938

A state flag was created for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition of 1897 but did not become popular. A captain in the Tennessee National Guard later created a new flag, which was adopted in 1905. The flag is red with a vertical stripe of blue down the right side, separated from the red by a margin of white. A white circle in the center contains a blue field with three white stars. These are said to stand for Tennessee’s status as the third state to have entered the Union after the original 13, the three United States presidents (Andrew Jackson, James Polk, and Andrew Johnson) who lived in Tennessee, and the three “grand divisions” of the state’s geography.

The Tennessee legislature passed a bill that banned the teaching of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in the state's public schools; in a highly publicized trial, high-school teacher John T. Scopes was later convicted of breaking the law.

1925

L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Church of Scientology, was born in Tilden, Nebraska.

1911

The tomb of al-Mahdī, in Omdurman, Sudan.

Al-Mahdī began the Siege of Khartoum, capital of the Sudan, which was defended by an Egyptian garrison under the British general Charles George (“Chinese”) Gordon.

1884

Tsar Alexander II of Russia was assassinated in St. Petersburg.

1881

Joseph II, Holy Roman emperor, detail of a painting by Pompeo Batoni, 1769; in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

The Holy Roman emperor Joseph II, who at first was coruler (1765–80) with his mother, Maria Theresa, and then acted as sole ruler (1780–90) of the Austrian Habsburg dominions, was born.

1741

The marquis de Cinq-Mars, a favourite of King Louis XIII of France, signed a secret treaty with King Philip IV of Spain in a plot to overthrow Cardinal de Richelieu.

1642

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