17th March: Today In History

Today is Friday, March 17th, the 76th day of 2017. There are 289 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight:

Events:

1942:  Six days after departing the Philippines during World War II, Gen. Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia to become supreme commander of Allied forces in the southwest Pacific theater.

1776:  The Revolutionary War Siege of Boston ended as British forces evacuated the city.

1861:  Victor Emmanuel II was proclaimed the first king of a united Italy.

1906:  President Theodore Roosevelt first likened crusading journalists to a man with "the muckrake in his hand" in a speech to the Gridiron Club in Washington.

1912:  The Camp Fire Girls organization was incorporated in Washington, D.C., two years to the day after it was founded in Thetford, Vermont. (The group is now known as Camp Fire.)

1936:  Pittsburgh's Great St. Patrick's Day Flood began as the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers and their tributaries, swollen by rain and melted snow, started exceeding flood stage; the high water was blamed for more than 60 deaths.

1941:  The National Gallery of Art opened in Washington, D.C.

1956:  Comedian Fred Allen, 61, died in New York.

1966:  A U.S. Navy midget submarine located a missing hydrogen bomb which had fallen from a U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber into the Mediterranean off Spain. (It took several more weeks to actually recover the bomb.)

1969:  Golda Meir became prime minister of Israel.

1970:  The United States cast its first veto in the U.N. Security Council, killing a resolution that would have condemned Britain for failing to use force to overthrow the white-ruled government of Rhodesia.

1988:  Avianca Flight 410, a Boeing 727, crashed after takeoff into a mountain in Colombia, killing all 143 people on board.

1992:  29 people were killed in the truck bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Whites in South Africa voted by a greater than 2-1 majority to forge ahead with talks to end white rule and give blacks voting rights for the first time in the country's history. In Illinois, Sen. Alan Dixon was defeated in his Democratic primary re-election bid by Carol Moseley-Braun, who went on to become the first black woman in the U.S. Senate.

Birthdays:

The former national chairwoman of the NAACP, Myrlie Evers-Williams, is 84.

Former NASA astronaut Ken Mattingly is 81.

Singer-songwriter Jim Weatherly is 74.

Singer-songwriter John Sebastian (The Lovin' Spoonful) is 73.

Former NSA Director and former CIA Director Michael Hayden is 72.

Rock musician Harold Brown (War; Lowrider Band) is 71.

Actor Patrick Duffy is 68.

Actor Kurt Russell is 66.