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Today in History: Houdini is born; the longest NHL game ever is played; and, the beaver becomes Canada's official symbol

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On this day, March 24, in history:

In 1580, what are believed to have been the first bombs were tossed at the town of Guelderland, Germany.

In 1603, the Elizabethan era ended in England with the death of Queen Elizabeth I. Her 45-year reign is generally regarded as a golden age where theatre and the arts flourished, and England extended its economic clout through exploration. It also flexed its muscle as a political power with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Elizabeth’s death not only marked the end of an era, it also marked the end of the Tudor line of rulers.

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In 1634, the first Roman Catholic mass in English North America was celebrated at St. Mary’s, Maryland.

In 1670, silver and copper coins were minted for use in Canada.

In 1761, German soldiers and settlers established Canada’s first Lutheran church in Halifax.

In 1765, Britain enacted the Quartering Act, requiring American colonists to provide temporary housing to British soldiers.

In 1803, famed educator Egerton Ryerson was born in Norfolk County, Upper Canada. He died in Toronto in 1882.

In 1874, escape artist Harry Houdini was born Eric Weiss in Appleton, Wis. He died in 1926. Here’s a front page story about Houdini’s Oct. 31, 1926 death in the Calgary Daily Herald, published on Nov. 1, 1926.

Here’s the entire front page from that day; the Houdini story appears near the bottom of the page.

In 1882, German bacteriologist Robert Koch announced he had isolated the bacillus of tuberculosis. His work helped diagnose T.B. in animals intended for food.

In 1890, Agnes Macphail, Canada’s first female MP, was born. She first won a Commons seat from Ontario in 1921 — the first federal election in which women had the vote. She lost her Commons seat in 1940, but served in the Ontario legislature from 1943-51. She died in Toronto in 1954.

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In 1890, U.S. scientist John Rock was born. He developed the birth control pill in 1944.

In 1900, work began on the New York City subway system.

In 1905, French adventure writer Jules Verne died at age 78. His classics include “Around the World in 80 Days” and “A Journey to the Center of the Earth.”

In 1921, the British Empire’s first female cabinet minister was sworn in. Mary Ellen Smith became a minister without portfolio in British Columbia. Smith won a 1918 Vancouver byelection following the death of her husband Ralph, the finance minister in the Liberal government. Re-elected in 1920, she served in cabinet until November 1921. She was also re-elected in 1924.

In 1933, the first concentration camps were set up by Germany’s Nazi government — the Dachau camp near Munich.

In 1936, the Detroit Red Wings won the longest game in NHL history. Mud Bruneteau’s goal at 16:30 of the sixth overtime period gave the Wings a 1-0 victory over the visiting Montreal Maroons. The Stanley Cup semifinal game ended at 2:25 a.m. on March 25th.

In 1944, what became known as “The Great Escape” took place when 76 Allied prisoners escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp through a man-made tunnel. Only three of the escapees made it home — 50 were captured and murdered and 23 were returned to prison camps. The story inspired the 1963 movie starring Steve McQueen.

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In 1944, in occupied Rome, the Nazis executed more than 300 civilians in reprisal for an attack by Italian partisans the day before that had killed 32 German soldiers.

In 1945, Canadian troops began the liberation of the Netherlands during the Second World War. Cpl. Fred Topham won the Victoria Cross for bravery as Canadian paratroopers and air support joined in the Allies’ crossing of the Rhine River.

In 1964, Prince Edward Island adopted its flag. The flag design is that of the coat of arms granted to the province in 1905, displaying an island and a great British oak tree centred, with its symbolic descendants to the immediate left. All are protected by the gold British Lion above.

In 1975, the beaver became Canada’s official symbol.

In 1976, British Field Marshall Viscount Montgomery died at age 88. His most famous victory — the 1942 defeat of Germany’s Afrika Korps under General Erwin Rommel — is considered a turning point in the Second World War.

In 1980, Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero, a vocal opponent of the military in El Salvador, was assassinated while saying mass in a small chapel at a hospital called “La Divina Providencia” in San Salvador. Several men, believed to be part of a death squad, were arrested for the murder but were later released.

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In 1989, the second-worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history occurred as the supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska’s Prince William Sound and began leaking 41 million litres of crude. (The worst was the Deepwater Horizon oil platform disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010.)

In 1999, NATO planes began three months of bombing the Serbian province of Kosovo in a successful effort to force Serbian troops to withdraw. It marked the first time in its 50-year existence that NATO had ever attacked a sovereign country.

In 2002, at the 74th Academy Awards, Halle Berry won best actress, Denzel Washington best actor — the first time Black actors had taken both top acting awards. Before that night, Sidney Poitier was the only African-American actor to have won an Oscar in a lead role. A Beautiful Mind won four awards, including best picture and best director (Ron Howard) and best supporting actress (Jennifer Connelly).

In 2004, the European Union declared Microsoft Corp. guilty of abusing its “near monopoly” with Windows to foil competitors in other markets and hit the software giant with a record fine of $613 million.

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In 2005, Kyrgyzstan President Askar Akayev’s government collapsed after opposition protesters took over the presidential compound and government offices.

In 2008, Bhutan, the small Himalayan country, became the world’s newest democracy when voters cast ballots in the nation’s first parliamentary elections, ending more than a century of absolute monarchy.

In 2009, France announced it would compensate 150,000 victims of nuclear testing carried out in the 1960s in French Polynesia and Algeria.

In 2010, the proposed $3.2 billion deal to sell New Brunswick Power’s generation assets to Hydro-Quebec fell apart over Quebec’s concerns about unanticipated costs.

In 2010, Harold W. McGraw Jr., who as leader of McGraw-Hill, his family’s publishing business, helped build it into a billion-dollar enterprise in the 1970s and ’80s, died in Darien, Conn., at age 92.

In 2010, the groundbreaking court martial of Capt. Robert Semrau began in Gatineau, Que. He was charged with second-degree murder and other offences in the death of a disarmed and severely wounded Taliban insurgent in Afghanistan in October 2008. This was believed to be the first time a Canadian soldier was charged in a battlefield death. (He was convicted on the lesser military charge of disgraceful conduct, reduced to the rank of second-lieutenant and dismissed from the Canadian Forces).

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In 2010, Pope Benedict XVI accepted the resignation of Bishop John Magee in Ireland’s sex abuse scandal. Magee was accused of mishandling complaints of reporting suspected pedophile priests to police in his diocese of Cloyne, which he had headed since 1987.

In 2011, Quebec confirmed a deal was struck with Ottawa that would allow the province to draw all royalties worth billion of dollars from Old Harry, natural-gas deposits in a disputed area in the Gulf of St. Lawrence that straddles the border between Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador.

In 2011, Canadian fighter jets took part for the first time in air attacks to help enforce the UN’s no fly zone over Libya. They helped drive tanks loyal to Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi out of Misrata. The Canadian raid reportedly destroyed an ammunition depot.

In 2012, Thomas Mulcair, a combative former Quebec Liberal cabinet minister, was chosen to succeed the late Jack Layton as leader of the federal NDP. He made his House of Commons debut as leader of the Official Opposition two days later.

In 2015, the co-pilot of a Germanwings jet barricaded himself in the cockpit and deliberately and wordlessly dropped the plane from a cruising altitude of 38,000 feet to just over 6,000 feet before slamming into a remote mountainside in the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board.

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In 2016, a U.N. court convicted former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic of genocide and nine other charges and sentenced him to 40 years in prison for orchestrating Serb atrocities throughout Bosnia’s 1992-95 war that left 100,000 people dead. Karadzic appealed the decision.

In 2016, former CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi was acquitted on all four charges of sexual assault and one count of choking. Justice William Horkins said he could not rely on the three complainants given their changing and shifting memories and evidence.

In 2017, Donald Trump granted the elusive U.S. presidential permit to TransCanada’s hotly debated, long-delayed Keystone XL pipeline, eight years and six months after the initial application for it to cross the American border.

In 2018, hundreds of thousands of teenagers and their supporters rallied in Washington for the March for Our Lives, a student-led movement to urge U.S. lawmakers to enact tougher gun control that was galvanized by the Parkland, Fla., high school shooting. Companion marches took place in hundreds of other American cities, over a dozen Canadian cities, as well as London, Paris, Munich, Sydney, Tokyo, and Edinburgh.

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In 2019, special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence that US President Donald Trump’s campaign “conspired or co-ordinated” with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election but reached no conclusion on whether Trump obstructed justice. That brought a hearty claim of vindication from Trump.

In 2019, Mike Trout and the Los Angeles Angels finalized a $432 million, 12-year contract that shattered the record for the largest deal in North American sports history. The centre fielder — a former MVP and one of the most sought-after baseball players in a generation — would set a baseball record for career earnings at about $513 million. That would surpass the roughly $448 million shortstop and third baseman Alex Rodriguez took in with Seattle, Texas and the New York Yankees from 1994-2017.

In 2020, the 2020 Summer Olympics were officially postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach agreed to the delay of about one year.

In 2020, the House of Commons unanimously passed a vote on the emergency legislation to provide billions in financial aid to help Canadians weather the COVID-19 pandemic.

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In 2020, the Assembly of First Nations declared a COVID-19 state of emergency and urged governments to give special consideration to remote fly-in communities. Indigenous health managers noted it’s hard to talk about the importance of washing your hands when tap water isn’t drinkable, and that it’s impossible to self-isolate in overcrowded homes.

In 2020, Canada’s chief medical health officer said the ratio of travel-related to community transmission of COVID-19 is about equal, representing a fundamental shift in the spread of the virus in Canada.

In 2020, the Senate passed an emergency federal bill to inject billions of dollars of aid into the Canadian economy after the COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed entire industries.

— List compiled by the Canadian Press

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