March 25th

Today's Highlight in History:
On March 25th, 1911, in a tragedy that galvanized America's labor movement, 146 immigrant workers were killed when fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York.

On this date:
In 1634, Maryland was founded by English colonists sent by the second Lord Baltimore.

In 1865, during the Civil War, Confederate forces captured Fort Stedman in Virginia.

In 1894, Jacob S. Coxey began leading an "army" of unemployed from Massillon, Ohio, to Washington DC to demand help from the federal government.

In 1913, the home of vaudeville, the Palace Theatre, opened in New York City.

In 1918, French composer Claude Debussy died in Paris.

In 1947, a coal mine explosion in Centralia, Illinois, claimed 111 lives.

In 1957, the Treaty of Rome established the European Economic Community.

In 1965, the Reverend Martin Luther King Junior led 25,000 marchers to the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest the denial of voting rights to blacks.

In 1975, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was shot to death by a nephew with a history of mental illness. (The nephew was beheaded the following June.)

In 1994, American troops completed their withdrawal from Somalia.

Ten years ago: Eighty-seven people, most of them Honduran and Dominican immigrants, were killed when fire raced through an illegal social club in New York City.

Five years ago: Two Americans who'd strayed across the Kuwaiti border into Iraq were sentenced to eight years in prison (however, David Daliberti and William Barle years for the 1992 rape of Desiree Washington, a beauty pageant contestant.

One year ago: NATO aircraft and missiles blasted targets in Yugoslavia for a second night, directing much of their fire on Kosovo, where fighting raged between Serbs and ethnic Albanians. Alexei Yagudin won the men's title for the second time at the World Figure Skating Championships held in Helsinki, Finland.

"Uninterpreted truth is as useless as buried gold."

-- Lytton Strachey, English biographer (1880-1932).