On March 17, 461, according to tradition, St. Patrick — the patron saint of Ireland — died in Saul.
In 1776 British forces evacuated Boston during the Revolutionary War.
In 1905 Anna Eleanor Roosevelt married Franklin Delano Roosevelt in New York.
In 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt used the term “muckrake” in a speech to the Gridiron Club in Washington.
In 1917 singer Nat King Cole was born in Montgomery, Ala.
In 1942 Gen. Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia to become supreme commander of Allied forces in the southwest Pacific theater during World War II.
In 1955 actor Gary Sinise, a founding member of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, was born in Blue Island, Ill.
In 1958 the U.S. Navy launched the Vanguard 1 satellite.
In 1966 a U.S. midget submarine located a missing hydrogen bomb that had fallen from an American bomber into the Mediterranean off Spain.
In 1992, 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. Also in 1992 28 people were killed in the truck bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires.
In 1999 a panel of medical experts concluded that marijuana has medical benefits for people suffering from cancer and AIDS.
In 2000 Smith and Wesson signed an unprecedented agreement with the Clinton administration to, among other things, include safety locks with all of its handguns to make them more childproof; in return, the agreement called for federal, state and city lawsuits against the gun maker to be dropped.
In 2003, edging to the brink of war, President George W. Bush gave Saddam Hussein 48 hours to leave his country and told Americans that military confrontation will ultimately make them safer. (Iraq rejected Bush’s ultimatum, saying that a U.S. attack to force Hussein from power would be “a grave mistake.”)
In 2005 baseball players told Congress that steroids were a problem in the sport. Also in 2005 rapper Lil’ Kim was convicted of lying to a grand jury about a shootout outside a New York radio station.
