16 marzo

A Babylonian chronicle dates it to the 2nd of Addaru in his seventh year: 16 March 597 BCE. He seized the king and appointed a king of his own choice. When that king rebelled, the city and its temple were destroyed in 587 or 586 and much of Judah was deported to Babylonia.

Called to Vienna with the Archbishop’s household, he stayed as a freelance: lessons, subscription concerts, operas and sales to publishers. The mid-1780s were the high point, with a dozen piano concertos in three seasons; after 1788 came debts and letters asking friends for loans. He moved house…

A royal ordinance ended the Danish trade from 1 January 1803, making Denmark the first European state to ban it by law. The ten years’ grace let planters in the Danish islands buy up captives first.

Hugo set his novel in the cathedral and used it to attack the neglect, vandalism and bad restoration of medieval buildings. Its success made saving Notre-Dame a public cause, and in 1844 the state ordered the restoration.

Armstrong and Scott made the first docking in orbit. Then a stuck thruster set the joined craft spinning; undocking made it worse, up to about one turn a second. Armstrong stopped it with the re-entry thrusters, which meant the flight had to end at once.

Soldiers of Charlie Company, Americal Division, killed the unarmed villagers of Sơn Mỹ in a morning. The U.S. Army’s investigators counted 347 dead; the memorial at Sơn Mỹ names 504. A helicopter crew under Hugh Thompson stopped part of it. The Army hid it until Seymour Hersh’s reports in November…

Troops and families left Pleiku down a neglected road to the coast. The column, joined by tens of thousands of civilians, was ambushed again and again; only a fraction reached Tuy Hòa. The Vietnamese who lived it call it the convoy of tears.

A year earlier the shares had traded above 150 dollars. To make the deal work, the New York Fed agreed to take on 30 billion dollars of Bear’s mortgage assets. The same night it announced that from Monday it would lend to every Wall Street dealer, not only to banks.

Jennifer Haller, a 43-year-old volunteer, got the first shot of Moderna and the NIH’s mRNA-1273 in a phase 1 trial in Seattle, 65 days after the genome was posted.