On March 21, 1952, Cleveland, Ohio hosted an event now
recognized as history’s first major rock-and-roll show…
the Moondog Coronation Ball.

Breathless promotion on the local radio station. Tickets
selling out in a single day. Thousands of teenagers,
hours before show time, lining up outside the biggest
venue in town.

The “Moondog” in question was the legendary disk jockey
Alan Freed, the self-styled “father of rock and roll” who
was then the host of the enormously popular “Moondog
Show” on Cleveland AM radio station WJW.

    
1960s

On March 20, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson notified
Alabama’s Governor George Wallace that he will use federal
authority to call up the Alabama National Guard in order to
supervise a planned civil rights march from Selma to
Montgomery.

President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Martin Luther
King, Jr.
   

In Ripon, Wisconsin, former members of the Whig Party met
to establish a new party to oppose the spread of slavery into
the western territories.

The Whig Party, which was formed in 1834 to oppose the
“tyranny” of President Andrew Jackson, had shown itself
incapable of coping with the national crisis over slavery.

By February 1854, anti-slavery Whigs had begun meeting in
the upper midwestern states to discuss the formation of a
new party. One such meeting, in Wisconsin on March 20,
1854, is generally remembered as the founding meeting of
the Republican Party.

Alvan Earle Bovay
(July 12, 1818 – January 13, 1903)

Horace Greeley
(February 3, 1811 – November 29, 1872)

On March 19, 2003, the United States, along with coalition
forces primarily from the United Kingdom, initiated war on
Iraq. Just after explosions began to rock Baghdad, Iraq’s
capital, U.S. President George W. Bush announced in a
televised address, “At this hour, American and coalition
forces are in the early stages of military operations to
disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world
from grave danger.”

President Bush and his advisors built much of their case
for war on the specious claim that Iraq, under dictator
Saddam Hussein, possessed or was in the process of
building weapons of mass destruction.

No weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. The
U.S. declared an end to the war in Iraq on December 15,
2011, nearly ten years after the fighting began. 

President George Bush (right) speaks to Donald Rumsfeld
and Paul Wolfowitz during a visit at the Pentagon on March
25, 2003.