March 16 (UPI) — On this date in history:
In 1802, the U.S. Congress authorized the establishment of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.
In 1827, Freedom’s Journal, the first Black-owned and -operated newspaper in the United States, was published in New York.
In 1926, Robert Goddard launched the world’s first liquid-fuel rocket.
In 1935, Adolf Hitler denounced the military clauses of the Versailles Treaty and immediately ordered general military conscription in Germany.
In 1945, the Island of Iwo Jima was declared secure by U.S. forces in one of the major World War II conflicts in the Pacific.
In 1956, the Rev. A. Edward Banks became the 25th minister to be arrested for allegedly violating the seldom-used Alabama state anti-boycott law. The boycott of Montgomery, Ala., buses began after Rosa Parks was fined $10 for refusing to surrender her seat to a white person.
In 1966, NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott docked their Gemini 8 space vehicle with an Agena craft, a first in orbital history.
File Photo courtesy of NASA
In 1968, about 300 Vietnamese villagers died at the hands of U.S. troops in what came to be known as the My Lai massacre.
In 1984, CIA station chief in Beirut, William Buckley, was kidnapped by members of Hezbollah. His captors claimed that they had executed Buckley on Oct. 4, 1985, though it’s believed he died of a heart attack sometime in June 1985, following nearly 15 months of torture.
In 1985, Terry Anderson, Beirut bureau chief for the Associated Press, was kidnapped by members of Hezbollah. He would remain in captivity for more than six years, before securing his release on Dec. 4, 1991.
In 1988, President Ronald Reagan ordered 3,200 U.S. troops sent to Honduras in what the White House described as “a measured response” to a Nicaraguan invasion directed against U.S.-backed Contra rebels.
File Photo by Cliff Owen/UPI
In 1994, the International Atomic Energy Agency said North Korea barred its inspectors from checking one of the nation’s seven nuclear sites.
In 2009, Japan reported its gross domestic product fell at a 12.7 percent annual rate in the last quarter of 2008, plunging the country into what experts said was its worst financial crisis since World War II.
In 2014, results of a referendum showed that people in Crimea voted overwhelmingly for the autonomous Black Sea peninsula to break from Ukraine and join Russia.
In 2021, a series of shootings at three massage parlors in the Atlanta area left eight people dead. Six of the slain victims were Asian women, prompting questions of whether the shootings were a hate crime amid rising anti-Asian sentiment in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in China. The accused gunman told police he was motivated by a conflict between sexual addiction and his Christianity, and he was sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole.
In 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden announced another $800 million in military aid for Ukraine after President Volodymyr Zelensky made a rare appeal for assistance before a joint session of Congress.
File Photo by J. Scott Applewhite/UPI