20 March in history

7 events that happened on 20 March, from 1602 to 1933.

  1. ✦ Anniversary of the day

    1602 CE 424 years ago

    Dutch East India Company is founded

    The States General granted the VOC a monopoly on Dutch trade in Asia. Financed by publicly traded shares, it could wage war, make treaties and found colonies, and dominated the spice trade.

    Dutch East India Company

  2. 1815 CE 211 years ago

    Napoleon returns to Paris

    The day after Louis XVIII fled, Napoleon entered the Tuileries to cheering crowds. His restored rule, the Hundred Days, ended with defeat at Waterloo in June.

    NapoleonParis

  3. 1852 CE 174 years ago

    Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'

    Stowe's novel of slavery sold some 300,000 copies in America in its first year and stirred anti-slavery feeling in the North. Lincoln is said to have greeted her as the author who started the war.

  4. 1854 CE 172 years ago

    Opponents of slavery meet at Ripon to form a new party

    Meeting in a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act called for a new party. The Republican Party was organised that summer and won the presidency in 1860.

  5. 1890 CE 136 years ago

    Kaiser Wilhelm II dismisses Bismarck

    After disputes with the young Emperor, Otto von Bismarck's resignation as Chancellor was accepted. Without him, Germany's alliances shifted, as Britain's Punch caricatured in 'Dropping the Pilot'.

    German EmpireOtto von BismarckWilhelm IIKaiser

  6. 1916 CE 110 years ago

    Einstein submits his general theory of relativity

    'The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity' reached the journal Annalen der Physik. It described gravity as the curvature of spacetime and predicted the bending of light, confirmed in 1919.

  7. 1933 CE 93 years ago

    Himmler announces the Dachau concentration camp

    Munich's police chief Heinrich Himmler announced a camp for political prisoners near Dachau, opened two days later. It became the model for the Nazi camp system; over 40,000 died there.

March

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