March 13 ...

In 607 AD the 12th recorded passage of Halley's Comet occurred. In 1781 the planet Uranus was discovered by Sir William Herschel. In 1868 the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson began in the US Senate. In 1901 the 23rd president of the United States, Benjamin Harrison, died in Indianapolis. In 1906 American suffragist Susan Brownell Anthony died in Rochester, NY, at age 86. In 1925 a law went into effect in Tennessee prohibiting the teaching of evolution. In 1933 banks began to reopen after a "holiday" declared by President Franklin Roosevelt. In 1964 38 residents of a Queens, NY, neighborhood failed to respond to the cries of Catherine "Kitty" Genovese, 28, as she was being stabbed to death (this story is now in dispute). In 1969 the Apollo 9 astronauts splashed down, ending a mission that included the successful testing of the Lunar Module. In 2001 Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian national who was arrested with a carload of explosives just before New Year's Eve 1999, went on trial in Los Angeles on charges of plotting to bomb Seattle and other U.S. cities during the millennium celebrations. (He was convicted of terrorism the following month.) In 2003 a report in the journal Nature reported that scientists had found 350,000-year-old human footprints in Italy. The 56 prints were made by three early, upright-walking humans that were descending the side of a volcano.