Nowruz, the Persian New Year, has been celebrated at the vernal equinox for over 2,500 years across Iran, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. Rooted in Zoroastrian tradition, it marks the rebirth of nature and remains one of the world's oldest continuously observed holidays, later folded into UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage.
Nowruz marks the astronomical arrival of spring and has been observed for millennia across the Persian-speaking world. Rooted in Zoroastrian belief in the renewal of the cosmos, it later spread through the Achaemenid, Parthian, and Sassanid empires. Today over 300 million people from the Balkans to Central Asia mark it, and the UN recognizes March 21 as International Nowruz Day.
The 1225 reissue, granted by the young King Henry III in exchange for a tax grant, became the definitive version of Magna Carta, later entered into statute law in 1297. Unlike the hastily sealed 1215 original, this version was freely and deliberately confirmed, giving its clauses — including limits on arbitrary imprisonment — lasting constitutional weight.
Following the March 1 Massacre of Wassy, tensions between French Catholics and Huguenots escalated rapidly through March 1562, with Huguenot leader Louis, Prince of Condé, mobilizing forces. The resulting French Wars of Religion would grind on intermittently for over three decades, killing an estimated two to four million people.
Bach was born on March 21, 1685 (Julian calendar; March 31 Gregorian), in the Thuringian town of Eisenach, the youngest child of town musician Johann Ambrosius Bach. Orphaned by age ten, he was raised by his elder brother and trained on organ and violin. He went on to compose over a thousand works, from the Brandenburg Concertos to the Mass in B minor, becoming the towering figure of the Baroque era and a foundational influence on nearly all subsequent Western music.
Nicéphore Niépce, born March 21, 1795, would go on to produce the earliest surviving photograph made in a camera, 'View from the Window at Le Gras,' around 1826-27, using a process he called heliography. His experiments laid the technical groundwork that Louis Daguerre later refined into the daguerreotype.
On March 21, 1804, France enacted the Code Civil des Français, popularly known as the Napoleonic Code. Drafted by a commission of jurists and championed personally by Napoleon, it swept away the patchwork of feudal, royal, and regional laws that had governed France, establishing equality before the law, secular authority over marriage, and clear property rights. It became one of the most influential legal documents in history, adopted or adapted by dozens of nations across Europe, Latin America, and beyond.
On March 21, 1918, Germany launched Operation Michael, the first of the Spring Offensives, with a five-hour artillery bombardment of unprecedented intensity followed by an infantry assault along a 60-mile stretch of the Western Front. Using new stormtrooper infiltration tactics, German forces achieved the war's most dramatic advance in years, driving British forces back nearly 40 miles, but the offensive ultimately stalled from exhaustion and supply failures, and Germany never regained the initiative.
On March 21, 1960, thousands gathered peacefully outside the Sharpeville police station to protest the pass laws requiring Black South Africans to carry internal passports. Police opened fire without warning, killing 69 people, many shot in the back while fleeing. The massacre galvanized international condemnation of apartheid, led the United Nations to establish March 21 as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, and pushed the African National Congress toward armed resistance.
On March 21, 1965, roughly 8,000 marchers departed Selma, Alabama, crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge under federal protection after President Johnson deployed National Guard troops. The march came two weeks after 'Bloody Sunday,' when state troopers had brutally beaten peaceful demonstrators attempting the same route. The successful five-day march to the state capitol in Montgomery built momentum that helped secure passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 just months later.
On March 21, 1970, Egypt completed the Aswan High Dam, a massive structure across the Nile built with Soviet financing and engineering after Western powers withdrew funding. The dam controlled the Nile's historic floods, generated hydroelectric power for a growing nation, and created Lake Nasser, one of the largest reservoirs on Earth, but also submerged ancient Nubian sites and altered downstream sediment flows relied upon by Egyptian farmers for millennia.
Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi traveled to Dhaka to sign the treaty with Bangladesh's first leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, formalizing the close relationship forged when Indian forces helped Bangladesh win independence from Pakistan in December 1971. The pact covered mutual defense consultation, trade, and cultural exchange, anchoring Bangladesh's early foreign policy firmly toward India.
After more than a century of German and then South African rule, and a 23-year armed independence struggle led by SWAPO, Namibia celebrated independence at a midnight ceremony in Windhoek attended by dozens of world leaders, including South Africa's F.W. de Klerk and UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar. Sam Nujoma took the oath as the country's first president.
On March 21, 2005, the Cassini spacecraft conducted a close flyby of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, passing within about 1,577 kilometers and using radar to peer through the moon's dense nitrogen-methane atmosphere. The data returned that day contributed to the growing picture of Titan as a world with liquid hydrocarbon lakes and a complex weather cycle, findings later confirmed dramatically by the Huygens probe's January 2005 landing and subsequent Cassini passes.
The iPad 2 launched on March 11, 2011 in the US, with international sales including additional countries following on March 25; in several markets the rollout continued through late March. It introduced dual cameras, a faster A5 chip, and the Smart Cover accessory, helping Apple extend its dominance of the nascent tablet market against a wave of Android competitors.
Dominic Ongwen, abducted as a child and raised within Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army, stood trial in The Hague facing 70 charges including murder, rape, sexual slavery, and enlisting child soldiers stemming from LRA attacks in northern Uganda. The case posed unusual questions for international law about prosecuting a perpetrator who was himself once a child victim of the same organization.