On March 17, 461, according to tradition, if not actual fact, St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, died in Saul, Ireland.
In 1649, England`s Parliament abolished the House of Lords.
In 1776, American revolutionaries forced the British to evacuate Boston.
In 1843, St. Patrick`s Day was celebrated in Chicago for the first time.
In 1905, Eleanor Roosevelt married Franklin D. Roosevelt in New York.
In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt used the word ``muckrake`` in a speech, referring to the deplorable habit of making sweeping and unjust charges of corruption against public officials and corporations.
In 1919, singer Nat ``King`` Cole was born in Montgomery, Ala.
In 1941, the National Gallery of Art opened in Washington.
In 1942, in World War II, Gen. Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia to become supreme commander of Allied forces in the southwest Pacific theater.
In 1958, the U.S. Navy launched the Vanguard 1 satellite.
In 1962, the Soviet Union accused the U.S. of fighting an ``undeclared war`` in Vietnam and demanded the removal of U.S. military forces there.
In 1969, Golda Meir took office as Israeli prime minister.
In 1970, the U.S. cast its first veto in the United Nations Security Council, killing a resolution that would have condemned Britain for failure to use force to overthrow the white-ruled government of Rhodesia.
In 1973, a Cambodian air force officer stole a plane and bombed the presidential palace in Phnom Pehn, missing President Lon Nol but killing 20 people.
In 1975, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the federal government had exclusive rights to any oil and gas resources on the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf beyond the three-mile limit.
In 1978, in one of history`s worst oil spills, the tanker Amoco Cadiz ran aground on the coast of Brittany, France.
In 1980, Ambassador Fernando Gomez Fyns of Uruguay made a daring escape from his leftist guerrilla captors inside the Dominican Embassy in Colombia.
In 1983, Cardinal Torence Cooke broke with tradition by declining to receive the grand marshal of New York`s St. Patrick`s Day Parade because of the marshal`s support for the Irish Republican Army.