March 28
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Featured Event
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French labor law regulating baking hours is passed
On this day in 1919, a law regulating “la fabrication du pain” was passed in France, restricting bakers from working from 10 pm to 4 am. This culminated in a quiet cultural shift in which the traditional French boule—which took hours to prepare—was gradually replaced by the baguette, a long, narrow, bread that could be prepared in a fraction of the time. The French staple eventually became commonplace, and today the baguette is protected as a part of the UNESCO Cultural Heritage list. [Read today’s edition of Today in History > >]
Featured Biography
Featured Biography
New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (neg. no. LC-USZ62-111438)
English writer Virginia Woolf, who died by suicide this day in 1941, altered the course of Modernist literature through her revisionist experiments with novelistic form, exemplified by such works as Mrs. Dalloway.
Famous Birthdays
More on March 28
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2004
English filmmaker, writer, and humanitarian Sir Peter Ustinov—whose versatile career spanned more than 60 years, during which he excelled in numerous areas of the arts while gaining renown, especially by means of lectures and one-man shows, as a witty raconteur—died at age 82. [Take our actors and acting quiz.]
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1985
Belorussian-born French painter, printmaker, and designer Marc Chagall, whose works were among the first expressions of psychic reality in modern art, died at age 97. [Test your knowledge of art history.]
John S. Zeedick—Hulton Archive/Getty Images
1979
At 4:00 am an automatic valve mistakenly closed at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, culminating in radioactive leakage. [Read about 10 of the world’s worst industrial disasters.]
Fabian Bachrach
1969
Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States, died at age 78. [Sort fact from fiction in our U.S. presidents quiz.]
Archive Photos—Hulton Archive/Getty Images
1939
Francisco Franco, leader of the Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War, captured the capital city of Madrid en route to his overthrow of the democratic Spanish republic. [How much do you know about European history?]
© Mario Tama—Getty Images
1936
Mario Vargas Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his novels of revolution and struggle, was born in Arequipa, Peru. [Take our Nobel laureates in literature quiz.]
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1935
The Nazi documentary Triumph des willens (Triumph of the Will) was released in Germany; the propaganda film, which was directed by Leni Riefenstahl, centers on the party’s 1934 congress in Nürnberg. [Test your knowledge of Nazi Germany.]
© Berkomaster/Shutterstock.com
1930
Built as Byzantium about 657 bce, then renamed Constantinople in the 4th century ce after Constantine the Great made the city his capital, the Turkish city of Istanbul officially received its present name.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
1920
American motion-picture actors Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were wed. [How much do you know about women in classic cinema?]
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
1890
American bandleader Paul Whiteman, called the “King of Jazz” for popularizing a musical style that helped to introduce jazz to mainstream audiences during the 1920s and ’30s, was born. [Take our music quiz.]
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1854
France and England declared war on Russia, joining forces with the Ottoman Turks in the Crimean War. [Take our quiz about the history of war.]
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1472
Painter Fra Bartolommeo, a prominent exponent of the High Renaissance style in early 16th-century Florence whose works included God the Father with SS. Catherine of Siena and Mary Magdalene (1509), was born. [Test your knowledge of Italian Renaissance art.]