Moments in Time: Australia's Sydney Opera House
The History Channel
On March 2, 1933, construction officially began on Australia's Sydney Opera House. The structure's first performance occurred in a rather unusual way in 1960, when singer and labor activist Paul Robeson climbed the scaffolding and serenaded workers while they ate lunch.
On March 3, 1965, more than 30 U.S. Air Force jets struck targets along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a military supply route running from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia to South Vietnam. The route sent weapons, manpower, ammunition and other supplies from communist-led North Vietnam to their supporters in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
On March 4, 1952, Ernest Hemingway finished his short novel "The Old Man and the Sea," writing to his publisher the same day that it was the best writing he'd ever done. Critics agreed and the book not only won the Pulitzer Prize the following year but became one of his bestselling works. It would also be his last significant work of fiction before he died by suicide less than a decade later.
On March 5, 1989, Michael Anderson Godwin, who'd been sentenced to death by electric chair for a 1980 murder sentence, accidentally took justice into his own hands when he electrocuted himself on his jail cell's steel toilet after biting into a wire while trying to fix a pair of earphones.
On March 6, 1987, the British Herald of Free Enterprise ferry, an 8,000-ton ship owned by Townsend Car Ferries, capsized after departing Zeebrugge, Belgium, drowning 188 passengers. The tragedy was attributed to poor safety procedures.
On March 7, 2010, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win a Best Director Academy Award for her film "The Hurt Locker," about an American bomb squad that disables explosives in Iraq. Only three women had previously been nominated for the award.
On March 8, 1981, a nuclear accident at a Japan Atomic Power Company plant in Tsuruga, Japan, exposed more than 50 workers to radiation when they were sent in to clean things up before the leak could escape the disposal building. Unfortunately, the plan was not successful and 16 tons of waste ended up in the Wakasa Bay.
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