Important Events From This day in History – 28 March

Today in History

• 1990 Jesse Owens receives the Congressional Gold Medal

  The African American athlete dominated the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, which took place during Adolf Hitler’s racist nazi regime.

• 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear power plant experiences a partial meltdown and radioactive leak

  The coolant leak was America’s worst commercial nuclear accident. A continuous string of nuclear disasters, such as Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986), and Fukushima (2011) continue to raise doubts about the security and environmental benefit of nuclear power.

• 1969 Greek poet Giorgos Seferis speaks out against the military junta

  The Nobel Prize laureate issued his now famous statement against Greece’s repressive right-wing Regime of the Colonels on the BBC World Service.

• 1963 Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds is released

  The film about a swarm of birds wreaking havoc in Bodega Bay, California has become a classic of the horror movie genre.

• 1910 The first seaplane in history takes off

  French inventor Henri Fabre’s Canard (Fabre Hydravion) was the first floatplane to take off from water under its own power. The first flight was 457 meters long.