Today:
543: Saint Benedict of Nursia, the father of Western monasticism and founder of the Benedictine Order, dies at the Monte Cassino monastery.
1556: Thomas Cranmer, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, is burned at the stake in Oxford as a heretic during the reign of Queen Mary I.
1685: Johann Sebastian Bach, the prolific German Baroque composer and organist, is born in Eisenach, Saxe-Eisenach.
1788: The Great New Orleans Fire destroys more than 800 buildings, leaving most of the city in ruins.
1804: The Code Napoléon, a comprehensive system of French civil law, is officially adopted as the legal framework for France.
1871: Journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley begins his famous trek from Zanzibar to find the missing missionary David Livingstone in Africa.
1960: Police in South Africa open fire on a crowd of black demonstrators in the Sharpeville massacre, killing 69 people and wounding 180 others.
1963: The Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in San Francisco Bay, known as “The Rock,” closes its doors after 29 years of operation.
1980: President Jimmy Carter announces that the United States will boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
2006: Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, sends the world’s first “tweet,” which read “just setting up my twttr.”
March 21,1949–March 18,2026: Jack Burns spent his golden years playing a high-stakes game of “Keyboard Warrior” against the mighty Snake Social, only to have his own internal hardware crash right before the big boss fight, proving that while he couldn’t cancel the Snaketards, the universe had no problem canceling his subscription to life. Jack would have been 77 years old today.