March 1, Peace Corps established

Today is Sunday, March 1, the 60th day of 2026. There are 305 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On March 1, 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order establishing the Peace Corps; since its establishment, over 240,000 Americans have served as Peace Corps volunteers.

Also on this date:

In 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act, making Yellowstone the nation’s first national park.

In 1932, Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., the 20-month-old son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh, was kidnapped from the family home in New Jersey. (Remains identified as those of the child were found two months later; Bruno Richard Hauptmann was convicted of murder in the case in 1935 and executed in 1936.)

In 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire from the spectators gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives, wounding five members of Congress.

In 1966, the Soviet space probe Venera 3 crash-landed on the surface of Venus, becoming the first spacecraft to reach another planet. However, Venera was unable to transmit any data back to Earth because its communications system had failed.

In 1971, a bomb went off inside a men’s room at the U.S. Capitol. The radical group Weather Underground claimed responsibility for the pre-dawn blast, which damaged the building but caused no injuries.

In 1974, seven people, including former Nixon White House aides H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman; former Attorney General John Mitchell; and former assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian, were indicted by a grand jury on charges of conspiring to obstruct justice in connection with the Watergate break-in. (These four defendants were convicted in January 1975, though Mardian’s conviction was later reversed.)

In 2005, Dennis Rader, the churchgoing family man accused of leading a double life as the BTK serial killer, was charged in Wichita, Kansas, with 10 counts of first-degree murder. (Rader later pleaded guilty and received multiple life sentences.)

In 2007, a tornado outbreak in the Southeast U.S. killed at least 19 people across Alabama and Georgia. One of the tornadoes toppled a concrete wall at a high school in Enterprise, Alabama, killing eight students.

In 2014, a mass stabbing by men wielding knives and machetes at a railway station in Kunming, in southwest China, left at least 29 people dead and 130 others wounded. Authorities blamed a militant separatist group for the attack and said four of the suspects were shot dead.

In 2024, thousands of mourners bid farewell to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny at a public funeral in Moscow, two weeks after his unexplained death in an Arctic penal colony. Navalny had been jailed since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow to face certain arrest after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin.