This Day In History for March 13

1781 - the seventh planet of the solar system, Uranus, was discovered by Sir William Herschel.

1884 - Congress officially adopted Eastern Standard Time for the District of Columbia.

1901 - the 23rd president of the United States, Benjamin Harrison, died in Indianapolis at age 67.

1925 - the Tennessee General Assembly approved a bill prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution. (Gov. Austin Peay signed the measure on March 21.)

1928 - hundreds of people died when the San Francisquito Valley in California was inundated with water after the St. Francis Dam burst just before midnight the evening of March 12.

1933 - banks began to re-open after a "holiday" declared by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

1964 - bar manager Catherine "Kitty" Genovese, 28, was stabbed to death near her Queens, N.Y. home; the case generated controversy over the supposed failure of Genovese's neighbors to respond to her cries for help.

1969 - the Apollo 9 astronauts splashed down, ending a mission that included the successful testing of the Lunar Module.

1980 - Ford Motor Chairman Henry Ford II announced he was stepping down, the same day a jury in Winamac, Ind., found Ford Motor Co. innocent of reckless homicide in the fiery deaths of three young women in a Ford Pinto.

1988 - yielding to student protests, the board of trustees of Gallaudet University in Washington D.C., a liberal arts college for the hearing-impaired, chose I. King Jordan to become the school's first deaf president.

1996 - a gunman burst into an elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland, and opened fire, killing 16 children and one teacher before killing himself.