This Day in History: March 31

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This Day in History: March 31

Take a look at all of the important historical events that took place on March 31.

On this day, March 31 …

2019: Making good on a longstanding threat, President Trump moves to cut direct aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, whose citizens are fleeing north and overwhelming U.S. resources as part of organized caravans.

Also on this day:

• 1492: King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain issue an edict expelling Jews from Spanish soil, except those willing to convert to Christianity.
• 1933: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Emergency Conservation Work Act, which creates the Civilian Conservation Corps.
• 1943: “Oklahoma!,” the first musical play by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, opens on Broadway.
• 1968: At the conclusion of a nationally broadcast address on Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson stuns listeners by declaring, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
• 1975: “Gunsmoke” closes out 20 seasons on CBS with its final first-run episode, “The Sharecroppers.”
• 1976: The New Jersey Supreme Court rules that Karen Ann Quinlan, a young woman in a persistent vegetative state, can be disconnected from her respirator. (Quinlan, who remained unconscious, would die in 1985.)
• 1991: The Warsaw Pact was formally dissolved.
• 1993: Actor Brandon Lee, son of Bruce Lee, is accidentally shot to death during the filming of the movie “The Crow”  in Wilmington, N.C., when he was hit by a bullet fragment that became lodged inside a prop gun.

• 1995: Mexican-American singer Selena Quintanilla-Perez, 23, is shot to death in Corpus Christi, Texas, by the founder of her fan club, Yolanda Saldivar.
• 2005: Terri Schiavo, 41, dies at a hospice in Pinellas Park, Fla., 13 days after her feeding tube was removed in a right-to-die court fight.
• 2014: In a flood of last-minute signups, hundreds of thousands of Americans rush to apply for health insurance as deadline day for President Obama’s overhaul brings long waits and a new spate of website technical difficulties.
• 2014: Charles H. Keating Jr., 90, the notorious financier who’d served prison time and was disgraced for his role in the costliest savings and loan failure in the U.S., dies in Phoenix.
• 2018: Amid tight security, Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai and her family return to her hometown in Pakistan for the first time since she was shot in the head in 2012 for her work as an advocate for young women’s education. 
• 2018: The Mormon church injects some diversity into what had been an all-white leadership panel by selecting its first-ever Latin American apostle and the first-ever apostle of Asian ancestry.