Milestones: March 29, 2024

March 29, 2024 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

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APPOMATOX — ANYONE WHO HAS DRIVEN I-95 THROUGH VIRGINIA PASSES THE CITY OF PETERSBURG, WHERE THE FINAL CAMPAIGN OF THE CIVIL WAR began on March 29, 1865. Union troops, under the command of General Ulysses S. Grant, moved against the Confederate trenches around Petersburg, quickly outnumbering Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s rebel forces, who fled westward. General Lee’s forces were hemorrhaging in contrast with Grant’s burgeoning army. Lee’s strategy of attacking Fort Stedman to split Union forces backfired horribly and he lost 5,000 men. Now holding the advantage, Grant on March 29 sent 12,000 troops to cut off Lee’s escape route from Petersburg, and Lee’s army could not hold the trenches during the battle.

Finally outnumbered and outmaneuvered, General Lee surrendered his army to General Grant at the Appomattox Court House on April 9, just five days before President Lincoln was assassinated.

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U.S. LEAVES VIETNAM — THE LAST U.S. COMBAT TROOPS LEFT SOUTH VIETNAM ON MARCH 29, 1973, as Hanoi freed many of the remaining American prisoners of war held in North Vietnam. The Vietnam Peace Agreement concluding America’s eight-year direct intervention had been signed two months earlier, in January 1973. The conflict had begun two decades before President John F. Kennedy began sending troops and American involvement fell into a quagmire as hostilities escalated and U.S. troop casualty count rose. Worse, the communist North Vietnamese army’s Tet Offensive of 1968 crushed U.S. hopes of an imminent end to the conflict, as American opposition spiked both the Vietnam War and the military conscription to continue supplying troops. President Johnson’s team of “Wise Men” had advised him the situation was untenable and he decided not to run for re-election. President Richard Nixon also found it difficult to extricate the U.S. from the war, until the peace agreement.

After the troops’ withdrawal, several thousand U.S. Department of Defense civilian employees remained in Saigon to help South Vietnam. However, even with U.S. troops and P.O.W.s now gone, the fighting continued between the two Vietnamese factions.

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THE KEELING CURVE — DR. CHARLES DAVID KEELING ON MARCH 29, 1958, BEGAN A MEASUREMENT TO REGIMEN THE AMOUNT OF CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE ATMOSPHERE from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawai’i. His research, which other scientists largely dismissed at first, revealed a rapid accumulation of carbon dioxide, expressed in a graph that came to be known as the Keeling Curve. Keeling launched his project thanks to funding he received as part of the International Geophysical Year, a worldwide scientific project that took place from 1957-1958. The graph showed an irregular curve due to the larger amount of vegetation in the Northern Hemisphere, which has a greater percent of landmass, and vegetation exhaled more oxygen in the summer, whereas they breathe in carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas. Eventually, other scientists recognized that carbon dioxide levels were increasing at an alarming rate.

Keeling is recognized for his research that helped awaken both the scientific community and the general public to climate change.

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A NEW WAY OF SEEING MERCURY — FIFTY YEARS AGO, ON MARCH 29, 1974, the unmanned U.S. space probe Mariner 10 became the first spacecraft to visit the planet Mercury, the smallest planet in the solar system and the one closest to the sun. NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) launched the probe in November 1973 to obtain close-up images of the planet, whose proximity to the sun obscured it in conventional photography. NASA spacecraft crew did three flybys, capturing details and mapping 35% of the planet’s surface. Mercury’s surface was filled with craters, much like the Earth’s moon. But the planet is inhabitable, lacking both air and water, thus any atmosphere. Depending on its proximity or distance from the sun, Mercury would either bake or freeze.

The probe also revealed that contrary to scientific conjecture, Mercury does not spin on its axis, the planet just has a very slow rotational period that lasts over 58 Earth days. One year on Mercury lasts just 88 Earth days (roughly three months).

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FOOTBALL DEBACLE — THE BALTIMORE COLTS LITERALLY SNUCK OUT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, ESCAPING THE EAST COAST FOR INDIANAPOLIS, exactly 40 years ago, on March 29, 1984. The team loaded moving vans and shipped out, leaving Baltimore without an NFL team, at least temporarily. However, turbulence in Cleveland was inextricably also playing out, and in the mid-1990s, Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell, claiming financial hardship, moved his team to Baltimore, without much more notice. Ironically, voters had recently approved a renovation of Cleveland Municipal Stadium, which sits yards away from the Lake Erie shoreline. Angry Cleveland Browns fans protested and litigated until a way was eventually found to keep their team’s name and colors in that northern Ohio city.

As for Baltimore, their NFL team was eventually named the Ravens.

See previous milestones, here.