Today in History: March 26

1992: Heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson was sentenced to six years in prison following a rape conviction in Indianapolis, Indiana.

1989: The first free elections take place in the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin is elected.

1982: Ground is broken in Washington D.C. for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

1979: The historic peace accord between Israel and Egypt, agreed to by Menachem Begin and Anwar el-Sādāt and negotiated by U.S. President Jimmy Carter at Camp David, Maryland, in September 1978, was signed this day in 1979.

1971: Members of the Awami League set up a government-in-exile in Calcutta (Kolkata) and declared Bangladesh an independent state.

1969: Writer John Kennedy Toole commits suicide at the age of 32. His mother helps get his first and only novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, published. It goes on to win the 1981 Pulitzer Prize.

1969: The Soviet weather Satellite Meteor 1 is launched.

1961: John F. Kennedy meets with British Premier Macmillan in Washington to discuss increased Communist involvement in Laos.

1954: The United States sets off an H-bomb blast in the Marshall Islands, the second in four weeks.

1953: Eisenhower offers increased aid to the French fighting in Indochina.

1953: Dr. Jonas Salk announces a new vaccine against polio.

1951: The United States Air Force flag design is approved.

1950: Senator Joe McCarthy names Owen Lattimore, an ex-State Department adviser, as a Soviet spy.

1942: The Germans begin sending Jews to Auschwitz in Poland.

1938: Herman Goering warns all Jews to leave Austria.

1930: Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman to become a U.S. Supreme Court justice, was born in El Paso, Texas.

1927: The Mille Miglia, the famed automobile race across Italy, was inaugurated.

1918: On the Western Front, the Germans take the French towns Noyon, Roye and Lihons.

1913: The Balkan allies take Adrianople.

1885: Eastman Film Co. manufactures the first commercial motion picture film.

1885: The first clash of the Riel Rebellion in Canada took place in Duck Lake, Saskatchewan.

1832: Famed western artist George Catlin begins his voyage up the Missouri River aboard the American Fur Company steamship Yellowstone.

1827: German composer Ludwig Van Beethoven dies in Vienna. He had been deaf for the later part of his life, but said on his death bed "I shall hear in heaven."

1827: Ludwig van Beethoven died of cirrhosis of the liver in Vienna.

1804: Congress orders the removal of Indians east of the Mississippi River to Louisiana.

1799: Napoleon Bonaparte captures Jaffa, Palestine.

1517: The famous Flemish composer Heinrich Issac dies.