Following the death of the reclusive Tiberius on March 16, the Roman Senate formally ratified 24-year-old Caligula as emperor by late March, 37 AD. Romans initially celebrated him as a breath of fresh air, the son of the beloved general Germanicus. Within a year, however, illness or unchecked power transformed him, and his short reign became a byword for cruelty, extravagance, and erratic tyranny before his assassination in 41 AD.

As the Texas Revolution raged in the spring of 1836, the provisional government worked to commission armed schooners to challenge Mexican naval superiority in the Gulf of Mexico. Vessels like the Liberty, Invincible, Independence, and Brutus, though few in number, harassed Mexican shipping, intercepted supplies, and helped keep the fragile rebellion's coastal lifelines to New Orleans open at a desperate moment following the fall of the Alamo.

In late March 1839, Commissioner Lin Zexu confined foreign traders, mostly British, to their factories in Canton, cutting off supplies until they surrendered their opium stocks. Lin's crackdown on the illegal drug trade, which had addicted millions of Chinese and drained silver from the treasury, humiliated British merchants and gave London a pretext for military intervention that erupted into the First Opium War the following year.

Working past midnight with Russian minister Eduard de Stoeckl, Seward finalized the purchase of 586,412 square miles of Alaskan territory for roughly two cents an acre. Critics derided the icy, seemingly useless land as 'Seward's Icebox' and 'Walrussia,' unable to see any value in it. The discovery of gold in the 1890s and oil in the 20th century would prove the acquisition to be one of the most consequential bargains in American history.

After 26 months of construction and fierce criticism from Parisian artists who called it an eyesore, Gustave Eiffel's wrought-iron tower opened to mark the 1889 Exposition Universelle. Eiffel himself climbed to the top to plant the French flag. Intended as a temporary exhibit slated for demolition after 20 years, the tower survived thanks to its usefulness as a radio antenna and became the enduring symbol of Paris.

By the spring of 1943, tens of thousands of Allied POWs and conscripted Asian laborers were dying by the thousands as Japan raced to complete the 258-mile Thailand-Burma railway, later immortalized in the film 'The Bridge on the River Kwai.' Malnutrition, tropical disease, and beatings killed an estimated 90,000 to 100,000 laborers and 12,000 POWs during the railway's construction, one of the deadliest forced-labor projects of the Second World War.

NASA's Vanguard program, meant to be America's answer to Sputnik, suffered another failure on March 31, 1959, when a second-stage malfunction prevented the satellite from reaching orbit. Vanguard's string of embarrassing failures, including a launchpad explosion nicknamed 'Flopnik' by the press, had already ceded early prestige in the space race to the Soviet Union and to the rival Explorer program run by Wernher von Braun's Army team.

Recorded in a single marathon 10-hour session at Abbey Road studios for under 400 pounds, 'Please Please Me' reached number one on the British album charts on this date and stayed there for 30 weeks. The album's raw energy, built on cover songs and a handful of Lennon-McCartney originals, announced a songwriting partnership and a cultural phenomenon that would upend the music industry on both sides of the Atlantic within a year.