What happened on 12 March?

15 events from the Ever-When timeline, ranked by how much they mattered.

1. 1947 Cold War Geopolitical, ideological and military tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies. Dated here from the Truman Doctrine speech (12 March 1947) to the So
2. 1938 Anschluss German annexation of Austria -- first major territorial expansion of the Reich.
3. 1930 Gandhi begins the Salt March Gandhi's nonviolent 240-mile march galvanises Indian civil disobedience.
4. 1947 Truman Doctrine US pledges to support free peoples resisting Communist subversion or aggression.
5. 1175 BCE Odysseus leaves Calypso on a raft Odyssey 5: four days building, seventeen days sailing by the stars — then Poseidon spies him and smashes the raft within sight of land.
6. 1993 Mumbai serial bombings 1993 12 coordinated bombings across Mumbai kill ~257.
7. 1925 Death of Sun Yat-sen The founding father of the Chinese Republic dies, leaving a power vacuum filled by Chiang Kai-shek.
8. 1685 Born: George Berkeley Anglo-Irish empiricist philosopher; argued for immaterialism (esse est percipi); author of A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge.
9. 1933 Roosevelt's first fireside chat A week into the bank crisis, Roosevelt explains banking to sixty million listeners in plain words over the radio; deposits flow back when the banks reopen.
10. 1999 NATO eastern enlargement Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic join NATO ten years after 1989; the Baltic states and four more follow in 2004, redrawing Europe's security map.
11. 1943 Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man Commissioned for the war effort, Copland's brass-and-percussion fanfare premieres in Cincinnati and becomes one of the most performed pieces of American concert music.
12. 1888 Rhodes founds De Beers Consolidated Mines Backed by the Rothschilds, Rhodes buys out his rival Barney Barnato and merges the Kimberley diamond diggings into one company that will control most of the world's diamonds.
13. 1863 Born: Gabriele D'Annunzio Italy's poet-warlord: decadent novelist, war hero and demagogue who seized Fiume in 1919 and ruled it as a proto-fascist theatre-state. Mussolini borrowed the balcony speeches, the
14. 1507 Death of Cesare Borgia Stripped of his conquests after his father's death and escaped from a Spanish prison, Cesare dies fighting for his brother-in-law the King of Navarre, ambushed outside Viana.
15. 1948 Costa Rican Civil War José Figueres leads a 44-day rebellion after the annulled 1948 election — some 2,000 dead, the bloodiest event in modern Costa Rican history — and wins power at the head of a refor