These historical events took place on March 31st:
1736: Bellevue Hospital founded in a New York City almshouse the first public hospital in the United States.
1854: In the Treaty of Kanagawa, Commodore Perry forced Japan to open ports to the United States.
1861: Confederacy takes over mint at New Orleans in the United States Civil War.
1870: Thomas Mundy Peterson of Perth Amboy, New Jersey is the first African American to vote in the United States under provisions of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, in a local election on town’s charter.
1880: Wabash, Indiana is the first town to claim to be completely illuminated by electric lighting.
1917: The Danish West Indies are officially ceded to the United States for $25 million and renamed the Virgin Islands.
1930: The Motion Pictures Production Code is instituted, imposing strict guidelines on the treatment of sex, crime, religion and violence in film for the next 38 years.
1948: United States Congress passed the Marshall Aid Act to rehabilitate war-torn Europe.
1957: Rodgers & Hammerstein’s live television musical “Cinderella”, starring Julie Andrews, with Kaye Ballard and Alice Ghostley, premieres on CBS-TV.
1968: United States President Lyndon B. Johnson announces in an address to the nation that he will not seek re-election.
2019: Elton John joins George Clooney’s call to boycott hotels owned by the Sultan of Brunei after Brunei plans new anti-gay laws to make homosexual sex punishable by death.