Today is Monday, March 17, the 76th day of 2014. There are 289 days left in the year. This is St. Patrick’s Day.

Today’s highlight:

On March 17, 1776, British forces evacuated Boston during the Revolutionary War.

On this date:

In 1762, New York’s first St. Patrick’s Day parade took place.

In 1861, Victor Emmanuel II was proclaimed the first king of a united Italy.

In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt first likened crusading journalists to a man with “the muckrake in his hand” in a speech to the Gridiron Club in Washington.

In 1912, the Camp Fire Girls organization was incorporated in Washington, D.C., two years to the day after it was founded in Thetford, Vt. (The group is now known as Camp Fire USA.)

In 1943, the Taoiseach of Ireland, Eamon de Valera, delivered a radio speech about “The Ireland That We Dreamed Of.”

In 1950, scientists at the University of California at Berkeley announced they had created a new radioactive element, “californium.”

In 1959, the Dalai Lama fled Tibet for India in the wake of a failed uprising by Tibetans against Chinese rule.

In 1966, a U.S. midget submarine located a missing hydrogen bomb which had fallen from an American bomber into the Mediterranean off Spain.

In 1969, Golda Meir became prime minister of Israel.

In 1970, the United States cast its first veto in the U.N. Security Council. (The U.S. killed a resolution that would have condemned Britain for failure to use force to overthrow the white-ruled government of Rhodesia.)

In 1973, U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm, a freed prisoner of the Vietnam War, was joyously greeted by his family at Travis Air Force Base in California in a scene captured in a Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photograph.

In 1988, Avianca Flight 410, a Boeing 727, crashed after takeoff into a mountain in Colombia, killing all 143 people on board.

Ten years ago: A car bomb tore apart the five-story Mount Lebanon Hotel catering to foreigners in the heart of Baghdad, killing seven people. Charles A. McCoy Jr., suspected in a series of highway shootings in central Ohio, was arrested in Las Vegas. (McCoy later pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the death of Gail Knisley plus 10 other charges and was sentenced to 27 years in prison.) Former MTV personality John “J.J.” Jackson died in Los Angeles at age 62.

Five years ago: U.S. journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee were detained by North Korea while reporting on North Korean refugees living across the border in China. (Both were convicted of entering North Korea illegally and were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor; both were freed in August 2009 after former President Bill Clinton met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.) The Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its final print edition.

One year ago: Two members of Steubenville, Ohio’s celebrated high school football team were found guilty of raping a drunken 16-year-old girl and sentenced to at least a year in juvenile prison in a case that rocked the Rust Belt city of 18,000. Former Oklahoma quarterback Steve Davis, 60, who’d led the Sooners to back-to-back national championships in the 1970s, was killed in a private plane crash in northern Indiana. Louisville earned the top overall seed in the NCAA tournament after a topsy-turvy season in college basketball.

Associated Press