MOMENTS IN TIME

• On March 27, 1912, in Washington, D.C., the wife of President William Taft and the wife of the Japanese ambassador plant two Yoshina cherry trees near the Jefferson Memorial. After World War II, cuttings from the trees were sent back to Japan to restore the Tokyo collection that was decimated by American bombing attacks during the war.

• On March 28, 1979, the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry begins when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at the Three Mile Island plant near Harrisburg, Pa., fails to close. As engineers struggled to understand what had happened, the reactor came within less than an hour of a complete meltdown.

• On March 29, 1927, Major Henry O'Neil de Hane Segrave becomes the first person to break the 200-mph barrier. Driving a 1,000 horsepower Mystery Sunbeam, Segrave averaged 203.79 mph on the course at Daytona Beach.

• On March 30, 1820, Anna Sewell, author of "Black Beauty," is born in Norfolk, England. "Black Beauty," first published in 1877, was the first significant children's story in the English language to focus on animal characters and was made into a movie at least three times.

• On March 31, 1889, the Eiffel Tower is dedicated in Paris. At 984 feet tall, the Eiffel Tower remained the world's tallest man-made structure until the completion of the Chrysler Building in New York in 1930.

• On April 1, 1700, English pranksters begin popularizing the annual tradition of playing April Fool's jokes. In keeping with the fun in 1957, the BBC reported that Swiss farmers were experiencing a record spaghetti crop and showed footage of people harvesting noodles from trees.

• On April 2, 1917, Jeannette Pickering Rankin, the first woman ever elected to Congress, takes her seat in the U.S. Capitol as a representative from Montana. The same day, President Wilson urged a declaration of war against Germany. Rankin was one of only 50 representatives who voted against the declaration.