March 17 · This Day in America
At dawn the redcoats look up at Dorchester Heights and see something that was not there a few mornings ago: American cannon, hauled three hundred miles from Ticonderoga over frozen ground, staring straight down their throats. The admiral warns the fleet will be shot to pieces. General Howe makes the only choice left. On March 17, some 170 ships carry away 8,906 troops, 1,100 loyalists, and 553 children, leaving £30,000 in abandoned supplies behind them. The eleven-month siege is over. Washington's ragtag army — no navy, little powder, less training — has just made the most powerful military on earth turn around and leave. It is the first great American victory of the war, won without a battle. Boston, hungry and battered, is free. The continent is watching, and it has just learned this fight can be won.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1958
The Naval Research Laboratory lofts a grapefruit-sized aluminum sphere, just 3.25 pounds, into orbit. Vanguard 1 is the first satellite powered by the sun. Its radio fell silent in 1964, but the little sphere kept going — and going. It is still up there, the oldest human-made object in space, quietly circling a world that has changed beneath it for nearly seventy years.
Source: nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov