March 13

The first foundation stone of the Ramakrishna Temple at Belur Math, headquarters of the Ramakrishna Order, was laid by its president Swami Shivananda near Kolkata.

Bruno Meissner, whose two-volume Babylonien und Assyrien synthesized what scholars then knew of Mesopotamian civilization, died in Zeuthen.

Kosho Uchiyama, Soto Zen abbot of Antai-ji and author of "Opening the Hand of Thought," died on this day in 1998.

The conclave elected Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, who took the name Francis, the first pope from the Americas.

From his garden in Bath, England, William Herschel noted a slow-moving object that proved to be Uranus, the first planet found with a telescope and the first discovered in recorded history.