On This Day

Today in History, March 28th

On March 28, 1979, a partial meltdown struck Three Mile Island. Plus the Wong Kim Ark ruling and the fall of Madrid in 1939.

By Today in History Updated November 10, 2026 3 min read Sources checked

Published March 28, 2026 · Last updated November 10, 2026

March 28 is best known for the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, the most serious in U.S. commercial nuclear power history. The date also saw the Supreme Court’s 1898 birthright citizenship ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark and the fall of Madrid that ended the Spanish Civil War in 1939.

The big story: The Three Mile Island Accident (1979)

At about 4 a.m. on Wednesday, March 28, 1979, something went wrong in the non-nuclear side of Unit 2 at Three Mile Island, near Middletown, Pennsylvania. The main feedwater pumps stopped, and the reactor shut itself down as designed. Then a relief valve stuck open. A light in the control room said it was closed, so operators had no idea cooling water was pouring out. Confusing gauges made things worse, the core was left uncovered, and part of it melted. The radiation that escaped was small. Federal regulators later estimated that the roughly 2 million people nearby got an average dose of about 1 millirem, less than a chest X-ray, and studies found no detectable health effects. The political fallout was much bigger. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission rewrote rules on plant equipment, operator training and emergency planning, and put resident inspectors at every plant. The industry created its own watchdog, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. Unit 2 never ran again.

More events on March 28

Year	What happened
1834	The U.S. Senate, led by Henry Clay, censured President Andrew Jackson for refusing to hand over cabinet papers on his war against the Bank of the United States. Jackson’s allies had the censure expunged in 1837.
1854	Britain and France declared war on Russia, siding with the Ottoman Empire in what became the Crimean War.
1862	Union troops turned back a Confederate invasion of New Mexico Territory at the Battle of Glorieta Pass.
1898	The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that a child born in the country to Chinese parents was a citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment.
1930	The Turkish city long known to the West as Constantinople officially took the name Istanbul.
1939	Republican defenders of Madrid surrendered to Francisco Franco’s Nationalists, effectively ending the Spanish Civil War. Franco declared the war over a few days later.
1969	Dwight D. Eisenhower, World War II commander and 34th U.S. president, died in Washington, D.C., at 78.
2005	A magnitude 8.6 earthquake struck off northern Sumatra, Indonesia, killing more than 1,300 people, most of them on the island of Nias.
2025	A magnitude 7.7 earthquake hit central Myanmar near Mandalay at midday, killing thousands. It was felt up to about 2,000 kilometers away.

Born on March 28

1592: John Amos Comenius, Czech educational reformer whose language textbooks were used across Europe.
1936: Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian novelist who won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature.
1986: Lady Gaga (Stefani Germanotta), American singer-songwriter behind “Bad Romance” and “Born This Way.”