Wikipedia:Main Page history/2016 March 28

The 139th Boat Race took place on 27 March 1993. Held annually, the Boat Race is a side-by-side rowing race between crews from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge along the River Thames. Cambridge, using "cleaver blades" for the first time in the history of the race, won by three-and-a-half lengths in a victory that was described in The Times as "crushingly conclusive". The winning time of 17 minutes exactly was the fourth fastest time in the event. Cambridge's victory prevented what would have been Oxford's seventeenth win out of the last eighteen races, which would have levelled the overall score for the first time since the 1929 race. Oxford's crew featured two Olympic gold medallists and saw changes in their rowers and cox in the lead-up to the event. The race was umpired by the former Oxford Blue Mark Evans, who controversially instigated changes to the start procedure of the race. In the reserve race, Cambridge's Goldie defeated Oxford's Isis, while Cambridge won the Women's Boat Race. (Full article...)

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March 28: Teachers' Day in the Czech Republic; Serfs Emancipation Day in Tibet

• 193 – Praetorian Guards assassinated Roman emperor Pertinax and sold the throne in an auction to Didius Julianus.
• 1802 – German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers (pictured) discovered 2 Pallas, the second asteroid known to man.
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• 1930 – Turkey changed the name of its largest city Constantinople to Istanbul.
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One of nine extant copies (all damaged by water and rodents while in storage) of the Waitangi sheet of the Treaty of Waitangi, first signed on 6 February 1840 by representatives of the British Crown and various Māori chiefs from the North Island of New Zealand. Consequently, Lieutenant Governor William Hobson declared British sovereignty over New Zealand in May 1840. The treaty also established a British Governor of New Zealand; recognised Māori ownership of their lands, forests, and other properties; and gave the Māori the rights of British subjects. In return the Māori people ceded New Zealand to Queen Victoria, giving her government the sole right to purchase land. Owing to significant difference in the English and Māori versions, there was no consensus regarding governance. The courts long ignored the treaty, but in 1975 the Waitangi Tribunal was established as a permanent commission of inquiry tasked with researching British breaches of it, and suggesting means of redress.

Document: William Hobson, James Freeman, and James Busby (English version); Henry Williams and Edward Williams (Māori translation)

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