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On March 19, 2003, the US and United Kingdom launched the invasion of Iraq with "Operation Iraqi Freedom", arguing that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction. The weapons were never found. Within three weeks, the American army had taken Baghdad. However, the occupation extended for years in a conflict that killed more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians and destabilised the entire Middle East.

On March 19, 1821, poet John Keats died in Rome at age 25 from tuberculosis, so young that he doubted his work would survive. Yet poems such as "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci" made him one of the greats of English Romanticism. He is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome alongside Percy Bysshe Shelley.

On March 19, 1279, the Battle of Yamen ended the Song Dynasty of China — the last Chinese resistance to the Mongol conquest. According to legend, when the Song fleet was defeated, minister Lu Xiufu leapt into the sea carrying the last child emperor in his arms rather than be captured. Kublai Khan's Mongols thus unified all of China under the Yuan Dynasty.