This Day in History

On March 5, 1963, country music performers Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins died in the crash of their plane, a Piper Comanche, near Camden, Tennessee, along with pilot Randy Hughes (Cline’s manager).

On this date:

In 1770, the Boston Massacre took place as British soldiers who’d been taunted by a crowd of colonists opened fire, killing five people.

In 1868, the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson began in the U.S. Senate, with Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presiding. Johnson, the first U.S. president to be impeached, was accused of “high crimes and misdemeanors” stemming from his attempt to fire Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton; the trial ended on May 26 with Johnson’s acquittal.

In 1933, in German parliamentary elections, the Nazi Party won 44 percent of the vote; the Nazis joined with a conservative nationalist party to gain a slender majority in the Reichstag.

In 1946, Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in which he said: “From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an ‘iron curtain’ has descended across the continent, allowing police governments to rule Eastern Europe.”

In 1953, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin died after three decades in power. Composer Sergei Prokofiev died in Moscow at age 61.

In 1955, Elvis Presley made his television debut on “Louisiana Hayride,” carried by KSLA-TV Shreveport.

In 1966, BOAC Flight 911, a Boeing 707, crashed into Japan’s Mount Fuji after breaking up in severe turbulence; all 124 people on board were killed.

In 1970, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons went into effect after 43 nations ratified it.

In 1982, comedian John Belushi was found dead of a drug overdose in a rented bungalow in Hollywood; he was 33.

In 1998, NASA scientists said enough water was frozen in the loose soil of the moon to support a lunar base and perhaps, one day, a human colony.

In 2002, President George W. Bush slapped punishing tariffs of eight to 30 percent on several types of imported steel in an effort to aid the ailing U.S. industry.