TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Saturday, March 7.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

On March 7, 1965, a march by civil rights demonstrators was violently broken up at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, by state troopers and a sheriff ’s posse in what came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”

ON THIS DATE

In 1793, during the French Revolutionary Wars, France declared war on Spain.

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell received a U.S. patent for his telephone.

In 1911, President William Howard Taft ordered 20,000 troops to patrol the U.S.Mexico border in response to the Mexican Revolution.

In 1912, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen arrived in Hobart, Australia, where he dispatched telegrams announcing his success in leading the first expedition to the South Pole the previous December.

In 1926, the first successful trans-Atlantic radiotelephone conversations took place between New York and London.

In 1936, Adolf Hitler ordered his troops to march into the Rhineland, thereby breaking the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact.

In 1945, during World War II, U.S. forces crossed the Rhine at Remagen, Germany, using the damaged but still usable Ludendorff Bridge.

In 1975, the U.S. Senate revised its filibuster rule, allowing 60 senators to limit debate in most cases, instead of the previously required two-thirds of senators present.

In 1994, the U.S. Navy issued its first permanent orders assigning women to regular duty on a combat ship — in this case, the USS Eisenhower.

In 1999, movie director Stanley Kubrick, whose films included “Dr. Strangelove,” ”A Clockwork Orange” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” died in Hertfordshire, England, at age 70, having just finished editing “Eyes Wide Shut.”

In 2001, Ariel Sharon was sworn in as Israel’s prime minister, serving until he suffered a stroke in 2006.

In 2005, President George W. Bush nominated John Bolton to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, an appointment that ran into Democratic opposition, prompting Bush to make a recess appointment.

Ten years ago: Iraq held an election in which neither the Sunni-backed coalition nor the Shiite political bloc won a majority, spawning an eight-month deadlock and stalling formation of a new government.

Five years ago: President Barack Obama joined tens of thousands of people in Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” march of 1965, saying that America’s racial history “still casts its long shadow upon us.” Nigeria’s home-grown Boko Haram Islamic extremists pledged formal allegiance to the Islamic State group as they battled a multinational force that had dislodged them from a number of towns in the north.

One year ago: Longtime Colombo crime family boss Carmine “The Snake” Persico died at the age of 85 at the Duke University Medical Center; he’d been serving what was effectively a life sentence at a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was sentenced in Virginia to nearly four years in prison for tax and bank fraud related to his work advising Ukrainian politicians; a federal judge in Washington a week later added three and a-half years to that sentence.

THOUGHT FOR TODAY

“In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste, but in its effects.” — J. William Fulbright, U.S. senator (1905-1995).

— ASSOCIATED PRESS