THIS WEEK IN HISTORY
Sunday, March 3
1791: Congress passed a measure taxing distilled spirits; it was the first internal revenue act in U.S. history.
1931: “The Star-Spangled Banner” became the national anthem of the United States as President Herbert Hoover signed a congressional resolution.
1960: Lucille Ball filed for divorce from her husband, Desi Arnaz, a day after they had finished filming the last episode of “The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show.”
1991: Motorist Rodney King was severely beaten by Los Angeles police officers in a scene captured on amateur video.
2017: The Nintendo Switch, a hybrid game machine that works as both a console at home and a portable tablet on the go, made its debut.
Monday, March 4
1789: The Constitution of the United States went into effect as the first Federal Congress met in New York. (The lawmakers then adjourned for lack of a quorum.)
1917: Republican Jeannette Rankin of Montana took her seat as the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
1966: John Lennon of The Beatles was quoted in the London Evening Standard as saying, “We’re more popular than Jesus now,” a comment that caused an angry backlash in the United States. 1994: In New York, four extremists were convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people and injured more than a thousand.
1998: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that sexual harassment at work can be illegal even when the offender and victim are of the same gender.
2012: Vladimir Putin scored a decisive victory in Russia’s presidential election to return to the Kremlin and extend his hold on power.
Tuesday, March 5
1770: The Boston Massacre took place as British soldiers who’d been taunted by a crowd of colonists opened fire, killing five people.
1933: In German parliamentary elections, the Nazi Party won 44% of the vote; the Nazis joined with a conservative nationalist party to gain a slender majority in the Reichstag.
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.
2004: Martha Stewart was convicted in New York of obstructing justice and lying to the government about why she’d unloaded her Imclone stock just before the price plummeted; her exstockbroker, Peter Bacanovic, also was found guilty in the stock scandal. (Each later received a five-month prison sentence.)
2022: A promised cease-fire in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol collapsed amid scenes of terror in the besieged town. The number of people fleeing the country reached 1.4 million just 10 days after Russian forces invaded.
Wednesday, March 6
1834: The city of York in Upper Canada was incorporated as Toronto.
1836: The Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, fell as Mexican forces led by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna stormed the fortress after a 13-day siege; the battle claimed the lives of all the Texan defenders, nearly 200 strong, including William Travis, James Bowie and Davy Crockett.
1857: The U.S. Supreme Court, in Dred
Scott v. Sandford, ruled 7-2 that Scott, a slave, was not an American citizen and therefore could not sue for his freedom in federal court.
1912: Oreo sandwich cookies were first introduced by the National Biscuit Co. 1964: Heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay officially changed his name to Muhammad Ali.
1970: A bomb being built inside a Greenwich Village townhouse in New York by the radical Weathermen accidentally went off, destroying the house and killing three group members.
1998: The Army honored three Americans who’d risked their lives and turned their weapons on fellow soldiers to stop the slaughter of Vietnamese villagers at My Lai in 1968.
2002: Independent Counsel Robert Ray issued his final report in which he wrote that former President Bill Clinton could have been indicted and probably would have been convicted in the scandal involving former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
2022: A second attempt to evacuate Ukrainians from the besieged city of Mariupol collapsed as Russian attacks made it impossible to create a humanitarian corridor.
Thursday, March 7
1876: Alexander Graham Bell received a U.S. patent for his telephone.
1916: Bavarian Motor Works (BMW) had its beginnings in Munich, Germany, as an airplane engine manufacturer.
1926: The first successful trans-Atlantic radio-telephone conversations took place between New York and London. 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 became known as
“Bloody Sunday.”
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.
Friday, March 8
1618: German astronomer Johannes Kepler devised his third law of planetary motion.
1817: The New York Stock & Exchange Board, which had its beginnings in 1792, was formally organized; it later became known as the New York Stock Exchange.
1965: The United States landed its first combat troops in South Vietnam as 3,500 Marines arrived to defend the U.S. air base at Da Nang.
1971: In the first of three fights between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, Frazier defeated Ali by decision in what was billed as “The Fight of the Century” at Madison Square Garden in New York. 2014: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, a Boeing 777 with 239 people on board, vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, setting off a massive and ultimately unsuccessful search.
Saturday March 9
1945: During World War II, U.S. B-29 bombers began launching incendiary bomb attacks against Tokyo, resulting in an estimated 100,000 deaths.
1964: The U.S. Supreme Court, in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, raised the standard for public officials to prove they’d been libeled in their official capacity by news organizations.
1987: Chrysler Corp. announced it had agreed to buy the financially ailing American Motors Corp.
1997: Rapper The Notorious B.I.G. (Christopher Wallace) was killed in a still-unsolved drive-by shooting in Los Angeles at age 24.