THIS WEEK IN HISTORY
Sunday, March 10
1876: Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant, Thomas Watson, heard Bell say over his experimental telephone: “Mr. Watson – come here – I want to see you” from the next room of Bell’s Boston laboratory.
1913: Former slave, abolitionist and Underground Railroad “conductor” Harriet Tubman died in Auburn, New York; she was in her 90s.
1969: James Earl Ray pleaded guilty in Memphis, Tennessee, to assassinating civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (Ray later repudiated that plea, maintaining his innocence until his death.) 2021: The House gave final congressional approval to a landmark $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill against the opposition of Republicans, while the Senate confirmed Merrick Garland to be U.S. attorney general with a strong bipartisan vote.
Monday, March 11
1918: What were believed to be the first confirmed U.S. cases of a deadly global flu pandemic were reported among U.S. Army soldiers stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas; 46 soldiers would die. (The worldwide outbreak of influenza claimed an estimated 20 million to 40 million lives.)
1942: As Japanese forces continued to advance in the Pacific during World War II, U.S. Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur left the Philippines for Australia, where he vowed on March 20, “I shall return” – a promise he kept more than 21⁄ years later.
1985: Mikhail S. Gorbachev was chosen to succeed the late Konstantin U. Chernenko as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.
2012: U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales shot and killed 16 Afghan villagers – mostly women and children – as they slept; Bales later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
2013: Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was convicted of a raft of crimes, including racketeering conspiracy (he was later sentenced to 28 years in prison).
2020: The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. Former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was sentenced in New York to 23 years in prison for rape and sexual abuse.
Tuesday, March 12
1864: Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant assumed command as General-in-Chief of the Union armies in the Civil War.
1912: The Girl Scouts of the USA had its beginnings as Juliette Gordon Low of Savannah, Georgia, founded the first American troop of the Girl Guides.
1955: Legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker died in New York at age 34.
1980: A Chicago jury found John Wayne Gacy Jr. guilty of the murders of 33 men and boys. (The next day, Gacy was sentenced to death; he was executed in May 1994.)
1987: The musical play “Les Miserables” opened on Broadway.
2003: Elizabeth Smart, the 15-year-old girl who vanished from her bedroom nine months earlier, was found alive in a Salt Lake City suburb with two drifters, Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Barzee. (Mitchell is serving a life sentence; Barzee was released from prison in September 2018.)
2009: Disgraced financier Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty in New York to pulling off perhaps the biggest swindle in Wall Street history; he would be sentenced to 150 years behind bars. (Madoff died in prison in April 2021.)
2021: The city of Minneapolis agreed to pay $27 million to settle a civil lawsuit from George Floyd’s family over the Black man’s death in police custody.
Wednesday, March 13
1781: The seventh planet of the solar system, Uranus, was discovered by Sir William Herschel.
1925: The Tennessee General Assembly approved a bill prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution. (Gov. Austin Peay signed the measure on March 21; Tennessee repealed the law in 1967.) 1946: U.S. Army Pfc. Sadao Munemori was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for sacrificing himself to save fellow soldiers from a grenade explosion in Seravezza, Italy; he was the only Japanese-American service member so recognized in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
2013: Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina was elected pope, choosing the name Francis. He was the first pontiff from the Americas and the first from outside Europe in more than a millennium. 2020: Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman, was fatally shot in her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, during a botched raid by plainclothes narcotics detectives; no drugs were found, and the “no-knock” warrant used to enter by force was later found to be flawed.
Thursday, March 14
1879: Albert Einstein, who would revolutionize physics and the human understanding of the universe, was born in Ulm, Germany.
1939: The republic of Czechoslovakia was dissolved, opening the way for Nazi occupation of Czech areas and the separation of Slovakia.
1964: A jury in Dallas found Jack Ruby guilty of murdering Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy, and sentenced him to death. (Both the conviction and death sentence were overturned, but Ruby died before he could be retried.)
1995: American astronaut Norman Thagard became the first American to enter space aboard a Russian rocket as he and two cosmonauts blasted off aboard a Soyuz spacecraft, headed for the Mir space station.
2018: Stephen Hawking, the bestknown theoretical physicist of his time, died at his home in Cambridge, England, at the age of 76; he had stunned doctors by living with the normally fatal illness ALS for more than 50 years.
Friday, March 15
44 B.C.: Roman dictator Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of nobles that included Brutus and Cassius.
1917: Czar Nicholas II abdicated in favor of his brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, who declined the crown, marking the end of imperial rule in Russia.
1919: Members of the American Expeditionary Force from World War I convened in Paris for a three-day meeting to found the American Legion.
1965: President Lyndon B. Johnson, addressing a joint session of Congress, called for new legislation to guarantee every American’s right to vote; the result was passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
1972: “The Godfather,” Francis Ford Coppola’s epic gangster movie based on the Mario Puzo novel and starring Marlon Brando and Al Pacino, premiered in New York.
2011: The Syrian civil war had its beginnings with Arab Spring protests across the region that turned into an armed insurgency and eventually became a full-blown conflict.
2023: The American Kennel Club announced that the French bulldog had become the most popular breed in the U.S., overtaking the Labrador retriever, which had been on top for more than three decades.
Saturday, March 16
1521: Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan and his crew reached the Philippines, where Magellan was killed during a battle with natives the following month.
1802: President Thomas Jefferson signed a measure authorizing the establishment of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York.
1935: Adolf Hitler decided to break the military terms set by the Treaty of Versailles by ordering the rearming of Germany.
1945: During World War II, American forces declared they had secured Iwo Jima, although pockets of Japanese resistance remained.
1968: The My Lai massacre took place during the Vietnam War as U.S. Army soldiers hunting for Viet Cong fighters and sympathizers killed unarmed villagers in two hamlets of Son My village; estimates of the death toll vary from 347 to 504. Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.
1972: In a nationally broadcast address, President Richard Nixon called for a moratorium on court-ordered school busing to achieve racial desegregation. 1994: Figure skater Tonya Harding pleaded guilty in Portland, Oregon, to conspiracy to hinder prosecution for covering up an attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan, avoiding jail but drawing a $100,000 fine.
2004: China declared victory in its fight against bird flu, saying it had “stamped out” all its known cases.
2014: Crimeans voted to leave Ukraine and join Russia, overwhelmingly approving a referendum that sought to unite the strategically important Black Sea region with the country it was part of for some 250 years.