Today in History
Today’s highlight:
On 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.
On this date:
1766: Antonio de Ulloa arrived in New Orleans to assume his duties as the first Spanish governor of the Louisiana Territory, where he encountered resistance from the French residents.
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.
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.
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.”
1953: Soviet dictator Josef Stalin died after three decades in power.
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.
1982: Comedian John Belushi was found dead of a drug overdose in a rented bungalow in Hollywood; he was 33.
1983: Country Music Television, CMT, made its debut with the video “It’s Four in the Morning,” performed by Faron Young.
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.
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.
2003: In a blunt warning to the United States and Britain, the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Russia said they would block any attempt to get U.N. approval for war against Iraq.
Ten years ago: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, visiting Guatemala, told reporters that demand for narcotics in the United States was fueling drug violence in Central America as she acknowledged a measure of U.S. responsibility for what she called “a terrible criminal scourge.”
Five years ago: Convicted murderer Jodi Arias was spared the death penalty as a jury in Phoenix voted 11-1 in favor of execution — not enough to send Arias to death row for the slaying of her lover, Travis Alexander.
One year ago: The Santa Anita race course in southern California canceled racing indefinitely to re-examine its dirt surface after the deaths of 21 horses in the preceding two months; the track would remain closed for racing for nearly a month.