Today in history

In 1530, Pope Clement VII threatened to excommunicate England's King Henry VIII if he went through with plans to marry Anne Boleyn, who became Henry's second wife after Catherine of Aragon. (The pope made good on his excommunication threat in 1533.)

In 1850, in a three-hour speech to the U.S. Senate, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts endorsed the Compromise of 1850 as a means of preserving the Union.

In 1945, during World War

II, U.S. forces crossed the Rhine at Remagen, Germany, using the damaged but still usable Ludendorff Bridge.

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

In 1967, the musical “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” based on the “Peanuts” comic strips by Charles M. Schulz, opened

in New York’s Greenwich Village.

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 1981, anti-government guerrillas in Colombia executed kidnapped American Bible translator Chester Bitterman, whom they accused of being a CIA agent.