TODAY IN HISTORY

On March 7, 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 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.”

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” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” died in Hertfordshire, England, at age 70.

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.