TODAY IN HISTORY

1913: The 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving Congress the power to levy and collect income taxes, was declared in effect by Secretary of State Philander Chase Knox.

1919: Oregon became the first state to tax gasoline, at 1 cent per gallon.

1954: Gamal Abdel Nasser became Egypt’s prime minister after the country’s president, Mohammed Naguib, was effectively ousted in a coup.

1957: The Supreme Court, in Butler v. Michigan, overturned a Michigan statute making it a misdemeanor to sell books containing obscene language that would tend to corrupt “the morals of youth.”

1964: Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) became world heavyweight boxing champion as he defeated Sonny Liston in Miami Beach.

1973: The Stephen Sondheim musical “A Little Night Music” opened at Broadway’s Shubert Theater.

1986: President Ferdinand Marcos fled the Philippines after 20 years of rule in the wake of a tainted election; Corazon Aquino assumed the presidency.

1991: During the Persian Gulf War, 28 Americans were killed when an Iraqi Scud missile hit a U.S. barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

1994: American-born Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein opened fire with an automatic rifle inside the Tomb of the Patriarchs in the West Bank, killing 29 Muslims before he was beaten to death by worshippers.

2020: U.S. health officials warned that the coronavirus was certain to spread more widely in the United States; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged Americans to be prepared. President Donald Trump, speaking in India, said the virus was “very well under control” in the U.S.

2022: President Joe Biden nominated federal appeals court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, making her the first Black woman selected to serve on it. (She would be confirmed by the Senate on April 7.) Russian troops bore down on Ukraine’s capital, with gunfire and explosions resonating ever closer to the government quarter, in an invasion of a democratic country that fueled fears of wider war in Europe and triggered worldwide efforts to make Russia stop.