This day in history
Today is Friday, March 8, the 68th day of 2024. There are 298 days left in the year.
Birthdays: Jazz saxophonist George Coleman is 89. Actor Sue Ane Langdon is 88. College Football Hall of Famer Pete Dawkins is 86. Songwriter Carole Bayer Sager is 80. Actor-director Micky Dolenz of The Monkees is 79. Pop singer Peggy March is 76. Red Sox Hall of Famer Jim Rice is 71. Jazz pianist Billy Childs is 67. Singer Gary Numan is 66. NBC News anchor Lester Holt is 65. Actor Aidan Quinn is 65. Actor Camryn Manheim is 63. Actor Leon is 63. Country-rock singer Shawn Mullins is 56. Neo-soul singer Van Hunt is 54. Actor Freddie Prinze Jr. is 48. Actor James Van Der Beek is 47. R&B singer Kameelah Williams of 702 is 46. Rock singer Tom Chaplin of Keane is 45. Rock musician Andy Ross of OK Go is 45.
▶In 1618, German astronomer Johannes Kepler devised his third law of planetary motion.
▶250 years ago, the Massachusetts General Court sent to the colonial governor legislation it passed that called for a ban on the importation of enslaved people to the colony. The bill, stemming from a petition of enslaved Bostonians that sought their emancipation, was not acted upon; Governor Thomas Hutchinson disbanded the legislative body the next day amid revolutionary hostilities.
▶In 1817, the New York Stock Exchange Board, which had its beginnings in 1792, was formally organized; it later became known as the New York Stock Exchange.
▶In 1841, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Supreme Court justice, was born in Boston.
▶In 1870, Sophie Smith, the last of a wealthy generation of farmers in Hatfield, willed that her fortune be used to establish a women’s college. She would become the first woman to endow a woman’s college, and Smith College, in Northampton, would become one of the leading liberal arts colleges in the Northeast.
▶In 1948, the Supreme Court, in McCollum v. Board of Education, struck down voluntary religious education classes in Champaign, Ill., public schools, saying the program violated the separation of church and state.
▶In 1965, the United States landed its first combat troops in South Vietnam as 3,500 Marines arrived to defend the US air base at Da Nang.
▶In 1971, in the first of three fights between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, Frazier defeated Ali by decision in what was billed as “The Fight of the Century” at Madison Square Garden in New York.
▶In 1983, in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals convention in Orlando, President Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.”
▶In 2000, President Clinton submitted to Congress legislation to establish permanent normal trade relations with China. (The US and China signed a trade pact in November 2000.)
▶In 2004, Iraq’s Governing Council signed a landmark interim constitution.
▶In 2008, President George W. Bush vetoed a bill that would have banned the CIA from using simulated drowning and other coercive interrogation methods to gain information from suspected terrorists.
▶In 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, a Boeing 777 with 239 people on board, vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, setting off a massive and ultimately unsuccessful search.
▶In 2022, President Biden announced that the US would ban all Russian oil imports, toughening the toll on Russia’s economy in retaliation for its invasion of Ukraine as a humanitarian crisis unfolded in the port city of Mariupol.