TODAY IN HISTORY

THURSDAY MAR 10, 2022

1496

Christopher Columbus concluded his second visit to the Western Hemisphere as he left Hispaniola for Spain.

1785

Thomas Jefferson was appointed America’s minister to France, succeeding Benjamin Franklin.

1864

President Abraham Lincoln assigned Ulysses S. Grant, who had just received his commission as lieutenantgeneral, to the command of the Armies of the United States.

1876

Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant, Thomas Watson, heard Bell say over his experimental telephone: “Mr. Watson — come here _ I want to see you” from the next room of Bell’s Boston laboratory.

1913

Former slave, abolitionist and Underground Railroad “conductor” Harriet Tubman died in Auburn, New York; she was in her 90s.

1969

James Earl Ray pleaded guilty in Memphis, Tennessee, to assassinating civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (Ray later repudiated that plea, maintaining his innocence until his death.

1988

Pop singer Andy Gibb died in Oxford, England, at age 30 of heart inflammation.

2015

Breaking her silence in the face of a growing controversy over her use of a private email address and server, Hillary Rodham Clinton conceded that she should have used government email as secretary of state but insisted she had not violated any federal laws or Obama administration rules.

2019

A Boeing 737 Max 8 operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed shortly after taking off from the capital, Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board; the crash was similar to one in October 2018 in which a 737 Max 8 flown by Indonesia’s Lion Air plunged into the Java Sea minutes after takeoff, killing all 189 people on the plane.

2020

Clusters of the coronavirus swelled on both U.S. coasts, with more than 70 cases linked to a biotech conference in Boston and infections turning up at 10nursing homes in the Seattle area. Members of a choir in Washington state gathered for a rehearsal that was later found to have been a superspreader event; disease trackers said a choir member with coronavirus symptoms attended, and 52 of the 60 others who were there got sick with confirmed or probable COVID-19, including two who died.