TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – MARCH 7
322 BC The Greek philosopher Aristotle dies.
161 On the death of Antoninus at Lorium, Marcus Aurelius becomes emperor.
1530 King Henry VIII’s divorce request is denied by the Pope. Henry then declares that he, not the Pope, is supreme head of England’s church.
1774 The British close the port of Boston to all commerce.
1799 In Palestine, Napoleon captures Jaffa and his men massacre more than 2,000 Albanian prisoners.
1847 U.S. General Winfield Scott occupies Vera Cruz, Mexico.
1850 Daniel Webster gave a three-hour speech endorsing the Compromise of 1850.
1876 Alexander Graham Bell is granted a patent for the telephone.
1904 In Springfield, OH, a mob broke into a jail and shot a black man accused of murder.
1906 Finland becomes the third country to give women the right to vote, decreeing universal suffrage for all citizens over 24, however, barring those persons who are supported by the state.
1911 In the wake of the Mexican Revolution, the U.S. sent 20,000 troops to the border of Mexico.
1927 A Texas law that bans Negroes from voting is ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
1933 The board game Monopoly is invented.
1933 The film King Kong premieres in New York City.
1951 U.N. forces in Korea under General Matthew Ridgeway launch Operation Ripper, an offensive to straighten out the U.N. front lines against the Chinese.
1961 The Senate authorized President Kennedy to restore the rank of five-star general to former President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
1965 Troopers with night sticks, shotguns and tear-gas grenades violently confronted 600 civil rights marchers during an attempted 50-mile march from Selma to the Alabama state capitol Montgomery.
1968 The Battle of Saigon, begun on the day of the Tet Offensive, ends.
1969 Israel elects Golda Meir, to become the first female prime minister of Israel.
1975 The U.S. Senate revised the filibuster rule. The new rule allowed 60 senators to limit debate instead of the previous two-thirds.
1977 Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin visits the United States for the first time and President and Mrs. Carter played host, the trip eventually led to the Camp David peace talks held between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Rabin’s replacement, Menachem Begin, in 1978
1981 Anti-government guerrillas in Colombia executed the kidnapped American Bible translator Chester Allen Bitterman. The guerrillas accused Bitterman of being a CIA agent.
1994 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that parodies that poke fun at an original work can be considered “fair use” that does not require permission from the copyright holder.
1996 Three U.S. servicemen are convicted in the rape of a 12-year-old Okinawa girl and sentenced by a Japanese court to seven years in prison.
1997 Steven Hoffen the former chief of Towers Financial Corps who had sold off vast sums of “worthless” Tower-backed bonds to unsuspecting investors is given a 20 year jail sentence and ordered to pay out $462 million in restitution to the innocent investors he swindled.
2004 V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire was invested as the first openly gay Episcopal Church bishop.
2006 The Defense Secretary has pointed out that the Iranian Qods Force has been infiltrating Iraq. ‘They [Iran] are currently putting people into Iraq to do things that are harmful to the future of Iraq,’ Rumsfeld said.
2010 A number of villages on the outskirt of Jos are attacked in a co-ordinated effort by Muslim extremeists, with more than 100 reported killed near the central Nigerian city of Jos
2014 The US state of Massachusetts passed a law that would outlaw “peeping Tom” photos. The law came after a court ruled that a man who had been taking up-skirt photos of public transportation passengers had not broken the law.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
