March 6
1820: President James Monroe signed the Missouri Compromise, which allowed Missouri to join the Union as a slave state and Maine to join as a free state.
1836: The Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, fell as Mexican forces led by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna stormed the fortress after a 13-day siege; the battle claimed the lives of all the Texian defenders, including Davy Crockett.
1857: The U.S. Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, ruled that Scott, an enslaved person, was not an American citizen and therefore could not sue for his freedom in Federal court.
March 7
1876: Alexander Graham Bell received a U.S. patent for his telephone.
1965: A march by over 500 civil rights demonstrators was violently broken up at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in what became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
March 8
1917: Protests against food rationing broke out in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), triggering eight days of rioting that resulted in the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the end of the Russian monarchy.
1948: the Supreme Court, in McCollum v. Board of Education, struck down religious education classes during school hours in Champaign, Illinois, public schools, saying the program violated separation of church and state.
March 9
1841: The U.S. Supreme Court, in United States v. The Amistad, ruled 7-1 in favor of a group of illegally enslaved Africans who were captured off the U.S. coast after seizing control of a Spanish schooner, La Amistad.
1916: More than 400 Mexican raiders led by Pancho Villa (VEE’-uh) attacked Columbus, New Mexico.
1997: Rapper The Notorious B.I.G. (Christopher Wallace) was killed in a still-unsolved drive-by shooting in Los Angeles; he was 24.
March 10
1496: Christopher Columbus concluded his second visit to the Western Hemisphere as he left Hispaniola for Spain.
1864: President Abraham Lincoln assigned Ulysses S. Grant, who had just received his commission as lieutenant-general, to the command of the Armies of the United States.
1913: Former slave, abolitionist and Underground Railroad “conductor” Harriet Tubman died. She was in her 90s.
1969: James Earl Ray pleaded guilty to assassinating civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
March 11
1918: What were believed to be the first confirmed U.S. cases of a deadly global flu pandemic were reported among U.S. Army soldiers stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas.
1942: As Japanese forces continued to advance in the Pacific during World War II, U.S. Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur left the Philippines for Australia, where he vowed on March 20, “I shall return” — a promise he kept more than 2 1/2 years later.
March 12
1864: Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant assumed command as General-in-Chief of the Union armies in the Civil War.
1955: Legendary jazz musician Charlie “Bird” Parker died in New York at age 34.
1987: The musical play “Les Miserables” opened on Broadway.
2009: Disgraced financier Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty in New York to pulling off perhaps the biggest swindle in Wall Street history.
