March 5
1770: The Boston Massacre occurred as British soldiers opened fire on a crowd of colonists, killing five people and fueling outrage leading up to the American Revolution.
1953: Soviet dictator Josef Stalin died from a stroke at age 74 after nearly three decades in power.
1982: Comedian John Belushi was found dead of a drug overdose; he was 33.
March 6
1857: In Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that Dred Scott was not a citizen and Congress could not ban slavery in federal territories, deepening pre-Civil War divisions.
1820: President James Monroe signed the Missouri Compromise, admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state while banning slavery north of 36°30′ in the Louisiana Territory.
1836: Mexican forces led by Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna captured the Alamo after a 13-day siege, killing all Texian defenders, including William Travis, James Bowie and Davy Crockett.
March 7
1876: Alexander Graham Bell received a U.S. patent for the telephone.
1936: Adolf Hitler ordered German troops into the demilitarized Rhineland, violating the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Treaties.
1965: More than 500 civil rights marchers were attacked by Alabama state troopers as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma 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 led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the end of the Russian monarchy in 1917.
1948: The Supreme Court, in McCollum v. Board of Education, struck down religious education classes held during school hours in Champaign, Illinois, public schools, ruling the program violated the separation of church and state.
1971: In the first of three bouts between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, Frazier defeated Ali by unanimous decision in the “Fight of the Century” at Madison Square Garden in New York.
March 9
1796: The future emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, married Joséphine de Beauharnais.
1841: The Supreme Court, in United States v. The Amistad ruled 7-1 that Africans who had seized control of the schooner La Amistad were illegally enslaved and must be freed.
1916: More than 400 Mexican raiders led by Pancho Villa attacked Columbus, New Mexico, killing 18 Americans.
March 10
1496: Christopher Columbus concluded his second voyage to the Western Hemisphere, departing Hispaniola for Spain.
1876: Thomas Watson heard Alexander Graham Bell say, “Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you,” the first words transmitted by telephone, in Bell’s Boston laboratory.
1959: Thousands of Tibetans revolted against Chinese forces in Lhasa, surrounding the Dalai Lama’s palace; he later fled to India, where he remains in exile.
March 11
1918: The first confirmed U.S. cases of the influenza pandemic were reported at Fort Riley, Kansas; the outbreak later killed an estimated 20 million to 40 million people worldwide.
1941: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act, providing war supplies to Allied nations during World War II.
1985: Mikhail Gorbachev was selected to succeed Konstantin Chernenko as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.
