On March 7th, 1965, a march by civil rights demonstrators was broken up in Selma, Alabama, by state troopers and a sheriff's posse.
On this date:
In 1849, horticulturist Luther Burbank was born in Lancaster, Massachusetts.
In 1850, in a 3-hour speech to the U.S. Senate, Daniel Webster endorsed the Compromise of 1850 as a means of preserving the Union.
In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for his telephone.
In 1908, Italian actress Anna Magnani was born in Rome.
In 1926, the first successful trans-Atlantic radio-telephone conversations took place, between New York and London.
In 1936, Adolf Hitler ordered his troops to march into the Rhineland, thereby breaking the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact.
In 1945, during World War II, U.S. forces crossed the Rhine River at Remagen, Germany, using the damaged but still usable Ludendorff Bridge.
In 1975, the Senate revised its filibuster rule, allowing 60 senators to limit debate in most cases, instead of the previously required two-thirds of senators present.
In 1981, anti-government guerrillas in Colombia executed kidnapped American Bible translator Chester Allen Bitterman, whom they accused of being a CIA agent.
In 1999, movie director Stanley Kubrick died in Hertfordshire, England, at age 70.
