From the archives of History.com…
- On March 7, 1965, in Selma, Alabama, a 600-person civil rights demonstration ends in violence when marchers are attacked and beaten by white state troopers and sheriff’s deputies. The day's events became known as "Bloody Sunday." The demonstrators—led by civil rights activists John Lewis …Continue reading
- On March 7, 2010, Kathryn Bigelow becomes the first woman to win an Academy Award for best director, for her movie “The Hurt Locker,” about an American bomb squad that disables explosives in Iraq in 2004. Prior to Bigelow, only three women had been nominated for a best director Oscar: Lina …Continue reading
- On March 7, 1862, Union forces under General Samuel Curtis clash with the army of General Earl Van Dorn at the Battle of Pea Ridge (also called the Battle of Elkhorn Tavern),in northwest Arkansas. The following day, the battle ended in defeat for the Confederates. Pea Ridge was part of a larger …Continue reading
- On March 7, 1999, American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick dies in Hertfordshire, England, at the age of 70. One of the most acclaimed film directors of the 20th century, Kubrick’s 13 feature films explored the dark side of human nature. Born in New York City in 1928, Kubrick took up photography in high …Continue reading
- Nazi leader Adolf Hitler violates the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact by sending German military forces into the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone along the Rhine River in western Germany. The Treaty of Versailles, signed in July 1919—eight months after the guns fell silent in World War …Continue reading
- On March 7, 1876, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for his revolutionary new invention: the telephone. The Scottish-born Bell worked in London with his father, Melville Bell, who developed Visible Speech, a written system used to teach speaking to the deaf. In the 1870s, the …Continue reading
- In the heaviest air raids since the bombing began in February 1965, U.S. Air Force and Navy planes fly an estimated 200 sorties against North Vietnam. The objectives of the raids included an oil storage area 60 miles southeast of Dien Bien Phu and a staging area 60 miles northwest of Vinh.Continue reading
- The New Republic publishes Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The poem, beginning with the famous line “Whose woods these are, I think I know. His house is in the village though,” has introduced millions of American students to poetry. Like most of Frost’s poetry, …Continue reading
- After rejecting what the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) said was a final offer, representatives of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) called a strike for all the union’s members to begin at 9 a.m. Pacific Time on March 7, 1988. The origins of the strike went back to …Continue reading
- The defense rests in the trial of Andrea Yates, a 37-year-old Texas woman who confessed to killing her five young children by drowning them in a bathtub. Less than a week later, on March 13, Yates was convicted and sentenced to life in prison; however, her conviction was later reversed. Andrea Pia …Continue reading
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Topics in the news around this time of year…
- On November 17, 1989, nine days after the fall of the Berlin Wall roughly 200 miles to the north, students gather en masse in Prague, Czechoslovakia to protest the communist regime. The demonstration sets off what will become known as the Velvet Revolution, the non-violent toppling of the …Continue reading
- On November 14, 1960, a court order mandating the desegregation of schools comes into effect in New Orleans, Louisiana. Six-year-old Ruby Bridges walks into William Frantz Elementary School, accompanied by federal marshals and taunted by angry crowds, instantly becoming a symbol of the civil rights …Continue reading
- A celebration that has persisted for over a century receives its first official recognition on June 7, 1979, as the Texas Legislature passes a bill declaring Juneteenth a state holiday. The annual June 19 celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation—not the announcement itself, but the arrival …Continue reading
- On May 5, 1921, a date of symbolic importance to its iconic creator, the perfume Chanel No. 5 officially debuts in Coco Chanel’s boutique on the Rue Cambon in Paris. The new fragrance immediately revolutionized the perfume industry and remained popular for a century. Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel was the …Continue reading
- On November 13, 2020, veteran front-office official Kim Ng breaks several glass ceilings simultaneously when she is named General Manager of the Miami Marlins. Ng is the first woman and first person of East Asian descent to lead a Major League Baseball front office, as well as the first female GM …Continue reading
- On March 12, 2020, after New York state and city leaders placed coronavirus-related restrictions on gatherings of more than 500 people, the Broadway theater district announces it will go dark for an unprecedented 32 days. The longest shutdown for the artistic mainstay in its history, the closure …Continue reading
- In a primetime Oval Office address, President Donald Trump announces a 30-day travel ban on foreign travel to the U.S. from most European countries as COVID-19 cases surge across the globe. Trump's TV address came the same day the World Health Organization officially declared the disease a …Continue reading
- Tugboats guide ships many times their size in and out of the Panama Canal.Continue reading
- Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, is shot dead by a white father and son while out for a jog in a suburb of Brunswick, Georgia on February 23, 2020. On May 7, following the release of a video of the killing that spurred national attention from the media, civil rights groups, lawmakers, …Continue reading
- The Mexican-American labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez dedicated his life’s work to what he called la causa (the cause): the struggle of farm workers in the United States to improve their working and living conditions through organizing and negotiating contracts with their …Continue reading
Stories in the news…
- The 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was the worst nuclear event since the meltdown at Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union 25 years prior. It started with an earthquake. It resulted in 465,000 evacuations, $360 billion in economic losses and increased radiation levels in …Continue reading
- When Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali faced each other in the ring on March 8, 1971, the world stopped to watch. Dubbed “the Fight of the Century,” the clash sold out Madison Square Garden in New York City, grossed $45 million in tickets at closed-circuit venues in the United States alone, and was …Continue reading
- When Southern rebels bombarded Fort Sumter in South Carolina in April 1861, it was the start of a war between the Union and the secessionist Confederate States of America that would stretch on for four bloody years. The war took a brutal toll. According to statistics compiled by the National Park …Continue reading
- The unlikely band of American women who crossed the Atlantic into war-torn France in February 1918 included six doctors, 13 nurses, a dentist, a plumber, an electrician, a carpenter and a mechanic. They were the first wave of women determined to build hospitals to treat the war-wounded and help the …Continue reading
- In March 1942, an American codebreaker named Elizebeth Smith Friedman made a horrifying discovery: Nazi spies in Latin America had located a large Allied supply ship named the Queen Mary along the coast of Brazil, and German U-boats were planning to sink it. So intent was Adolf Hitler on destroying …Continue reading
- Old Norse literature about Vikings is filled with famous last stands, audacious last words, death songs and defiance. When men died in battle, it was believed that the war-god Odin gathered chosen slain warriors at his home in Asgard—the dwelling place of the gods in Norse mythology. Odin’s …Continue reading
- How did a high-standing Indian who signed away his ancestral lands in the Deep South become a general for the Confederacy during the Civil War? And why did he fight so fiercely against other Native people during the conflict? Stand Watie lived during a convulsive time for his people—and the young …Continue reading
- The haunting lyrics of “Strange Fruit” paint a picture of a rural American South where political and psychological terror reigns over African American communities. “Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,” blues legend Billie Holiday sang in her powerful 1939 recording of the song, “Strange …Continue reading
- With the certification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on August 26, 1920, women secured the right to vote after a decades-long fight. "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” it …Continue reading
- Women served on both sides of World War II, in official military roles that came closer to combat than ever before. The Soviet Union, in particular, mobilized its women: Upward of 800,000 would enlist in the Red Army during the war, with more than half of these serving in front-line units. British …Continue reading
