World/nation trivia: The week of March 2-8

March 2:

1807, the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves was signed by President Thomas Jefferson. (The domestic trade of enslaved people was not affected.)

1962, Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points for the Philadelphia Warriors against the New York Knicks, a single-game NBA record that still stands. Philadelphia won by a score of 169-147.

1985, the U.S. government approved a screening test for AIDS that detected antibodies to the virus, allowing possibly contaminated blood to be excluded from the blood supply.

March 3:

1849, Congress established the U.S. Department of the Interior.

1931, President Herbert Hoover signed a bill making “The Star-Spangled Banner” the national anthem of the United States.

1969, Apollo 9 blasted off from Cape Kennedy on a mission to test NASA’s lunar module.

1991, motorist Rodney King was severely beaten by Los Angeles police officers after a high-speed chase; amateur video that captured the scene aired on local news that evening, sparking public outrage.

March 4:

1789, the Constitution of the United States went into effect as the first Federal Congress met in New York.

1865, President Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated for a second term of office.

1966, John Lennon of The Beatles was quoted in the London Evening Standard as saying, “We’re more popular than Jesus now,” a comment that caused an angry backlash in the United States.

2015, the Justice Department cleared Darren Wilson, a white former Ferguson, Missouri, police officer, in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, a Black 18-year-old, but also issued a scathing report calling for sweeping changes in city law enforcement practices, which it called discriminatory and unconstitutional.

March 5:

1770, the Boston Massacre took place as British soldiers who’d been taunted by a crowd of colonists opened fire, killing five people.

1946, Winston Churchill delivered a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in which he said: “From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”

1963, country music performers Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins died in the crash of their plane, a Piper Comanche, near Camden, Tennessee, along with pilot Randy Hughes (Cline’s manager).

1982, comedian John Belushi was found dead of a drug overdose in a rented bungalow at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont hotel; he was 33.

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, while banning slavery in the northern portion of the Louisiana Territory.

1857, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, ruled 7 to 2 that Scott, an enslaved person, was not an American citizen and therefore could not sue for his freedom in Federal court; it also ruled that slavery could not be banned from any Federal territory. The decision deepened the national divide over slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War.

1964, heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay took a new name given to him by Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammed: Muhammad Ali.

1981, Walter Cronkite signed off for the last time after nearly two decades as the anchor of “The CBS Evening News.”

March 7:

1876, Alexander Graham Bell received a U.S. patent for his telephone.

1936, Adolf Hitler ordered his troops to march into the Rhineland, thereby breaking the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Treaties.

1965, a march by over 500 civil rights demonstrators was violently broken up at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama; state troopers and a sheriff’s posse fired tear gas and beat marchers with batons in what became known as “Bloody Sunday.”

March 8:

1965, the United States landed its first combat troops in South Vietnam as 3,500 Marines arrived to defend the U.S. air base at Da Nang.

1971, in the first of three fights between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, Frazier defeated Ali by unanimous decision in what was billed as “The Fight of the Century” at Madison Square Garden in New York.

1988, 17 soldiers were killed when two Army helicopters from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, collided in mid-flight during a night training mission.

2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, a Boeing 777 with 239 people on board, vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, setting off a massive and ultimately unsuccessful search.

– Associated Press