TODAY IN HISTORY

March 7, 1965

A march by civil rights demonstrators was violently broken up at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, by state troopers and a sheriff’s posse in what came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”

ALSO ON THIS DATE

1530

Pope Clement VII threatened to excommunicate England’s King Henry VIII if he went through with plans to marry Anne Boleyn, who became Henry’s second wife after Catherine of Aragon.

1793

During the French Revolutionary Wars, France declared war on Spain.

1850

In a three-hour speech to the U.S. Senate, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts endorsed the Compromise of 1850 as a means of preserving the Union.

1926

The first successful transAtlantic radio-telephone conversations took place between New York and London.

1936

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

1945

During World War II, U.S. forces crossed the Rhine at Remagen, Germany, using the damaged but still usable Ludendorff Bridge.

1975

The U.S. Senate revised its filibuster rule, allowing 60 senators to limit debate in most cases, instead of the previously required two-thirds of senators present.