March 7

It’s National Crown Roast of Pork Day and National Be Heard Day and Baseball Hat Appreciation Day and Middle Name Pride Day and Get Grandma to Write Down Her Meatloaf Recipe Day and World Day of Prayer

ON THIS DAY…
0161 Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius dies and is succeeded by co-Emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, an unprecedented political arrangement in the Roman Empire
0321 Roman Emperor Constantine I decrees that the dies Solis Invicti (sun-day) is the day of rest in the Empire
1774 The British closed the port of Boston to all commerce
1850 US Senator Daniel Webster gives his “Seventh of March” speech in which he endorses the Compromise of 1850 in order to prevent a possible civil war
1854 Charles Miller of St. Louis, MO patented the first US sewing machine to stitch buttonholes
1876 Alexander Graham Bell patented an “Improvement in Telegraphy” which established the principle of the telephone
1897 Dr. John Kellogg served the world’s first cornflakes to his patients at a mental hospital in Battle Creek, MI
1901 It was announced that blacks had been found enslaved in parts of South Carolina
1906 Finland granted women the right to vote
1908 Cincinnati’s mayor, Mark Breith announced before the city council that, “Women are not physically fit to operate automobiles”
1911 Willis Farnsworth of Petaluma, CA patented the coin-operated locker
1926 The first successful trans-Atlantic radio-telephone conversation took place, between New York City and London
1927 A Texas law that banned Negroes from voting was ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court
1933 The game “Monopoly” was created and trademarked by Charles Darrow in Atlantic City, NJ
1936 Adolf Hitler broke the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact when he ordered troops to march into the Rhineland
1945 During World War II, U.S. troops crossed the bridge at Remagen, the first incursion into Germany by Allied forces
1955 Phyllis Diller made her debut at the Purple Onion in San Francisco, CA
1955 Peter Pan with Mary Martin and Cyril Richard was presented as a television special for the first time
1965 About 600 people began a 54 mile march from Selma, AL to the state capitol in Montgomery; on the outskirts of Selma, after they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the marchers, in plain sight of photographers and journalists, were brutally assaulted by heavily armed state troopers and deputies
1967 Sandra Dee received a divorce from Bobby Darin
1969 Golda Meir elected as the first female Prime Minister of Israel
1972 The process of expulsion of John Lennon from the USA begins
1986 There can be only one! Highlander opens in US theaters
1988 “The Beatles Past Masters, Volume One” and “The Beatles Past Masters, Volume Two” are released on CD in the US
1992 History’s largest crepe was baked and flipped in Bloemfontein, South Africa; it was 41 feet 2 inches in diameter, an inch and-a-half deep, and weighed 5,908 pounds
1994 The US Supreme Court ruled that parodies that poke fun at an original work can be considered “fair use” that does not require permission from the copyright holder
1996 The first surface photos of Pluto were released; although the only solar-system planet never visited by spacecraft, it was successfully photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope
1997 Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride reopens after being renovated
1998 A Minnesota judge ordered tobacco companies to release 39,000 secret documents that might contain information on how the industry studied ways to lure children as young as five years old to smoke cigarettes
2003 Scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center announced that they had transferred 6.7 gigabytes of uncompressed data from Sunnvale, CA, to Amsterdam, Netherlands, in 58 seconds; the data was sent via fiber-optic cables and traveled 6,800 miles
2006 Apple Inc. is granted the patent to the iPod
2008 10,000 B.C. opens in the US theaters

BORN:
1671 Robert Roy MacGregor, famous Scottish folk hero and outlaw of the early 18th-century
1746 André Michaux, explorer, botanist and silviculturist who wrote the first book on the forest trees of America
1765 Nicéphore Niepce, inventor who was the first to make a permanent photographic image
1837 Henry Draper, physician and amateur astronomer who made the first photograph of the spectrum of a star
1849 Luther Burbank, naturalist and horticulturist who was a pioneer of plant breeding; during his 55 year career, he prodigiously produced useful varieties of fruits, flowers, vegetables, grains, and grasses
1857 Julius Wagner-Jauregg, psychiatrist and neurologist whose made the first use of a shock therapy
1862 Joseph Lee, inventor and “Father of the American playground movement,” who introduced the first contemporary neighborhood playground in the US
1875 Joseph Maurice Ravel, composer and pianist of the impressionistic period, known especially for the subtlety, richness and poignancy of his music (Boléro, Miroirs)
1904 Reinhard Heydrich, Nazi shithead
1940 Daniel J. Travanti, two-time Emmy Award-winning actor (Hill Street Blues, Adam, Midnight Crossing)
1946 John Heard, actor (Prison Break, Big, Home Alone, Radio Flyer)
1958 Rik Mayall, actor-comedian (The Comic Strip Presents…, The Young Ones, Bottom, Drop Dead Fred)
1964 Bret Easton Ellis, author (Less Than Zero, American Psycho)
1964 Wanda Sykes, Emmy Award-winning writer (The Chris Rock Show), actress and comedian (Monster-in-Law, Over the Hedge, My Super Ex-Girlfriend)
1971 Peter Sarsgaard, actor (Boys Don’t Cry, K-19: The Widowmaker, Garden State)
1971 Rachel Weisz, Academy Award-winning actress (The Constant Gardener, The Mummy, The Fountain, Beautiful Creatures)

DIED:
0322BC Aristotle, philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great; he wrote on many different subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology, dies at 62
1274 St. Thomas Aquinas, theologian who wrote commentaries on Aristotle; following Aristotle’s definition of science as sure and evident knowledge obtained from demonstrations, Thomas defined science as the knowledge of things from their causes, dies at 49
1809 Jean-Pierre-François Blanchard, balloonist who made the first aerial crossing of the English Channel, dies at 55
1951 William Draper Harkins, nuclear chemist who was one of the first to investigate the structure and fusion reactions of the nucleus, dies at 77
1954 James Bryan Herrick, physician and clinical cardiologist who was the first to observe and describe sickle-cell anemia, dies at 92
1967 Alice B. Toklas, life partner of Gertrude Stein, dies at 89
1988 Divine (Harris Glenn Milstead), actor-singer-beloved drag queen (Hairspray, Polyester, Female Trouble), dies at age 43
1999 Stanley Kubrick, Academy Award-winning visual effects artist (2001: A Space Odyssey), director, writer and producer (Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket), dies at 70
2000 Charles Gray, actor (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, You Only Live Twice, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, The Night of the Generals), dies at 71
2004 Paul Winfield, Emmy Award-winning actor (Picket Fences, Sounder, The Serpent and the Rainbow, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan), dies at 64
2005 Debra Hill, producer-writer (Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York, The Fisher King), dies at 54