1791 Congress passes a resolution authorizing the U.S. Mint; legislation creating the mint will be passed on Apr. 2, 1792.
1803 The first impeachment trial of a U.S. judge, John Pickering, begins.
1817 The first commercial steamboat route from Louisville to New Orleans is opened.
1845 Florida becomes the 27th U.S. state.
1857 Under pretexts, Britain and France declare war on China.
1861 The serfs of Russia are emancipated by Alexander II as part of a program of westernization.
1863 President Abraham Lincoln signs the conscription act compelling U.S. citizens to report for duty in the Civil War or pay $300.00.
1877 Rutherford B. Hayes, the republican governor of Ohio, is elected president; his election is confirmed by an electoral commission after a disputed election the previous November.
1878 Russia and the Ottomans sign the Treaty of San Stefano, granting independence to Serbia.
1905 The Russian Czar agrees to create an elected assembly.
1918 The Soviets and Germany sign a peace treaty at Brest
-Litovsk depriving the Soviets of White Russia.
1919 Boeing flies the first U.S. international airmail from Vancouver, British Columbia to Seattle, Washington.
1923 The first issue of Time magazine is published. Its editor, Henry R. Luce, is just out of Yale.
1931 President Herbert Hoover signs a bill that makes Francis Scott Key’s “Star Spangled Banner,” the national anthem.
1939 In Bombay, Gandhi begins a fast to protest the state’s autocratic rule.
1940 A Nazi air raid kills 108 on a British liner in the English Channel.
1941 Moscow denounces Axis rule in Bulgaria.
1942 The RAF raids the industrial suburbs of Paris.
1945 Finland declares war on the Axis.
1952 The U.S. Supreme Court upholds New York’s Feinberg Law banning Communist teachers in the United States.
1969 Sirhan Sirhan testifies in a court in Los Angeles that he killed Robert Kennedy.
1973 Japan discloses its first defense plan since World War II.
1999 Former White House intern Monica Lewinsky appears on national television to explain her affair with President Bill Clinton.
Born on March 3
1831 George M. Pullman, inventor of the railway sleeping car.
1847 Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the first telephone as well as other devices.
1873 William Green, President of the American Federation of Labor.
1895 Matthew Ridgway, U.S. Army leader in World War II and Korea.
1911 Jean Harlow, actress (Hell’s Angels, Dinner at Eight).
1916 Robert Whitehead, Broadway producer (Bus Stop, A Man for All Seasons).
1918 Arthur Kornberg, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist.
1920 Robert Searle, cartoonist.
1926 James Merrill, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet (Divine Comedies).
1927 Nicolas Freeling, crime writer.
