03 March History
- 1791 - Congress establishes the U.S. Mint.
- 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. Hays, the republican governor of Ohio is elected president, his election confirmed by an electoral commission after disputed election the previous November.
- 1878 - Russia and the Ottomans sign the treaty of Stenafano, 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. It's 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 the 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.
03 March Birthdays
- 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, (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.