Today is Tuesday, March 2, the 61st day of 2021. There are 304 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On March 2, 1932, the 20th Amendment to the Constitution, which moved the date of the presidential inauguration from March 4 to January 20, was passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification.
On this date:
In 1867, Howard University, a historically Black school of higher learning in Washington, D.C., was founded. Congress passed, over President Andrew Johnson’s veto, the first of four Reconstruction Acts.
In 1877, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was declared the winner of the 1876 presidential election over Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, even though Tilden had won the popular vote.
In 1917, Puerto Ricans were granted U.S. citizenship as President Woodrow Wilson signed the Jones-Shafroth Act.
In 1943, the three-day Battle of the Bismarck Sea began in the southwest Pacific during World War II; U.S. and Australian warplanes were able to inflict heavy damage on an Imperial Japanese convoy.
In 1962, Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points for the Philadelphia Warriors in a game against the New York Knicks, an NBA record that still stands. (Philadelphia won, 169-147.)
In 1965, the movie version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “The Sound of Music,” starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, had its world premiere in New York.
In 1985, the government approved a screening test for AIDS that detected antibodies to the virus, allowing possibly contaminated blood to be excluded from the blood supply.
In 1995, the Internet search engine website Yahoo! was incorporated by founders Jerry Yang and David Filo.
Today’s Birthdays: Former Soviet President and Nobel peace laureate Mikhail S. Gorbachev is 90. Actor Laraine Newman is 69. Former Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., is 68. Singer Jay Osmond is 66. Pop musician John Cowsill (The Cowsills) is 65. Rock singer Jon Bon Jovi is 59. Actor Daniel Craig is 53. Rock singer Chris Martin (Coldplay) is 44. Actor Heather McComb is 44. Actor Rebel Wilson is 41. Actor Bryce Dallas Howard is 40. NFL quarterback Ben Roethlisberger is 39.
