On This Day: March 7

This is the 66th day of the year.

Fact of the Day: Monopoly

Monopoly, the bestselling privately patented board game in history, gained popularity in the United States during the Great Depression when Charles B. Darrow, an unemployed heating engineer, sold the concept to Parker Brothers in 1935. Before then, homemade versions of a similar game had circulated in many parts of the United States. Most were based on the Landlord's Game, a board game designed and patented by Lizzie G. Magie in 1904. Darrow died a millionaire in 1967.

Holidays

Feast day of St. Eosterwine, St. Perpetua, and St. Felicitas.

Events

161 - On the death of Antoninus at Lorium, Marcus Aurelius became emperor.

1869 - The Suez Canal, the waterway across Egypt connecting the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, was opened.

1876 - Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for the telephone.

1917 - The first gramophone record of a jazz band was released, by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

1926 - The first successful trans-Atlantic radio-telephone conversation took place, between New York City and London.

1933 - The board game Monopoly was invented by Charles Darrow.

1936 - Nazi leader Adolf Hitler violated the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact by sending German military forces into the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone along the Rhine River in western Germany.

1965 - About 525 people began a 54-mile march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery, demonstrating for African-American voting rights and to commemorate the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, shot three weeks earlier by an state trooper while trying to protect his mother at a civil rights demonstration.

1994 - The Supreme Court ruled that parodies that poke fun at an original work can be considered "fair use," therefore not requiring permission from the copyright holder.

2001 - Ariel Sharon took office as the prime minister of Israel.

2007 - British House of Commons votes to make the upper chamber, the House of Lords, 100% elected.

Births

1792 - Sir John Herschel, English astronomer.

1849 - Luther Burbank, American naturalist.

1872 - Piet Mondrian, Dutch painter.

1875 - Maurice Ravel, French composer.

1942 - Tammy Faye Bakker, American televangelist.

1958 - Alan Hale, American astronomer.

Deaths

1274 - St Thomas Aquinas, Christian philosopher.

1999 - Stanley Kubrick, American film director.

2006 - Gordon Parks, groundbreaking photographer, born in Fort Scott, Kansas.