Today is Monday, March 02nd
The 061st day of 2009.
There are 304 days left in the year.
On March 2, 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.
On March 2, 1904, Theodor Seuss Geisel, who wrote and illustrated the popular 'Dr. Seuss' children's books, was born.
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On this date in:
1793 - Sam Houston, the first president of the Republic of Texas, was born near Lexington, Va.
1807 - Congress outlawed the importing of slaves to the United States, effective the following year.
1836 - Texas declared its independence from Mexico.
1899 - Congress established Mount Rainier National Park in Washington state.
1917 - Puerto Ricans were granted U.S. citizenship.
1923 - Time magazine debuted.
1933 - The movie "King Kong" had its world premiere in New York.
1939 - Roman Catholic Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli was elected pope and took the name Pius XII.
1949 - An American B-50 Superfortress, the Lucky Lady II, landed at Fort Worth, Texas, after completing the first non-stop, around-the-world flight.
1959 - Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis held the first of two recording sessions that yielded the album "Kind of Blue."
1962 - Wilt Chamberlain of the Philadelphia Warriors scored an NBA record 100 points in a game against the New York Knicks.
1965 - The movie version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "The Sound of Music" had its world premiere in New York.
1985 - The federal government approved a screening test for AIDS that detected antibodies to the virus, allowing possibly contaminated blood to be excluded from the blood supply.
1997 - It was revealed that Vice President Al Gore had made fund-raising calls for the 1996 election on phones installed in government buildings for that purpose.
2004 - A series of coordinated blasts in Iraq killed 181 people at shrines in Karbala and Baghdad as thousands of Shiite Muslim pilgrims gathered for a religious festival.
2006 - President George W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced a landmark civilian nuclear cooperation deal in New Delhi.
2008 - Dmitry Medvedev, Vladimir Putin's hand-picked successor, scored a crushing victory in Russia's presidential election