Today is Monday, March 7, the 66th day of 2011. There are 299 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History

On March 7, 1911, President William Howard Taft ordered 20,000 troops to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border in response to the Mexican Revolution.

On this date

In 1793, during the French Revolutionary Wars, France declared war on Spain.

In 1850, in a three-hour speech to the U.S. Senate, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts endorsed the Compromise of 1850 as a means of preserving the Union.

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for his telephone.

In 1926, the first successful trans-Atlantic radio-telephone conversations took place between New York and London.

In 1936, Adolf Hitler ordered his troops to march into the Rhineland, thereby breaking the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact.

In 1945, during World War II, U.S. forces crossed the Rhine River at Remagen, Germany, using the damaged but still usable Ludendorff Bridge.

In 1960, Jack Paar returned as host of NBC’s “Tonight Show,” nearly a month after walking off in a censorship dispute with the network.

In 1965, a march by civil rights demonstrators was broken up in Selma, Ala., by state troopers and a sheriff’s posse.

In 1975, the U.S. Senate revised its filibuster rule, allowing 60 senators to limit debate in most cases, instead of the previously required two-thirds of senators present.

In 1981, anti-government guerrillas in Colombia executed kidnapped American Bible translator Chester Bitterman, whom they’d accused of being a CIA agent.

One year ago

The Iraq war thriller “The Hurt Locker” received six Academy Awards including best picture, with Kathryn Bigelow accepting the first directing Oscar awarded to a woman. Iraq held an election in which neither the Sunni-backed coalition nor the Shiite political bloc won a majority, spawning an eight-month deadlock and stalling formation of a new government.

Today’s Birthdays

Comedian Alan Sues is 85. TV personality Willard Scott is 77. Pro and College Football Hall-of-Famer Lynn Swann is 59. Golfer Tom Lehman is 52. Comedian Wanda Sykes is 47. Actor Peter Sarsgaard is 40. Actress Rachel Weisz is 40. Actress Jenna Fischer is 37.

Thought for Today

“If you’re not feeling good about you, what you’re wearing outside doesn’t mean a thing.”

— Leontyne Price, American opera singer