Here’s a brief look back in time on this day, March 6.
In 1836, the Battle of the Alamo comes to a bloody conclusion after a two-week siege from the Mexican Army. The volunteer regiment held at the garrison were unable to hold their own, having only 200 members compared to upwards of 5,000 Mexican soldiers. In total, 183 members, including the King of the Wild Frontier Davy Crockett, were killed as soldiers scaled their way up the fort’s walls. The rest were spared, having mostly been women and children. The fort still stands today in the middle of downtown San Antonio, TX.
In 1951, the federal trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenburg begins. The couple were arrested on espionage charges linked to the suspicion of giving the Soviet Union classified information on the Manhattan Project: the U.S. government’s research and development of the first nuclear bomb. Speculations began to rise when the USSR ran their first nuke test in 1949: about 4 years after the U.S. completed and dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The two countries never openly traded formulas or secrets, nor did the U.S. give any hints of the Project’s existence. It was discovered that one of the Project’s physicists, Klaus Fuchs, had given the Russians key documents throughout World War II. He was not the only one, having played a small part in a large spy ring. Julius was accused of being part of this ring based on the confession of another alleged spy, having no concrete evidence other than word-of-mouth. Ethel, his wife, was charged alongside him as a means of “getting her husband to talk” per the words of then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Both were convicted and sentenced to death by electric chair. To this day, no evidence – other than the alleged spy’s confession – were presented.
In 1981, Walter Cronkite signs off his last broadcast as CBS Evening News‘ anchor. Cited as “the most trusted man in America”, Cronkite, had been one of the most watched television news anchors of all time, having broke news on the Vietnam War, the Watergate Scandal, and perhaps most famously, the assassination of 35th U.S. President John F. Kennedy.