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supposed to last four days, but was extended until it was gradually lifted starting March 13.)
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• On this date:
• In 1836, the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, fell to Mexican forces after a 13-day siege.
• In 1853, Verdi's opera "La Traviata" premiered in Venice, Italy.
• In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Scott, a slave, was not an American citizen and could not sue for his freedom in federal court.
• In 1912, Oreo sandwich cookies were first introduced by the National Biscuit Co.
• In 1933, Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, wounded in an attempt on then-President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt's life the previous month, died at a Miami hospital at age 59.
• In 1944, U.S. heavy bombers staged the first full-scale American raid on Berlin during World War II.
• In 1953, Georgy Malenkov was named premier of the Soviet Union a day after the death of Josef Stalin.
• In 1967, the daughter of Josef Stalin, Svetlana Alliluyeva (ah-lee-loo-YAY'-vah), appeared at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi and declared her intention to defect to the West.
• In 1970, a bomb being built inside a Greenwich Village townhouse by the radical Weathermen accidentally went off, destroying the house and killing three group members.
• In 1973, Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck, 80, died in Danby, Vt.
• In 1983, in a case that drew much notoriety, a woman was gang-raped atop a pool table in a tavern in New Bedford, Mass., called Big Dan's; four men were later convicted of the attack.
• In 1988, the board of trustees at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., a liberal arts college for the deaf, selected Elisabeth Zinser, a hearing woman, to be school president. (Outraged students shut down the campus, forcing selection of a deaf president, I. King Jordan, instead.)
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• Ten years ago: A somber President George W. Bush readied the nation for war against Saddam Hussein, hurling some of his harshest invectives yet at the Iraqi leader during a prime-time news conference. The United States ratified a treaty on cutting active U.S. and Russian long-range nuclear warheads by two-thirds. Democ

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