To­day in his­to­ry:

On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Air­lines Flight MH370, a Boe­ing 777 with 239 peo­ple on board, van­ished dur­ing a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Bei­jing, set­ting off a mas­sive and ul­ti­mate­ly un­suc­cess­ful search.

Al­so on this date:

In 1965, the Unit­ed States land­ed its first com­bat troops in South Viet­nam as 3,500 Marines ar­rived to de­fend the U.S. air base at Da Nang.

In 1917, protests against food ra­tioning broke out in Pet­ro­grad (now St. Pe­ters­burg), trig­ger­ing eight days of ri­ot­ing that re­sult­ed in the ab­di­ca­tion of Tsar Nicholas II and the end of the Russ­ian monar­chy.

In 1948, the Supreme Court, in Mc­Col­lum v. Board of Ed­u­ca­tion, struck down re­li­gious ed­u­ca­tion class­es dur­ing school hours in Cham­paign, Illi­nois, pub­lic schools, say­ing the pro­gram vi­o­lat­ed sep­a­ra­tion of church and state.

In 1971, in the first of three fights be­tween Muham­mad Ali and Joe Fra­zier, Fra­zier de­feat­ed Ali by unan­i­mous de­ci­sion in what was billed as “The Fight of the Cen­tu­ry” at Madi­son Square Gar­den in New York.

In 1983, in a speech to the Na­tion­al As­so­ci­a­tion of Evan­gel­i­cals con­ven­tion in Or­lan­do, Flori­da, Pres­i­dent Ronald Rea­gan re­ferred to the So­vi­et Union as an “evil em­pire.”

In 1988, 17 sol­diers were killed when two Army he­li­copters from Fort Camp­bell, Ken­tucky, col­lid­ed in mid-flight dur­ing a night train­ing mis­sion.

In 2008, Pres­i­dent George W. Bush ve­toed a bill that would have banned the CIA from us­ing sim­u­lat­ed drown­ing and oth­er co­er­cive in­ter­ro­ga­tion meth­ods to gain in­for­ma­tion from sus­pect­ed ter­ror­ists.

By THE AS­SO­CI­AT­ED PRESS