By The Associated Press

Today in History

Today is Wednesday, March 22, the 81st day of 2017. There are 284 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

On March 22, 1765, the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act to raise money from the American colonies, which fiercely resisted the tax. (The Stamp Act was repealed a year later.)

On this date:

In 1638, religious dissident Anne Hutchinson was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for defying Puritan orthodoxy.

In 1894, hockey’s first Stanley Cup championship game was played; home team Montreal defeated Ottawa, 3-1.

In 1929, a U.S. Coast Guard vessel sank a Canadian-registered schooner, the I’m Alone, which was suspected of carrying bootleg liquor, in the Gulf of Mexico.

In 1933, during Prohibition, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a measure to make wine and beer containing up to 3.2 percent alcohol legal. In 1941, the Grand Coulee hydroelectric dam in Washington state officially went into operation.

In 1958, movie producer Mike Todd, the husband of actress Elizabeth Taylor, and three other people, were killed in the crash of Todd’s private plane near Grants, New Mexico.

In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson named Gen. William C. Westmoreland to be the U.S. Army’s new Chief of Staff. In 1978, Karl Wallenda, the 73-year-old patriarch of “The Flying Wallendas” high-wire act, fell to his death while attempting to walk a cable strung between two hotel towers in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

In 1987, a garbage barge, carrying 3,200 tons of refuse, left Islip, New York, on a six-month journey in search of a place to unload. (The barge was turned away by several states and three other countries until space was found back in Islip.)

In 1991, high school instructor Pamela Smart, accused of recruiting her teenage lover and his friends to kill her husband, Gregory, was convicted in Exeter, New Hampshire, of murder-conspiracy and being an accomplice to murder and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

In 1992, 27 people were killed when a USAir Fokker F-28 jetliner bound for Cleveland crashed on takeoff from New York’s LaGuardia Airport; 24 people survived.

In 1997, Tara Lipinski, at age 14 years and 10 months, became the youngest ladies’ world figure skating champion in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Ten years ago: John and Elizabeth Edwards announced that her cancer had returned, but that the North Carolina Democrat planned to continue his presidential campaign.

Thought for Today: “Kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve.” — Joseph Joubert, French moralist (1754-1824).