Oreo cookies introduced – Chicago Tribune

Today is Thursday, March 6, the 65th day of the year 2025. There are 300 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On March 6, 1912, Oreo cookies were first introduced by the National Biscuit Company (later known as Nabisco).

Also on this date:

In 1820, President James Monroe signed the Missouri Compromise, which allowed Missouri to join the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state, while banning slavery in the northern part of the Louisiana Territory.

In 1836, the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, fell when Mexican forces led by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna stormed the fortress after a 13-day siege; the battle cost the lives of all the Texian defenders, including William Travis, James Bowie and Davy Crockett.

In 1857, the United States Supreme Court, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, ruled 7-2 that Scott, a slave, was not a U.S. citizen and therefore could not sue for his freedom in federal court; it also ruled that slavery could not be prohibited in any federal territory. The decision deepened the national division over slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War.

In 1869, chemist Dmitri Mendeleev presented his concept of the periodic table of elements at a meeting of the Russian Chemical Society in St. Petersburg.

In 1951, the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on federal espionage charges began in New York.

In 1964, heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay took a new name given to him by Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammed: Muhammad Ali.

In 1970, a bomb built inside a Greenwich Village home in New York by members of the left-wing activist group Weather Underground accidentally exploded, destroying the house and killing three members of the group.