TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Monday, March 15.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
On March 15, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson, addressing a joint session of Congress, called for new legislation to guarantee every American’s right to vote. The result was passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
ON THIS DATE
In 44 B.C., Roman dictator Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of nobles that included Brutus and Cassius.
In 1493, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus arrived back in the Spanish harbor of Palos de la Frontera, two months after concluding his first voyage to the Western Hemisphere.
In 1820, Maine became the 23rd state.
In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson met with about
100 reporters for the first formal presidential press conference.
In 1964, actor Elizabeth Taylor married actor Richard Burton in Montreal; it was her fifth marriage, his second. (They divorced in 1974, remarried in 1975, then divorced again in 1976.)
In 1972, “The Godfather,” Francis Ford Coppola’s epic gangster movie based on the Mario Puzo novel and starring Marlon Brando and Al Pacino, premiered in New York.
In 1975, Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis died near Paris at age 69.
In 1985, the first internet domain name, symbolics. com, was registered by the Symbolics Computer Corp. of Massachusetts.
In 1998, Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose child care guidance spanned half a century, died
in San Diego at 94.
In 2005, former WorldCom chief Bernard Ebbers was convicted in New York of engineering the largest corporate fraud in U.S. history. (He was later sentenced to 25 years in prison.)
In 2019, a gunman killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, streaming the massacre live on Facebook. (Brenton Tarrant, an Australian white supremacist, was sentenced to life in prison without parole after pleading guilty to 51 counts of murder and other charges.)
Ten years ago: The Syrian civil war had its beginnings with Arab Spring protests across the region that turned into an armed insurgency and eventually became a fullblown conflict.
Five years ago: Democrat Hillary Clinton triumphed in the Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Illinois and Missouri presidential primaries; Donald Trump strengthened his hand in the Republican race, winning in Florida, North Carolina, Illinois and Missouri, but falling in Ohio to the state’s governor, John Kasich, while Florida Sen. Marco Rubio ended his campaign after his home-state loss. One year ago: The Federal Reserve took massive emergency action to help the economy withstand the coronavirus by slashing its benchmark interest rate to near zero and saying it would buy $700 billion in treasury and mortgage bonds. After initially trying to keep schools open, New York City Mayor
Bill de Blasio said the nation’s largest public school system would close in hopes of curbing the spread of the coronavirus.