TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Sunday, March 15, the 75th day of 2020. There are 291 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

On March 15, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson met with about 100 reporters for the first formal presidential press conference. 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 1919, members of the American Expeditionary Force from World War I convened in Paris for a three-day meeting to found the American Legion.

In 1941, Richard C. Hottelet, a correspondent for the United Press, was arrested in Berlin by the German secret police on suspicion of espionage. (Hottelet was released four months later in a prisoner exchange.)

In 1944, during World War II, Allied bombers again raided German-held Monte

Cassino.

In 1956, the Lerner and Loewe musical play “My Fair Lady,” based on Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” opened on Broadway.

In 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.

In 1985, the first internet domain name, symbolics.com, was registered by the Symbolics Computer Corp. of Massachusetts.

In 1998, CBS’ “60 Minutes” aired an interview with former White House employee Kathleen Willey, who said President Bill Clinton had made unwelcome sexual advances toward her in the Oval Office in 1993, a charge denied by the president. Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose child care guidance spanned half a century, died in San Diego at 94.

In 1999, an Amtrak train slammed into a steel-filled truck at a crossing in Bourbonnais, Illinois, killing 11 people.

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.)