THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Today is Friday, March 15, the 75th day of 2024. There are 291 days left in the year.
Today’s highlight in history:
On March 15, 44 B.C., Roman dictator Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of nobles that included Brutus and Cassius.
On this date:
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 1917, Czar Nicholas II abdicated in favor of his brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, who declined the crown, marking the end of imperial rule in Russia.
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 1944, during World War II, Allied bombers again raided German-held Monte Cassino.
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 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 1977, the situation comedy “Three’s Company,” starring John Ritter, Joyce DeWitt and Suzanne Somers, premiered on ABC-TV.
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 2011, the Syrian civil war had its beginnings with Arab Spring protests across the region that turned into an armed insurgency and eventually became a full-blown conflict.
In 2012, convicted former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (blah-GOY’-uh-vich) walked into a federal prison in Colorado, where the 55-year-old Democrat began serving a 14year sentence for corruption. (He was released in February 2020 after President Donald Trump commuted his sentence.)
In 2018, a pedestrian bridge that was under construction collapsed onto a busy Miami highway, crushing vehicles beneath massive slabs of concrete and steel; six people died and 10 were injured.