TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Wednesday, March 15, the 74th day of 2023. There are 291 days left in the year. On this date in:

Roman dictator Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of nobles that included Brutus and Cassius.

Members of the American Expeditionary Force from World War I convened in Paris for a three-day meeting to found the American Legion.

During World War II, Allied bombers again raided German-held Monte Cassino.

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.

“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.

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.)

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.

The Trump administration accused Moscow of an elaborate plot to hack into America’s electric grid, factories, water supply and even air travel; the U.S. also targeted Russians with sanctions for alleged election meddling for the first time since President Donald Trump took office.

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.)

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.