TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

44 B.C.

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

ALSO ON THIS DATE

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.

1820

Maine became the 23rd state.

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.

1919

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

1944

During World War II, Allied bombers again raided Germanheld Monte Cassino.

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.

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.

1977

The situation comedy “Three’s Company,” starring John Ritter, Joyce DeWitt and Suzanne Somers, premiered on ABC-TV.

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.)

2012

Convicted former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich walked into a federal prison in Colorado, where the 55-year-old Democrat began serving a 14-year sentence for corruption. (He was released in February 2020 after President Donald Trump commuted his sentence.) The American campaign in Afghanistan suffered a double blow as the Taliban broke off talks with the U.S., and President Hamid Karzai said NATO should pull out of rural areas and speed up the transfer of security responsibilities to Afghan forces nationwide.

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.

2020

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.