This Day in History

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March 15

44 BC – Julius Caesar, Dictator of the Roman Republic, is stabbed to death by Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus, Decimus Junius Brutus, and several other Roman senators on the Ides of March.

493 – Odoacer, the first barbarian King of Italy after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, is slain by Theoderic the Great, king of the Ostrogoths, while the two kings were feasting together.

1493 – Christopher Columbus returns to Spain after his first trip to the Americas.

1783 – In an emotional speech in Newburgh, New York, George Washington asks his officers not to support the Newburgh Conspiracy. The plea is successful and the threatened coup d'état never takes place.

1819 – French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel wins a contest at the Academie des Sciences in Paris by proving that light behaves like a wave. The Fresnel integrals, still used to calculate wave patterns, silence skeptics who had backed the particle theory of Isaac Newton.

1820 – Maine becomes the 23rd U.S. state.

1906 – Rolls-Royce Limited is incorporated.

1917 – Tsar Nicholas II of Russia abdicates the Russian throne ending the 304-year Romanov dynasty.

1931 – SS Viking explodes off Newfoundland, killing 27 of the 147 on board.

1952 – In Cilaos, Réunion, 1870 mm (73 inches) of rain falls in a 24-hour period, setting a new world record (March 15 through March 16).

1985 – The first Internet domain name is registered (symbolics.com).

1990 – Mikhail Gorbachev is elected as the first President of the Soviet Union.

2011 – Beginning of the Syrian Civil War.

Births

270 – Saint Nicholas (no, not that one), 1767 – Andrew Jackson, 1887 – Marjorie Merriweather Post, 1911 – Lightnin' Hopkins, 1913 – Macdonald Carey, 1933 – Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 1935 – Judd Hirsch, 1935 – Jimmy Swaggart, 1940 – Phil Lesh, 1941 – Mike Love, 1943 – David Cronenberg, 1943 – Sly Stone, 1947 – Ry Cooder, 1955 – Dee Snider, 1956 – Clay Matthews, Jr., 1959 – Fabio, 1962 – Terence Trent D'Arby, 1963 – Bret Michaels, 1964 – Rockwell, 1968 – Mark McGrath, 1969 – Kim Raver, 1972 – Mike Tomlin, 1975 – will.i.am, 1975 – Eva Longoria, 1985 – Kellan Lutz

Deaths

44 BC – Julius Caesar, 220 – Cao Cao, 493 – Odoacer, 1898 – Henry Bessemer, 1937 – H. P. Lovecraft, 1975 – Aristotle Onassis, 1997 – Gail Davis, 1998 – Benjamin Spock, 2001 – Ann Sothern, 2007 – Bowie Kuhn, 2009 – Ron Silver, 2014 – David Brenner, 2015 – Mike Porcaro