March 15 - Events

Events

• 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.
• 221 – Liu Bei, a Chinese warlord and member of the Han royal house, declares himself emperor of Shu-Han and claims his legitimate succession to the Han Dynasty.
• 280 – Sun Hao of Eastern Wu surrenders to Sima Yan which began the Jin Dynasty.
• 351 – Constantius II elevates his cousin Gallus to Caesar, and puts him in charge of the Eastern part of the Roman Empire.
• 933 – After a ten-year truce, German King Henry I defeats a Hungarian army at the Battle of Riade near the Unstrut river.
• 1311 – Battle of Halmyros: The Catalan Company defeats Walter V of Brienne to take control of the Duchy of Athens, a Crusader state in Greece.
• 1493 – Christopher Columbus returns to Spain after his first trip to the Americas.
• 1514 – Jodocus Badius Ascensius publishes Christiern Pedersen's Latin version of Saxo’s Gesta Danorum, the oldest known version of that work.
• 1545 – First meeting of the Council of Trent.
• 1564 – Mughal Emperor Akbar abolishes jizya (per capita tax) .
• 1672 – Charles II of England issues the Royal Declaration of Indulgence.
• 1781 – American Revolutionary War: Battle of Guilford Courthouse – Near present-day Greensboro, North Carolina, 1,900 British troops under General Charles Cornwallis defeat an American force numbering 4,400.
• 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.
• 1820 – Maine becomes the 23rd U.S. state.
• 1848 – A revolution breaks out in Hungary. The Habsburg rulers are compelled to meet the demands of the Reform party.
• 1875 – Archbishop of New York John McCloskey is named the first cardinal in the United States.
• 1888 – Start of the Anglo-Tibetan War of 1888.
• 1906 – Rolls-Royce Limited is incorporated.
• 1916 – President Woodrow Wilson sends 4,800 United States troops over the U.S.-Mexico border to pursue Pancho Villa.
• 1917 – Tsar Nicholas II of Russia abdicates the Russian throne and his brother the Grand Duke becomes Tsar.
• 1922 – After Egypt gains nominal independence from the United Kingdom, Fuad I becomes King of Egypt.
• 1926 – The dictator Theodoros Pangalos is elected President of Greece without opposition.
• 1931 – SS Viking explodes off Newfoundland, killing 27 of the 147 on board.
• 1933 – Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss keeps members of the National Council from convening, starting the austrofascist dictatorship.
• 1939 – World War II: German troops occupy the remaining part of Bohemia and Moravia; Czechoslovakia ceases to exist.
• 1939 – Carpatho-Ukraine declares itself an independent republic, but is annexed by Hungary the next day.
• 1941 – Philippine Airlines, the flag carrier of the Philippines took its first flight between Manila (from Nielson Field) to Baguio City with a Beechcraft Model 18 making the airline the first and oldest commercial airline in Asia operating under its original name.
• 1943 – World War II: Third Battle of Kharkov – the Germans retake the city of Kharkov from the Soviet armies in bitter street fighting.
• 1945 – World War II: Soviet forces begin an offensive to push Germans from Upper Silesia.
• 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).
• 1956 – My Fair Lady premiered on Broadway at the Mark Hellinger Theatre.
• 1961 – South Africa withdraws from the Commonwealth of Nations.
• 1965 – President Lyndon B. Johnson, responding to the Selma crisis, tells U.S. Congress "We shall overcome" while advocating the Voting Rights Act.
• 1977 – Tenor Luciano Pavarotti and the PBS opera series Live from the Met both make their American television debuts.
• 1978 – Somalia and Ethiopia signed a truce to end the Ethiopian-Somali War.
• 1985 – The first Internet domain name is registered (symbolics.com).
• 1985 – Brazilian military dictatorship ends.
• 1986 – Hotel New World Disaster. 33 people die when the Hotel New World in Singapore collapses.
• 1990 – Iraq hangs British journalist Farzad Bazoft for spying.
• 1990 – Mikhail Gorbachev is elected as the first President of the Soviet Union.
• 1991 – The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany went into effect, granting full sovereignty to the Federal Republic of Germany.
• 2003 – President Ange-Felix Patasse is overthrown in a coup by François Bozizé
• 2011 – Beginning of the Syrian civil war.