Friday, March 15, 2013

March 15 in history


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MAR 14      INDEX      MAR 16
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44 BC – Julius Caesar, the "dictator for life" of the Roman Empire, was stabbed to death by Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus, Decimus Junius Brutus and several other Roman senators on the Ides of March at a meeting in a hall next to Pompey's Theatre. The conspiracy against Caesar encompassed as many as sixty noblemen, including Caesar's own protege, Marcus Junius Brutus.

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.

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.

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.

1564 – Mughal Emperor Akbar abolishes jizya (per capita tax on non-Muslim subjects).

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 – General George Washington made a surprise appearance at an assembly of army officers at Newburgh, New York, to calm the growing frustration and distrust they had been openly expressing towards Congress in the previous few weeks. Angry with Congress for failing to honor its promise to pay them and for its failure to settle accounts for repayment of food and clothing, officers began circulating an anonymous letter condemning Congress and calling for a revolt. In an emotional speech Washington asked his officers not to support the Newburgh Conspiracy. The plea was successful and the threatened coup d'état never took 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 – As part of the Missouri Compromise between the North and the South, Maine was admitted into the Union as the 23rd state. Administered as a province of Massachusetts since 1647, the entrance of Maine as a free state was agreed to by Southern senators in exchange for the entrance of Missouri as a slave state.

1848 – A revolution breaks out in Hungary. The Habsburg rulers are compelled to meet the demands of the Reform party.

1864 – American Civil War: The Red River Campaign: U.S. Navy fleet arrives at Alexandria, Louisiana.

1874 – France and Viet Nam sign the Second Treaty of Saigon, further recognizing the full sovereignty of France over Cochinchina.

1875 – Archbishop of New York John McCloskey is named the first cardinal in the United States.

1877 – First ever official cricket test match is played: Australia vs England at the MCG Stadium, in Melbourne, Australia.

1888 – Start of the Anglo-Tibetan War of 1888.

1892 – Liverpool F.C. is founded.

1906 – Rolls-Royce Limited is incorporated.

1912 – Baseball’s Cy Young, pitcher, retires from baseball with 511 wins.

1913 – President Woodrow Wilson met at 12:45 p.m. in his office with 125 reporters for the first formal presidential press conference.

1916 – President Woodrow Wilson sends 4,800 United States troops over the U.S.–Mexico border to pursue Pancho Villa.

1917 – During the February Revolution, Czar Nicholas II, ruler of Russia since 1894, is forced to abdicate the throne by the Petrograd insurgents. A provincial government is installed in his place.

1921 – Talaat Pasha, former Grand Vizir of the Ottoman Empire and chief architect of the Armenian Genocide is assassinated in Berlin by 23-year-old Armenian, Soghomon Tehlirian.

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.

1927 – The first Women's Boat Race between the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge takes place on The Isis in Oxford.

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.

1935 – Percy Shaw founded his company Reflecting Roadstuds Limited to make cat's eyes.

1939 – World War II: German troops invade and occupy the remaining part of Bohemia and Moravia. Czechoslovakia – a nation sacrificed on the altar of the Munich Agreement, which was a vain attempt to prevent Germany's imperial aims – 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, takes its first flight from Manila's 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.

1941 – Blizzard of 1941: A fast-moving and severe blizzard hit North Dakota and Minnesota, killing 151 people.

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 receives its premiere performance 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, addresses a joint session of Congress saying "We shall overcome" while advocating passage of the Voting Rights Act.

1965:  Gen. Harold K. Johnson, Army Chief of Staff, reported on his recent visit to Vietnam to President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.  He admitted that the recent air raids ordered by President Johnson had not affected the course of the war and said he would like to assign an American division to hold coastal enclaves and defend the Central Highlands.

1968:  Construction starts on the north tunnel of the Eisenhower–Edwin C. Johnson Memorial Tunnel on Interstate 70 in Colorado, some 60 miles west of Denver. Located at an altitude of more than 11,000 feet, the project was an engineering marvel and became the world's highest vehicular tunnel when it was completed in 1979.

1972:  The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola’s epic gangster movie based on the Mario Puzo novel and starring Marlon Brando and Al Pacino, premieres at Loew's State Theatre in New York

1973:  President Nixon hinted that the United States might intervene again in Vietnam to prevent communist violations of the truce.  A cease-fire under the provisions of the Paris Peace Accords had gone into effect on January 27, 1973, but was quickly and repeatedly violated by both sides as they jockeyed for control of territory in South Vietnam.  Very quickly, both sides resumed heavy fighting in what came to be called the "ceasefire war."

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 – Collapse of the Hotel New World: Thirty-three people die when the Hotel New World in Singapore collapses.

1989:  Gorbachev calls for radical agricultural reform: In a dramatic indication of just how far he wanted his reforms to go, General Secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev called for an end to the Soviet agricultural bureaucracy and the introduction of free market principles.

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

1991 – The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany comes into effect, granting full sovereignty to the Federal Republic of Germany.

2011 – Beginning of the Syrian civil war.



Saints' Days and Holy Days

Traditional Western



Contemporary Western

Clemens Maria Hofbauer
Leocritia
Longinus
Louise de Marillac
Raymond of Fitero


Anglican, Episcopal, Lutheran



Eastern Orthodox

March 15 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)

Saints

Apostle Aristobulus of the Seventy, first bishop of Britain (1st c.)
Martyrs Agapius, and with him seven martyrs:
      Publius (Pauplios); Timolaus; Romulus; two named Dionysius;
      and two named Alexander; at Caesarea in Palestine (303)
Hieromartyr Alexander of Side in Pamphylia (270-275)
Martyr Nicander of Egypt (305)
Saint Hebarestes, steward of a church located in Jerusalem

Pre-Schism Western Saints

Martyr Mancius (5th or 6th c.)
Saint Speciosus, a monk at Terracina in Italy (c. 555)
Saint Probus of Rieti, Bishop of Rieti in central Italy (c. 571)
Saint Zachariah, Pope of Rome (752)
Saint Leocritia (Lucretia), a holy virgin in Cordoba in Spain (859)

Post-Schism Orthodox Saints

Saint Nicander, monk, of Gorodetsk (Nizhni-Novgorod) (1603)
New Martyr Manuel of Crete (1792)
Hieromartyr Parthenios, Deacon, at Didymoteicho (1805)

New Martyrs and Confessors

New Hieromartyr Alexis Vinogradov, Protopresbyter of Tver (1938)
New Hieromartyr Demetrius Legeydo, Priest of Chimkent (1938)
New Hieromartyr Michael Bogoslovsk, Protopresbyter of Simferopol-Crimea (1940)

Other commemorations

Commemoration of the deliverance of the island of Lefkada from the earthquake of 1938



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