March 15 in History

A group of Roman senators stabbed Julius Caesar to death on March 15, 44 BC, in the Theatre of Pompey, where the Senate was meeting while the Curia Julia was being rebuilt. Caesar had been warned repeatedly: a soothsayer had told him to 'beware the Ides of March,' and his wife Calpurnia had dreamed of his statue running with blood. Caesar ignored both warnings. The conspirators, numbering at least sixty senators led by Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus, had convinced themselves that killing the dictator would restore the Roman Republic. Caesar was struck twenty-three times, though a physician later determined that only one wound, a thrust between the ribs, was fatal. The assassination achieved the opposite of its intended purpose: rather than restoring republican government, it triggered a series of civil wars that destroyed the Republic entirely and culminated in the establishment of the Roman Empire under Caesar's adopted heir, Octavian, who became Augustus.

The conspirators cornered Julius Caesar in the portico of Pompey's Theatre on March 15, 44 BC, with Tillius Cimber presenting a petition as the signal to attack. Servilius Casca struck first, stabbing Caesar in the neck, but the wound was not fatal. Caesar grabbed Casca's arm and stabbed him with his stylus, shouting 'Casca, you villain, what are you doing?' The other conspirators rushed in. Caesar fought back initially but collapsed at the base of Pompey's statue after receiving twenty-three stab wounds. He reportedly pulled his toga over his face as he fell. The ancient historian Suetonius recorded that a physician found only one wound, between the ribs, to be mortal. Massive blood loss killed him. The Senate fled in panic. Brutus attempted to address the crowd but found the Forum empty. Caesar's body lay where it fell for three hours before his slaves carried it home on a litter. Mark Antony's funeral oration three days later turned the Roman mob against the conspirators and launched the civil wars that ended the Republic.

Dr. Bernard Fantus established the world's first hospital blood bank at Cook County Hospital in Chicago on March 15, 1937, creating a system where donated blood could be stored, typed, and cross-matched for transfusion on demand. Before Fantus's innovation, blood transfusions required finding a compatible donor at the moment of need, a process so unreliable that many patients bled to death while waiting. Fantus coined the term 'blood bank,' drawing an analogy to financial banking: donors made deposits, patients made withdrawals. He preserved blood using sodium citrate as an anticoagulant and refrigerated it at 4 degrees Celsius, extending its usable life to roughly ten days. The system was immediately adopted by hospitals across the United States and proved its value during World War II, when battlefield blood banks saved thousands of soldiers who would have died from hemorrhagic shock. The Red Cross launched its national blood collection program in 1948 based on Fantus's model.

President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress on March 15, 1965, eight days after Bloody Sunday in Selma, and uttered words that stunned the nation: 'And we shall overcome.' The phrase, borrowed from the civil rights movement's anthem, signaled that the federal government had fully embraced the cause. Johnson's speech demanded immediate passage of voting rights legislation, declaring that 'it is wrong, deadly wrong, to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote.' Martin Luther King Jr. watched the speech on television and wept. The Voting Rights Act, signed into law on August 6, 1965, outlawed literacy tests and other discriminatory voting practices, authorized federal registrars to enroll voters in counties where less than 50 percent of eligible minorities were registered, and required jurisdictions with histories of discrimination to obtain federal approval before changing voting laws. Within four years, Black voter registration in Mississippi jumped from 6.7 percent to 59.8 percent.

Christopher Columbus returned to Palos de la Frontera, Spain, on March 15, 1493, after a seven-month voyage that had taken him to the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola. He brought back gold trinkets, exotic parrots, a few tobacco leaves, and six Taino captives whom he presented to Ferdinand and Isabella as proof of his discovery. The monarchs were thrilled. Columbus was paraded through the streets, appointed Viceroy of the Indies, and immediately authorized to mount a second expedition with seventeen ships and over 1,200 men. The consequences were catastrophic for the indigenous populations: European diseases, particularly smallpox, preceded the colonizers and devastated communities that had no natural immunity. Within fifty years, the Taino population of Hispaniola collapsed from roughly 250,000 to fewer than 500. Columbus himself never realized he had found a new continent. He died in 1506 still insisting he had reached the eastern coast of Asia.

Symbolics Inc., a Massachusetts computer company specializing in Lisp machines, registered symbolics.com on March 15, 1985, making it the first dot-com domain name ever registered. The Domain Name System had been introduced just a year earlier, replacing the cumbersome HOSTS.TXT file that had previously mapped names to internet addresses. Symbolics had no particular strategic vision for its domain; it was simply among the earliest companies to adopt the new naming convention. Only five more dot-com domains were registered in all of 1985. By 1987, there were only 100. The explosion came later: by 2000, over 20 million dot-com names had been claimed, and the domain extension had become synonymous with the internet itself. Symbolics went bankrupt in the 1990s, and its historic domain was eventually sold to a small investment group. The first dot-com registration is now a footnote to a digital revolution that Symbolics itself did not survive to participate in.

German King Henry I (Henry the Fowler) defeated a Hungarian raiding army at the Battle of Riade in March 933, breaking the cycle of devastating Magyar incursions that had terrorized Central Europe for decades. Henry had purchased a nine-year truce with the Hungarians in 924, using the breathing space to fortify towns, build a heavy cavalry force, and train his soldiers in coordinated tactics. When the truce expired and the Hungarians returned, they faced a transformed German military. Henry's armored cavalry overwhelmed the Magyar horse archers in a pitched battle near the Unstrut River. The victory did not eliminate the Hungarian threat entirely, but it demonstrated that the nomadic raiders could be beaten using Western military methods. Henry's son, Otto I, completed the work at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955, ending the Hungarian invasions permanently. Henry's military reforms and fortress-building program laid the foundation for the powerful medieval German kingdom that his descendants would transform into the Holy Roman Empire.