| On this date in: |
| 44 B.C. | Roman dictator Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of nobles that included Brutus and Cassius. |
| 1493 | Christopher Columbus returned to Spain, concluding his first voyage to the Western Hemisphere. |
| 1820 | Maine became the 23rd state. |
| 1875 | The Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York City, John McCloskey, was named the first American cardinal by Pope Pius IX. |
| 1913 | President Woodrow Wilson held the first open presidential news conference. |
| 1919 | The American Legion was founded in Paris. |
| 1956 | The Lerner and Loewe musical "My Fair Lady" opened on Broadway. |
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| 1964 | Actress Elizabeth Taylor and actor Richard Burton were married. |
| 1965 | Addressing a joint session of Congress, President Lyndon B. Johnson called for new legislation to guarantee every American's right to vote. |
| 1975 | Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, the husband of former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, died at age 69. |
| 2003 | Hu Jintao was chosen to replace Jiang Zemin as the president of China. |
| 2003 | The World Health Organization issued a worldwide health alert for the respiratory illness SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome). |
| 2004 | Martha Stewart resigned from the board of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia 10 days after she was convicted in a stock scandal. |
| 2005 | Former WorldCom chief Bernard Ebbers was convicted of engineering an $11 billion accounting fraud that toppled his company. (He was later sentenced to 25 years in prison.) |
