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Highlights for March 15
44BC BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH:
Gaius Julius Caesar, dictator of Rome, is stabbed to death in the Roman Senate by his own senators at a meeting near Pompeii’s Theatre. The conspiracy against Caesar encompassed as many as 60 noblemen, including Caesar’s own protégé, Marcus Brutus.
Caesar was scheduled to leave Rome to fight in a war on March 18, and had appointed loyal members of his army to rule the Empire in his absence. The Republican senators, already chafing at having to abide by Caesar’s decrees, were particularly angry about the prospect of taking orders from Caesar’s underlings. Cassius Longinus began plotting against the dictator, quickly recruiting his brother-in-law Marcus Brutus to join. Caesar should have been well aware that many of the senators hated him, but he dismissed his security force not long before his assassination. Reportedly, Caesar was handed a warning note as he entered the senate meeting that day, but did not read it. After entering the hall with Mark Antony, Caesar was surrounded by senators holding daggers. Casca struck the first blow, hitting Caesar in the neck and drawing blood. The other senators all joined in, stabbing him repeatedly about the head.
After being wounded in the groin by Marcus Brutus, Caesar was said to have remarked (in Greek), "You, too, my child."Caesar, born into the Julii, an ancient but not particularly distinguished Roman aristocratic family, began his political career in 78 B.C. as a prosecutor for the anti-patrician Popular Party. He won influence in the party for his reformist ideas and oratorical skills, and aided Roman imperial efforts by raising a private army to combat the king of Pontus in 74 B.C. He was an ally of Pompey, the recognized head of the Popular Party, and essentially took over this position after Pompey left Rome in 67 B.C. to become commander of Roman forces in the east.
In 63 B.C., Caesar was elected pontifex maximus, or "high priest," allegedly by heavy bribes. Two years later, he was made governor of Farther Spain and in 64 B.C. returned to Rome, ambitious for the office of consul. The consulship, essentially the highest office in the Roman Republic, was shared by two politicians on an annual basis. Consuls commanded the army, presided over the Senate and executed its decrees, and represented the state in foreign affairs. Caesar formed a political alliance--the so-called First Triumvirate--with Pompey and Marcus Licinius Crassus, the wealthiest man in Rome, and in 59 B.C. was elected consul. Although generally opposed by the majority of the Roman Senate, Caesar's land reforms won him popularity with many Romans.
In 58 B.C., Caesar was given four Roman legions in Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum, and during the next decade demonstrated brilliant military talents as he expanded the Roman Empire and his reputation. Among other achievements, Caesar conquered all of Gaul, made the first Roman inroads into Britain, and won devoted supporters in his legions. However, his successes also aroused Pompey's jealousy, leading to the collapse of their political alliance in 53 B.C.
The Roman Senate supported Pompey and asked Caesar to give up his army, which he refused to do. In January 49 B.C., Caesar led his legions across the Rubicon River from Cisalpine Gaul to Italy, thus declaring war against Pompey and his forces. Caesar made early gains in the subsequent civil war, defeating Pompey's army in Italy and Spain, but was later forced into retreat in Greece. In August 48 B.C., with Pompey in pursuit, Caesar paused near Pharsalus, setting up camp at a strategic location. When Pompey's senatorial forces fell upon Caesar's smaller army, they were entirely routed, and Pompey fled to Egypt, where he was assassinated by an officer of the Egyptian king.
Caesar was subsequently appointed Roman consul and dictator, but before settling in Rome he traveled around the empire for several years and consolidated his rule. In 45 B.C., he returned to Rome and was made dictator for life. As sole Roman ruler, Caesar launched ambitious programs of reform within the empire. The most lasting of these was his establishment of the Julian calendar, which, with the exception of a slight modification and adjustment in the 16th century, remains in use today. He also planned new imperial expansions in central Europe and to the east.
In the midst of these vast designs, Caesar was assassinated on March 15, 44 B.C., by a group of conspirators who believed that his death would lead to the restoration of the Roman Republic. However, the result of the "Ides of March" was to plunge Rome into a fresh round of civil wars, Antony attempted to carry out Caesar’s legacy. However, Caesar’s will left his grandnephew Octavius in charge. Cassius and Brutus tried to rally a Republican army and Brutus even issued coins celebrating the assassination, known as the Ides of March. Octavius, vowing revenge against the assassins, defeated and killed both Cassius and Brutus two years later. Antony took his armies east, where he hooked up with Caesar’s old paramour, Cleopatra. Octavius and Antony fought for many years before Octavius finally prevailed. In 30 B.C., Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide together. Octavian, Caesar's grand-nephew, would emerge as Augustus, the first Roman emperor, destroying the republic forever.
Andrew Jackson is born in the Garden of the Waxhaws, South Carolina.
The son of Irish immigrants, Jackson spent much of his early life in the rough-and-tumble frontier regions of South Carolina and Tennessee. His father died from injuries sustained while lifting a heavy log, and his mother was left with few resources to support the family. Jackson received only a minimal formal education, but he learned a great deal about the practical realities of frontier life by mixing with the rowdy frontiersmen around him.
As a young man, Jackson settled in the still relatively untamed Tennessee area, where he worked as a self-taught lawyer. After playing an important role in winning statehood for Tennessee, Jackson became the state's first federal congressman. He achieved national recognition during the War of 1812 for his victories over both Indian and British warriors, paving the way for his election to the presidency in 1828.
Jackson represented a sharp break from the presidents who preceded him, all of whom had been well-educated men born to privilege. Americans eager to create a more democratic nation embraced the rough-hewn Jackson as their leader, celebrating him as a representation of the egalitarian spirit of the frontier. Jackson played to these sentiments, although he was no frontiersman in comparison to trailblazers and explorers like Daniel Boone or John Sevier. Still, Jackson was a man who had risen from backwoods poverty to become a successful lawyer, farmer, officer, and politician-a path to success that many average Americans hoped they might follow.
More than any other president, Jackson was associated with westward expansion. A notorious Indian fighter as a young man, Jackson believed that Indians were obstacles to American progress. Once elected president, Jackson supported and vigorously executed the goals of the Removal Act of 1830, which cleared Indians from large areas of the frontier and opened the land to Anglo settlement. Jackson's election to the presidency also signaled a sharp shift in the American view of frontier inhabitants. Previously seen as slovenly, lazy, and ill-educated troublemakers who interfered with elite plans for an orderly settlement of the West, frontiersmen started to be regarded as the archetypal American hero.
During Jackson's presidency, Americans embraced a powerful new unifying myth that the nation's frontier experience would foster democracy, equality, and strength. Throughout his life, and even well after his death in 1845, Jackson symbolized and embodied this new American fascination with the tranformative power of the western frontier.
Jackson's Page
As part of the Missouri Compromise between the North and the South, Maine is 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.
In 1604, French explorer Samuel de Champlain visited the coast of Maine and claimed it as part of the French province of Acadia. However, French attempts to settle Maine were thwarted when British forces under Sir Samuel Argall destroyed a colony on Mount Desert Island in 1613. Sir Ferdinando Gorges, a leading figure in the Plymouth Company, initiated British settlement in Maine after receiving a grant and royal charter, and upon Gorges' death in 1647 the Massachusetts Bay Colony claimed jurisdiction. Gorges' heirs disputed this claim until 1677, when Massachusetts agreed to purchase Gorges' original proprietary rights.
As part of Massachusetts, Maine developed early fishing, lumbering, and shipbuilding industries and in 1820 was granted statehood. In the 19th century, the promise of jobs in the timber industry lured many French Canadians to Maine from the Canadian province of Quebec, which borders the state to the west. With 90 percent of Maine still covered by forests, Maine is known as the "Pine Tree State" and is the most sparsely populated state east of the Mississippi River.
1917 Czar Nicholas II abdicates
During the February Revolution, Czar Nicholas II, ruler of Russia since 1894, is forced to abdicate the throne by the Petrograd insurgents, and a provincial government is installed in his place.
Crowned on May 26, 1894, Nicholas was neither trained nor inclined to rule, which did not help the autocracy he sought to preserve in an era desperate for change. The disastrous outcome of the Russo-Japanese War led to the Russian Revolution of 1905, which the czar diffused only after signing a manifesto promising representative government and basic civil liberties in Russia. However, Nicholas soon retracted most of these concessions, and the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary groups won wide support. In 1914, Nicholas led his country into another costly war, and discontent in Russia grew as food became scarce, soldiers became war-weary, and devastating defeats on the eastern front demonstrated the czar's ineffectual leadership.
In March 1917, the army garrison at Petrograd joined striking workers in demanding socialist reforms, and Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate. Nicholas and his family were first held at the Czarskoye Selo palace, then in the Yekaterinburg palace near Tobolsk. In July 1918, the advance of counterrevolutionary forces caused the Yekaterinburg Soviet forces to fear that Nicholas might be rescued. After a secret meeting, a death sentence was passed on the imperial family, and Nicholas, his wife, his children, and several of their servants were gunned down on the night of July 16
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