[Amnorix]

March 15.

44 BC. Beware the Ides of March. Julius Caesar is murdered by Brutus and several other Roman Senators.

1493. Christopher Columbus returns to Spain after his first trip to the Americas.

1545. The Council of Trent convenes for the first time. One of the most important ecumenical councils of the Catholic Church, it is the last to be held for nearly 300 years.

1783. George Washington, in Newburgh, New York, makes a plea to his army and officers not to support the Newburgh Conspiracy -- a proposed coup d'etat by many of the army's soldiers and officers to ensure that they are paid the many years of back pay they are owed. His plea succeeds and the plot is abandoned.

1939. After the Nazi German annexation of the Sudentenland in the fall of the previous year, Germany marches into the now essentially defenseless remainder of Czechoslovakia (Bohemia and Moravia) and incorporates the rest of the country with nary a shot fired.

1952. In Ciliaos, Reunion, an island in the Indian Ocean to the East of Madagascar, 73 inches of rain falls in one day, setting a new world record (that we only hope is never broken. Yeesh)