44 BC – Julius Caesar, Dictator of the Roman Republic, is stabbed to death by Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus, Decimus Junius Brutus, and several other Roman senators on the Ides of March.
856 – Michael III, emperor of the Byzantine Empire, overthrows the regency of his mother, empress Theodora (wife of Theophilos) with support of the Byzantine nobility.
493 – Christopher Columbus returns to Spain after his first trip to the Americas.
1783 – In an emotional speech in Newburgh, New York, George Washington asks his officers not to support the Newburgh Conspiracy. The plea is successful and the threatened coup d’йtat never takes place.
1819 – French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel wins a contest at the Acadйmie 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.
1874 – France and Vietnam sign the Second Treaty of Saigon, further recognizing the full sovereignty of France over Cochinchina.
1906 – Rolls-Royce Limited is incorporated.
1916 – President Woodrow Wilson sends 4,800 United States troops over the U.S.–Mexico border to pursue Pancho Villa.
1922 – After Egypt gains nominal independence from the United Kingdom, Fuad I becomes King of Egypt.
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.
1951 – Iranian oil industry is nationalized.
1990 – Mikhail Gorbachev is elected as the first President of the Soviet Union.
