March 15 was “the Ides of March” in the Roman calendar. On that date in 44 BC, Julius Caesar, Dictator of the Roman Republic, was stabbed to death by a handful of prominent senators.
On the same date in AD 1783, General George Washington eloquently entreated his officers not to support the Newburgh Conspiracy. His plea was successful: the threatened coup d’état never took place.
The Truce of Ulm was signed in Ulm, Baden-Württemberg, on March 14, 1647, between France, Sweden, and Bavaria. This treaty was developed after France and Sweden invaded Bavaria during the Thirty Years’ War.
1781 — William Herschel discovered Uranus.
1809 — Sweden’s King Gustav IV Adolf was deposed in the Coup of 1809, a political result of the disastrous Finnish War with the Russian Empire.
1814 — The Congress of Vienna declared Napoleon an outlaw following his escape from Elba.
1930 — News of the discovery of Pluto was announced by the Lowell Observatory. Then called the Ninth Planet, it was the result of a long search for “Planet X,” a theorized planet influencing the orbit of Neptune, the ice giant planet beyond Uranus. Clyde W. Tombaugh had discovered it the month before, on February 18. In 2006, in a grand gesture of logomachy, the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto to “dwarf planet.” Pluto and its moons — Charon; Styx; Nix; Kerberos; and Hydra — are also now officially considered “trans-Neptunian objects.”
1969 — Apollo 9 returned safely to Earth after testing NASA’s $2.29 billion Lunar Excursion Module, overseen by Grumman.
Mahatma Gandhi began the Salt March, a 200-mile march to the sea, to protest the British monopoly on salt in India, on March 12, 1930.
March 11, 2010 — minutes before being sworn in as President of Chile, economist and businessman Sebastián Piñera is shaken as an earthquake hits central Chile and aftershocks disturb the ceremony.
On March 10, 1922, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869 – 1948), activist and theorist of non-violent revolution, was arrested in India, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years in prison, only to be released nearly two years later for an appendicitis operation.