February 14th
 

1766 ~ Birthday of Thomas Malthus, population expert.

1779 ~ Captain James Cook is murdered by natives of Hawaii during his third visit to the Pacific island group.

1929 ~ St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago - 7 gangsters killed.

1974 ~ Soviet authorities formally charge Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn with treason one day after expelling him from the country.

1989 ~ Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini has issued a death threat against author Salman Rushdie and his publishers over the book “Satanic Verses”.

February 15th
 

1564 ~ Birthday of Galileo Galilei, in Pisa, Italy. Excellent Scientist and Astronomer, but injudicious Author.

1820 ~ Birthday of Susan B. Anthony, who crusaded against slavery, was active in the temperance movement, and helped launch and then sustain the struggle to gain the vote for women.

1898 ~ A massive explosion of unknown origin sinks the battleship USS Maine in Cuba's Havana harbor, killing 260 of the approximately 400 crew members aboard.

1942 ~ The supposedly impregnable Singapore fortress surrenders to Japanese forces after a weeklong siege.

1950 ~ The Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, the two largest communist nations in the world, announce the signing of a mutual defense and assistance treaty, which many at the time viewed as proof positive that communism was a monolithic movement.

1965 ~ In accordance with a proclamation by Queen Elizabeth, a new Canadian national flag, red and white, with a stylized 11-point red maple leaf in its center, is raised above Parliament Hill in Ottawa.

1971 ~ The British Government launched a new decimal currency. The familiar pound (£), shilling (s) and pence (d) coins were phased out over the next 18 months in favor of a system dividing the pound into units of ten, including half, one, two, five, ten and 50 pence denominations.

Feruary 16th
 

1600 ~ Giordano Bruno burned at stake

1923 ~ Howard Carter finds the tomb of Pharoah Tutankhamen.

1945 ~ The Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines is reoccupied by American troops, almost three years after the infamous "Bataan Death March".

1951 ~ In a statement focusing on the situation in Korea, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin charges that the United Nations has become "a weapon of aggressive war."

1959 ~ Fidel Castro, aged 32, sworn in as Cuban Prime Minister.

1979 ~ The Bee Gees receive the Grammy for Best Album of 1978 for "Saturday Night Fever".

This Day In History | Civil War

February 16

1862 Capture of Fort Donelson

General Ulysses S. Grant finishes a spectacular campaign by capturing Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River in Tennessee. This battle came ten days after Grant's capture of Fort Henry, just ten miles to the west on the Tennessee River, and opened the way for Union occupation of central Tennessee.
This Day In History | Old West

February 16

1878 Silver dollars made legal

Strongly supported by western mining interests and farmers, the Bland-Allison Act-which provided for a return to the minting of silver coins--becomes the law of the land.

This Day In History | Crime

February 16

1894 John Wesley Hardin is pardoned

Infamous gunslinger John Wesley Hardin is pardoned after spending 15 years in a Texas prison for murder. Hardin, who was reputed to have shot and killed a man just for snoring, was 41 years old at the time of his release.

Hardin probably killed in excess of 40 people during a six-year stretch beginning in 1868. When he was only 15, Hardin killed an ex-slave in a fight, becoming a wanted fugitive. Two years later, he was arrested for murder in Waco, Texas. Although it was actually one of the few he had not committed, Hardin did not want to run the risk of being convicted and escaped to the town of Abilene.

At that time, Abilene was run by Wild Bill Hickok, who was friendly with Hardin. However, one night Hardin was disturbed by the snoring in an adjacent hotel room and fired two shots through the wall, killing the man. Fearing that not even Wild Bill would stand for such a senseless crime, Hardin moved on again.

On May 26, 1874, Hardin was celebrating his 21st birthday when he got into an altercation with a man who fired the first shot. Hardin fired back and killed the man. A few years later, Hardin was tracked down in Florida and brought to trial. Because it was one of the more defensible shootings on Hardin's record, he was spared the gallows and given a life sentence. After his pardon, he moved to El Paso and became an attorney. But his past caught up with him, and the following year he was shot in the back as revenge for one of his many murders.

On Feb. 16, 1923, the burial chamber of King Tutankhamen's recently unearthed tomb was unsealed in Egypt.

February 17th
 

1801 ~ House breaks electoral college tie, and Vice President Thomas Jefferson is finally elected the third president of the United States over his running mate, Aaron Burr.

1817 ~ Baltimore becomes 1st US city lit by gas.

1867 ~ Birthday of William Cadbury, English chocolate manufacturer.

1947 ~ The U.S. Voice of America (VOA) begins its first radio broadcasts to the Soviet Union.

1972 ~ The 15,007,034th Volkswagen Beetle rolled off the production line, surpassing the Ford Model T’s previous production record to become the most produced car in history.

1979 ~ Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" debuts.

1979 ~ In response to the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia (a client state of China), China launches an invasion of Vietnam.

This Day In History | Civil War

February 17

1865 Sherman sacks Columbia, South Carolina

The soldiers from Union General William Tecumseh Sherman's army ransack Columbia, South Carolina, and leave a charred city in their wake.
This Day In History | World War II

February 17

1944 U.S. troops land on Eniwetok atoll

Operation Catchpole is launched as American troops devastate the Japanese defenders of Eniwetok and take control of the atoll in the northwestern part of the Marshall Islands.
This Day In History | Old West

February 17

1820 Senate passes Missouri Compromise

The Senate passes the Missouri Compromise, an attempt to deal with the dangerously divisive issue of extending slavery into the western territories.

On Feb. 17, 1972, President Nixon departed on his historic trip to China.

This Day In History | General Interest

February 18

1930 Ninth planet discovered

Pluto, generally the ninth most distant planet from the sun, is discovered at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, by astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh.
1967 J. Robert Oppenheimer dies

On February 18, 1967, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb," dies in Princeton, New Jersey, at the age of 62.

This Day In History | World War II

February 18

1943 Nazis arrest White Rose resistance leaders

Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie, the leaders of the German youth group Weisse Rose (White Rose), are arrested by the Gestapo for opposing the Nazi regime.

his Day In History | Civil War

February 18

1827 Lewis Armistead born

Confederate General Lewis Armistead is born in New Bern, North Carolina. Armistead is best known for leading Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, where he was mortally wounded.

This Day In History | Old West

February 18

1878 Murder ignites Lincoln County War

Long simmering tensions in Lincoln County, New Mexico, explode into a bloody shooting war when gunmen murder the English rancher John Tunstall.

February 18th
 

1516 ~ Birthday of Queen Mary I, 1st reigning queen of Great Britain.

1745 ~ Birthday of Allesandro Volta, inventor of the battery.

1885 ~ Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" published

1898 ~ Birthday of Enzo Ferrari, well known in auto racing circles.

1929 ~ 1st Academy Awards announced. “Wings” won the Best Picture award.

1933 ~ Birthday of Yoko Ono.

1954 ~ The Secretary of the Army, Robert T. Stevens, ordered two generals to ignore their subpoenas from Senator McCarthy - head of the Senate's Permanent Investigations sub-committee.

1969 ~ Lulu (Shout, To Sir With Love) marries Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees.

1984 ~ Revised Concordat between Italy & the Vatican signed.

On Feb. 18, 1861, Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederate States of America in Montgomery, Ala.

This Day In History | General Interest


COPERNICUS BORN:
February 19, 1473

On February 19, 1473, Nicolaus Copernicus
is born in Torun, a city in north-central
Poland on the Vistula River. The father of
modern astronomy, he was the first modern
European scientist to propose that Earth and
other planets revolve around the sun.

February 19
1942 Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066

Ten weeks after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, U.S. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, authorizing the
removal of any or all people from military areas "as deemed necessary
or desirable." The military in turn defined the entire West Coast, home
to the majority of Americans of Japanese ancestry or citizenship, as a
military area. By June, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans were
relocated to remote internment camps built by the U.S. military in
scattered locations around the country. For the next two and a half
years, many of these Japanese Americans endured extremely difficult
living conditions and poor treatment by their military guards.




This Day In History | World War II

February 19

1945 Marines invade Iwo Jima

On this day, Operation Detachment, the U.S. Marines' invasion of
Iwo Jima, is launched. Iwo Jima was a barren Pacific island guarded
by Japanese artillery, but to American military minds, it was prime real
estate on which to build airfields to launch bombing raids against
Japan, only 660 miles away.

February 19th
 

1797 ~ Almost 33% of papal domain ceded to France.

1878 ~ Thomas Edison patented the gramophone (phonograph).

1943 ~ Birthday of "Mama" Cass Elliot, actress/singer (Mamas & Papas-Monday Monday).

1960 ~ Birthday of Prince Andrew of England.

1986 ~ USSR launched Mir space station.

1997 ~ China's reformist leader Deng Xiaoping died at the age of 92.

February 20th
 

1816 ~ Rossini's opera "The Barber of Seville" premiers in Rome.

1902 ~ Birthday of photographer Ansel Adams.

1904 ~ Birthday of Aleksei N Kosygin, Soviet premier (1964-80).

1924 ~ Birthday of Sidney Poitier, actor (Porgy & Bess, A Raisin in the Sun, Guess who's Coming to Dinner, To Sir With Love).

1941 ~ First transport of Jews to concentration camp in Plotsk, Poland.

1954 ~ Birthday of Patty Hearst Shaw, famous kidnap hostage (Tanya).

1958 ~ The Sheerness docks closed. The first secretary of the Admiralty, Samuel Pepys, established the dockyard in the 17th century as an extension to the Royal Navy headquarters in nearby Chatham, which was itself later closed and became a Naval Museum.

1962 ~ Marine Lieutenant John Glenn, becomes the first American to orbit the Earth, as he circled the globe three times. He was fortunate enough to return to orbit aboard the Space Shuttle in 1998.

Now there’s a man I envy!

jseal, you're doing a wonderful job....

but damn.... I miss DM. :(