| 270:
|
Martyrdom of Valentine
|
| 433:
|
Death of St. Maro
|
| 842:
|
Oaths of Strasbourg
|
| 1009:
|
Massacre of St. Bruno of Querfurt and his party, by Lithuanians
|
| 1014:
|
Coronation of Henry II, "the Saint" as Holy Roman Emperor
|
| 1130:
|
Election of Innocent II as Pope
|
| 1349:
|
2,000 Jews are burned at the stake in Strasbourg, Germany
|
| 1400:
|
Murder of Richard II, King of England
|
| 1432:
|
Entrance of Henry VI, King of England and France, into London
|
| 1473:
|
Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus born
|
| 1489:
|
Treaty of Dordrecht
|
| 1549:
|
Death of Giovanni Bazzi
|
| 1549:
|
Maximillian II is recognized as the future King of Bohemia
|
| 1564:
|
Michelangelo falls ill
|
| 1571:
|
Death of Benevenuto Cellini
|
| 1613:
|
Marriage of Fredrick V Elector Palantine and Princess Elizabeth of England
|
| 1613:
|
William Shakespeare's "The Tempest" first performed
|
| 1760:
|
Richard Allen, 1st black ordained by a Methodist-Episcopal church born
|
| 1778:
|
The American ship Ranger carried the recently adopted Star and Stripes to a foreign port for the first time as it arrived in France
|
| 1779:
|
American Loyalists are defeated by Patriots at Kettle Creek, Georgia
|
| 1803:
|
Moses Coast received a patent on the apple parer
|
| 1813:
|
An early Russian opera composer, Alexander Dargomyzhsky, composer of "Rusalka." It was later said he had not learned to talk for six years. born
|
| 1847:
|
Anna Howard Shaw, U.S. suffragette born
|
| 1848:
|
President Polk became the first chief executive to be photographed while in office as he posed for Matthew Brady in New York
|
| 1859:
|
George Washington Gale Ferris, inventor of the Ferris Wheel born
|
| 1859:
|
Oregon was admitted to the Union as the 33rd state
|
| 1870:
|
Esther Morris becomes the world's first female justice of the peace
|
| 1876:
|
Inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray applied separately for patents related to the telephone. (The US Supreme Court eventually ruled Bell the rightful inventor.)
|
| 1886:
|
The West Coast citrus industry was born. The first trainload of oranges left Los Angeles for eastern markets
|
| 1894:
|
Comedian Jack Benny (Benjamin Kubelsky) in Waukegan, Illinois. born
|
| 1895:
|
Oscar Wilde's final play, "The Importance of Being Earnest," opened at the St. James's Theatre in London
|
| 1899:
|
Voting machines for use in federal elections were approved by the U.S. Congress
|
| 1900:
|
General Roberts invades South Africa's Orange Free State with 20,000 British troops
|
| 1903:
|
President Theodore Roosevelt signed a law creating a Department of Commerce and Labor
|
| 1904:
|
The "Missouri Kid" is captured in Kansas
|
| 1908:
|
Russia and Britain threaten action in Macedonia if peace is not reached soon
|
| 1912:
|
Arizona became the 48th state of the Union
|
| 1913:
|
Teamsters union president Jimmy Hoffa born
|
| 1913:
|
Sportscaster Mel (Israel) Allen born
|
| 1915:
|
The Kaiser invites the U.S. Ambassador Gerard to Berlin in order to confer on the war
|
| 1918:
|
Warsaw demonstrators protest the transfer of Polish territory to the Ukraine
|
| 1918:
|
The motion picture, "Tarzan of the Apes", was released. The film was based on a series of stories written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The movie focused on 10-year-old Gordon Griffith who played Tarzan as a boy. An older Tarzan was played by Elmo Lincoln
|
| 1919:
|
The United Parcel Service is incorporated in Oakland, California
|
| 1920:
|
The League of Women Voters was founded in Chicago; its first president was Maude Wood Park
|
| 1921:
|
Broadcaster Hugh Downs (The Jack Paar Show, Concentration, Today, 20/20) born
|
| 1924:
|
Thomas Watson founds International Business Machines Corp
|
| 1928:
|
Explorer Peter Gimbel born
|
| 1928:
|
Astronaut Frank Borman born
|
| 1929:
|
The "St. Valentine's Day Massacre" took place in a Chicago garage as seven rivals of Al Capone's gang were gunned down
|
| 1931:
|
Singer Phyllis McGuire (The McGuire Sisters Sugartime) born
|
| 1932:
|
The U.S. won the first bobsled competition at the Winter Olympic Games at Lake Placid, New York
|
| 1933:
|
An eight-day bank holiday was declared in Michigan in a Depression-era move to avert a financial panic. $50 million was rushed to Detroit to bolster bank assets
|
| 1934:
|
Actress-singer Florence Henderson (The Brady Bunch) born
|
| 1935:
|
Golf champion Mickey (Mary) Wright born
|
| 1936:
|
Actor Andrew Prine (The Miracle Worker, Gettysburg, The Devil's Brigade) born
|
| 1939:
|
Country singer Razzy Bailey. born
|
| 1939:
|
The Reich launches the battleship Bismark
|
| 1940:
|
Britain announces that all merchant ships will be armed
|
| 1940:
|
The first porpoise born in captivity arrived at Marineland in Florida
|
| 1941:
|
Secretary of Health and Human Rights Donna Shalala born
|
| 1941:
|
"Reflections in a Golden Eye" by Carson McCullers was first published
|
| 1944:
|
Journalist Carl Bernstein. born
|
| 1945:
|
Peru, Paraguay, Chile and Ecuador joined the United Nations
|
| 1946:
|
Actor-dancer Gregory Hines. born
|
| 1948:
|
TV personality Pat O'Brien born
|
| 1948:
|
Magician Teller (Penn and Teller) born
|
| 1949:
|
The United States charges the U.S.S.R. with interning up to 14 million in labor camps
|
| 1950:
|
Rock musician (Heart) Roger Fisher born
|
| 1951:
|
Cajun singer-musician Michael Doucet (Beausoleil). born
|
| 1951:
|
Ice skater (Alicia) Jo Jo Starbuck born
|
| 1955:
|
A Jewish couple loses their fight to adopt Catholic twins as the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to rule on state law
|
| 1956:
|
Actor Ken Wahl. born
|
| 1956:
|
The 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party opened, during which Nikita Khruschev denounced the policies of Joseph Stalin
|
| 1957:
|
Georgia Senate outlaws interracial athletics
|
| 1960:
|
Actress Meg Tilly. born
|
| 1962:
|
First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy conducted a televised tour of the White House. It was the first public peek into the Presidential back rooms and bedrooms and drew a record audience of 80 million
|
| 1964:
|
Actor Zach Galligan born
|
| 1965:
|
Malcolm X's home is firebombed. No injuries are reported
|
| 1966:
|
Rock musician Ricky Wolking (The Nixons) born
|
| 1966:
|
Rick Mount of Lebanon, Indiana, became the first, high school, male athlete to be pictured on the cover of Sports Illustrated
|
| 1967:
|
Tennis player Manuela Maleeva-Fragniere. born
|
| 1971:
|
Moscow publicizes a new five-year plan geared to expanding consumer production
|
| 1972:
|
Rock singer Rob Thomas (Matchbox Twenty) born
|
| 1972:
|
The musical, "Grease," opened at the Eden Theater on Broadway. The play later moved to the Broadhurst Theater where it became the longest-running musical (at that time - CATS has since passed this record) ever with a run of 3,388 performances
|
| 1979:
|
Adolph Dubs, the US ambassador to Afghanistan, was kidnapped in Kabul by Muslim extremists and killed in a shootout between his abductors and police
|
| 1980:
|
CBS announced that Dan Rather had been chosen to succeed Walter Cronkite as anchorman and managing editor of The CBS Evening News the following year
|
| 1983:
|
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin appointed Moshe Arens, Israel's ambassador to the United States, to be defense minister, replacing Ariel Sharon
|
| 1984:
|
Six-year-old Stormie Jones became the world's first heart-liver transplant recipient at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh (she lived until November 1990)
|
| 1984:
|
British rocker Elton John married Renata Blauel in Sydney, Australia
|
| 1985:
|
Cable News Network reporter Jeremy Levin, who was being held hostage by extremists in Lebanon, was freed
|
| 1986:
|
The government reported that collapsing world oil prices sent U.S. wholesale prices plunging seven-tenths of one percent in January 1986
|
| 1987:
|
Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov addressed a closed-door session of a Kremlin-sponsored peace forum. Participants quoted Sakharov as calling for more democracy in the Soviet Union
|
| 1988:
|
Hours after learning that his sister had died of leukemia, American David Jansen lost his bid for a gold medal at the Winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada, when he fell during the 500-meter speed-skating event
|
| 1988:
|
Broadway composer Frederick Loewe, who wrote the scores for "My Fair Lady" and "Camelot," died in Palm Springs, California, at age 86
|
| 1989:
|
Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini called on Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie author of the novel "The Satanic Verses," a work condemned as blasphemous throughout the Islamic world
|
| 1989:
|
Union Carbide Corporation of the U.S. accepted an Indian Supreme Court ruling that it pay $470 million in compensation for the 1984 Bhopal poison gas disaster
|
| 1990:
|
94 people were killed when an Indian Airlines passenger jet crashed while landing at a southern Indian airport
|
| 1991:
|
Iraq charged the bombing of an underground facility the day before, which killed hundreds of civilians, was a deliberate attack on an air raid shelter, a charge denied by the United States
|
| 1991:
|
Two San Francisco men became the first couple to register as "domestic partners" under a new city ordinance
|
| 1992:
|
The former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Moldova and Azerbaijan rejected a proposal for a unified army, handing a sharp rebuff to Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin
|
| 1992:
|
American speed skater Bonnie Blair won her second gold medal of the Albertville Olympics, in the one-thousand meters event
|
| 1993:
|
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Elliott Carter finished composing a 20-minute piece called "Partita" for the Chicago Symphony. Carter says "Partita" aims to depict the sense of motion in a floating bubble
|
| 1993:
|
The body of James Bulger, a two-year-old boy who had been lured away from his mother in a Liverpool, England, shopping mall two days earlier, was found along a stretch of railroad track. (Two boys who were ten years old at the time were later convicted of murdering James.)
|
| 1994:
|
President Clinton used his first annual economic report to proclaim his policies had put the country on track for rising prosperity for years to come
|
| 1994:
|
At the Winter Olympics in Norway, speedskater Dan Jansen slipped and fell during the 500 meters race
|
| 1995:
|
A federal judge rejected the Justice Department's proposed antitrust settlement with Microsoft Corporation; U.S. District Judge Stanley Sporkin was later overruled
|
| 1995:
|
The House passed the centerpiece of the Republican anti-crime package, voting to create block grants for local governments while eliminating President Clinton's program to hire more police
|
| 1996:
|
Texas Senator Phil Gramm bowed out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination following his poor showing in the Louisiana and Iowa caucuses
|
| 1996:
|
An armed North Korean demanding political asylum shot his way into the Russian embassy compound in Pyongyang, killing three people
|
| 1997:
|
American Airlines and its pilots union continued contract talks as the clock ticked down to a midnight strike deadline. (The pilots did strike, but President Clinton immediately intervened, ordering a 60-day "cooling off" period.)
|
| 1998:
|
Authorities officially declared Eric Rudolph a suspect in the bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama, abortion clinic and offered a $100,000 reward
|
| 1998:
|
Russia's Ilya Kulik won the men's figure skating gold medal at the Nagano Olympics
|
| 1999:
|
John D. Ehrlichman, President Nixon's domestic affairs adviser imprisoned for his role in the Watergate cover-up that ultimately led to Nixon's resignation, died in Atlanta at age 73
|
| 1999:
|
President Clinton, accompanied by his wife, Hillary, began a quick visit to Mexico to encourage its struggle against narcotics and government corruption, and grow its markets for U.S. products
|
| 2000:
|
Three tornadoes tore across rural southwest Georgia, killing 20 people and destroying homes, businesses and farms
|
| 2000:
|
Two sophomores at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, were found shot to death in a fast-food restaurant just two blocks from the school, which was still reeling from the April 1999 massacre
|
| 2005:
|
U.S. drones reported in Iranian airspace
|
| 2005:
|
Brazilian Medicine Council against Cuban privileges
|
| 2005:
|
Severe weather warning issued for Samoa
|
| 2005:
|
Madrid skyscraper devastated by fire
|
| 2005:
|
Iran rejects EU nuclear reactor offer
|
| 2005:
|
Passenger ship Voyager radios SOS in the Mediterranean
|
| 2005:
|
WestJet Airlines retires 18 aircraft
|
| 2005:
|
Best Buy signs leases for 28 new stores
|
| 2005:
|
Large explosion in Beirut kills many including former prime minister
|
| 2005:
|
'Baby 81's parents confirmed
|
| 2006:
|
Study says people don't understand the emotional tone of emails, but think they do
|
| 2006:
|
Bali Nine ringleaders sentenced to death
|
| 2006:
|
Trainee police officer shot in Nottingham
|
| 2006:
|
GAO reveals $1.6 billion spent on public relations by the Bush administration in 2003-2005
|
| 2006:
|
Israeli group announces anti-semitic cartoons contest
|
| 2006:
|
Body found on a Kingwood Street in Houston
|
| 2006:
|
Police embarrassed after car stolen from station
|
| 2006:
|
The Tel Aviv Magistrates Court sentences Omri Sharon
|
| 2006:
|
Man shot by US Vice President suffers mild heart attack
|
| 2006:
|
Pennsylvania man named in alleged terror plot
|
| 2006:
|
California police kill knife-wielding man
|
| 2007:
|
Indian museum combats spread of HIV
|
| 2007:
|
Canada's best films of 2006 honoured at Genie Awards
|
| 2007:
|
Archaeologist finds earliest tools used by non-human apes
|
| 2007:
|
Car bomb kills 11 in Iran
|
| 2007:
|
DaimlerChrysler plans to cut 13,000 jobs
|
| 2007:
|
Funding gap forces library closures in Jackson County, Oregon
|
| 2007:
|
New England area of USA braces for winter storm
|
| 2008:
|
Clinton's speech at St. Mary's University stirs debate over abortion
|
| 2008:
|
Historic manuscript "The Housebook" reported sold in Germany
|
| 2008:
|
Six dead in campus shooting at Northern Illinois University
|
| 2008:
|
Inflation in Finland reaches 7-year high at 3.8%
|
| 2008:
|
National Hockey League news: February 14, 2008
|
| 2008:
|
Employment figures in Brazil up by 2.2% according to IBGE
|
| 2008:
|
Study reports that 28% of broiler chickens struggle to walk
|
| 2009:
|
500 stranded melon-headed whales rescued in Philippine bay
|
| 2009:
|
Australia's Queensland Roar through to A-League football preliminary final
|
| 2009:
|
Germany's GUN Records closes
|
| 2009:
|
Six killed in UK car crash
|
| 2009:
|
Queensland Premier denies March 28 election
|
| 2009:
|
Virgin Atlantic jet fire investigation finds faulty wiring in A340 fleet
|
| 2009:
|
British Airways jet makes rough landing at London City Airport
|
| 2009:
|
Israel elects 18th Knesset
|
| 2010:
|
Chicago Metra considers selling naming rights for train lines, stations
|
| 2010:
|
Winning British EuroMillions lottery ticket worth £56 million claimed
|
| 2010:
|
Chip and PIN 'not fit for purpose', says Cambridge researcher
|
| 2010:
|
Bill Clinton leaves hospital following heart procedure
|
| 2011:
|
Indian foreign minister criticized after reading wrong speech at UN summit
|
| 2011:
|
Former Egyptian president Mubarak reportedly ill, may be in coma
|
| 2011:
|
Canadian rapper Bad News Brown murdered in Montreal
|
| 2011:
|
Four found dead in Leicestershire, England
|
| 2011:
|
NASCAR: Dale Earnhardt, Jr. earns Daytona 500 pole
|
| 2012:
|
Santorum neologism spreads to Romney
|
History
Icons
Prolific inventor with over 80 US patents, Margaret Ethridge Knight born in York, Maine
Comedic radio, television, and film actor, Jack Benny born Benjamin Kubelsky in Waukegan, Illinois
Hypnotherapist, broadway musical star, actress and Brady mom, Florence Henderson born in Dale, Indiana
Three-time US Figure Skating Champion, JoJo Starbuck born in Birmingham, Alabama