WikiPedia:Selected anniversaries/February

• 1796 - The capital of Upper Canada was moved from Newark (now Niagara-on-the-Lake) to York (now Toronto), which was judged to be less vulnerable to attack by the United States.
• 1884 - The first fascicle of the Oxford English Dictionary was published.
• 1946 - Norwegian politician Trygve Lie was elected the first UN Secretary-General.
• 1958 - Egypt and Syria merged to form the United Arab Republic.
• 2003 - The NASA Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas during reentry into the Earth's atmosphere on its 28th and final mission. This was the second total loss of a Space Shuttle.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 962 - Pope John XII crowned Otto the Great as Holy Roman Emperor, the first in nearly 40 years.
• 1848 - The Mexican-American War ended with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, granting the United States the Mexican Cession.
• 1925 - Medical supplies to combat an outbreak of diphtheria reached Nome, Alaska on dog sleds, inspiring the annual Iditarod race across Alaska.
• 1943 - The Battle of Stalingrad concluded with 91,000 tired and starving German soldiers taken captive by the Red Army.
• 1990 - President F.W. de Klerk declared the end of Apartheid in South Africa.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1488 - Bartholomeu Diaz of Portugal sailed around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa and landed in Mossel Bay.
• 1867 - Crown Prince Mutsuhito ascended to the Japanese throne, beginning the Meiji Era.
• 1966 - The Soviet spacecraft Luna 9 became the first space probe to land on the Moon and transmit pictures from the lunar surface to Earth.
• 1969 - Yasser Arafat became the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1859 - Constantin von Tischendorf found the Codex Sinaiticus, a 4th-century uncial manuscript of the New Testament, in a monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt.
• 1862 - Bacardi, one of the world's largest rum producers, was founded as a small distillery in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba.
• 1899 - The Philippine-American War began.
• 1945 - Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin met at the Yalta Conference.
• 1957 - USS Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine, logged her 60,000th nautical mile, matching the endurance of the fictional Nautilus described in Jules Verne's novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1859 - Prince Alexander John Cuza of Wallachia and Moldavia merged his two principalities to form Romania.
• 1885 - King Leopold II of Belgium established the Congo Free State as his personal possession in Africa.
• 1924 - Hourly Greenwich Time Signals from the Royal Greenwich Observatory were first broadcast by the BBC.
• 1988 - The first Red Nose Day raised £15 million in the United Kingdom for charity.
• 2004 - Rebels from the Revolutionary Artibonite Resistance Front captured the city of Gonaïves, starting the 2004 Haiti rebellion.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1819 - Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles founded Singapore, a new trading post for the British East India Company.
• 1820 - Sponsored by the American Colonization Society, the first African American immigrants established a settlement in present-day Liberia.
• 1922 - France, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States signed the Washington Naval Treaty to limit naval armaments.
• 1952 - The Duchess of Edinburgh learned of her accession to the British throne while in a tree-top hotel in Kenya, becoming Queen Elizabeth II.
• 1959 - Jack Kilby filed the patent for the first integrated circuit.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

Missing image
Astronaut.jpg
Astronaut Bruce McCandless "free-flying" in space

• 1301 - Edward of Caernarvon, the future King Edward II, became the first English heir apparent to hold the title as Prince of Wales.
• 1940 - Pinocchio, the Academy Award-winning Disney animated film based on a story by Carlo Collodi, was first released.
• 1984 - NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless II performed the first untethered spacewalk using a Manned Maneuvering Unit.
• 1992 - The Maastricht treaty, which led to the formation of the European Union, was signed in Maastricht, the Netherlands.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1587 - Queen Mary I of Scotland was executed at Fotheringhay Castle on suspicion of having been involved in the Babington Plot to murder her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I of England.
• 1904 - The Russo-Japanese War began with a surprise torpedo attack by the Japanese on Russian ships near present-day Lüshunkou, China.
• 1971 - Trading began in NASDAQ, the world's first electronic stock exchange.
• 1979 - Colonel Denis Sassou-Nguesso was chosen as the new President of the People’s Republic of the Congo.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

Missing image
Joseph_McCarthy.jpg
Joseph McCarthy, U.S. Senator

• 474 - As the seven-year old Leo II was deemed too young to rule, his father Zeno was crowned as the co-emperor of the Byzantine Empire.
• 1895 - Volleyball was invented at a YMCA in Holyoke, Massachusetts.
• 1943 - World War II: The Battle of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands ended, giving the Allied forces a key victory in the Pacific War over the Japanese military.
• 1950 - Red scare: Senator Joseph McCarthy accused the U.S. State Department of being filled with communists.
• 1960 - Joanne Woodward was honored with the first star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1258 - Hulagu Khan and the Mongols sacked Baghdad, ending the rule of the Abbasid caliphate.
• 1763 - Britain and Spain partitioned New France by the Treaty of Paris, and decimated the French colonial empire.
• 1840 - Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha married Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom at the Chapel Royal.
• 1962 - "Rudolf Abel," a Soviet spy arrested by the FBI, was exchanged for Gary Powers, the pilot of an U.S. Air Force spy plane shot down in the U-2 Incident.
• 1996 - Deep Blue, the chess-playing computer, defeated International Grandmaster and World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in a game of chess for the first time.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1873 - King Amadeo I of Spain abdicated, proclaimed at the Cortes Generales that Spanish people were "ungovernable," and left the country.
• 1919 - Friedrich Ebert became the first Reichspräsident of the Weimar Republic.
• 1929 - The first Lateran treaty was signed, establishing Vatican City as an independent sovereign enclave within Italy.
• 1963 - The Beatles began recording for their first album, Please Please Me.
• 1979 - Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized power in Iran, and eventually became the Supreme Leader of the Islamic republic.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1689 - The Convention Parliament was convened to determine if James II, the last Catholic king of England, had vacated the throne when he fled to France in 1688.
• 1818 - Led by General Bernardo O'Higgins, Chile formally proclaimed its independence from Spain.
• 1909 - The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the oldest and most influential civil rights organizations in the U.S., was founded.
• 1912 - Xuantong Emperor of the Manchu Qing dynasty, the last Emperor of China, abdicated.
• 2001 - NEAR Shoemaker touched down on Eros, becoming the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1689 - Glorious Revolution: Instead of James Francis Edward Stuart the Prince of Wales acceding to the throne, his sister Mary and her husband William were proclaimed co-rulers of England.
• 1880 - Thomas Edison observed the Edison Effect, which later formed the basis of John Ambrose Fleming's vacuum tube diodes.
• 1881 - Hubertine Auclert, a leading French suffragette in Paris, launched the feminist newspaper La Citoyenne.
• 1984 - Konstantin Chernenko succeeded the late Yuri Andropov as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1876 - Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell each filed a patent for the telephone.
• 1879 - Chilean forces occupied the Bolivian port of Antofagasta, instigating the War of the Pacific.
• 1945 - The RAF Bomber Command began the strategic bombing of Dresden in Saxony, Germany, resulting in a lethal firestorm which killed tens of thousands of civilians.
• 1989 - A fatwa was issued for the execution of Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses, a novel considered "blasphemous against Islam".
• 1989 - The first satellite in the satellite constellation of the Global Positioning System was placed into orbit.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1898 - The USS Maine exploded and sank in Havana, Cuba, killing more than 260 people in a tragedy that precipitated the Spanish-American War.
• 1942 - General Tomoyuki Yamashita led the Japanese forces to capture the supposed "impregnable fortress" of Singapore.
• 1971 - A new penny that was worth 1/100 instead of 1/240 of the pound sterling was introduced in the United Kingdom on Decimal Day.
• 1989 - Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan: The Soviet Union officially announced that all of its troops had already left Afghanistan.
• 2003 - Millions of people around the world took part in the largest mass protest movement in history to protest against war in general, and specifically the military preparations for the impending invasion of Iraq.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1249 - Louis IX of France dispatched Andrew of Longjumeau as his ambassador to the Mongols.
• 1804 - Lt. Stephen Decatur led a raid to destroy the captured USS Philadelphia in Tripoli of the Barbary States, denying her use to the enemy in the First Barbary War.
• 1857 - Gallaudet University, the world’s only university for hearing-impaired students, was established in Washington, D.C..
• 1923 - Howard Carter unsealed the burial chamber of Tutankhamun, a Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt.
• 1978 - The first computer bulletin board system, CBBS, was created by Ward Christensen during a blizzard in Chicago, Illinois.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1854 - Britain recognized the independence of the Orange Free State in the present-day Free State Province, South Africa.
• 1895 - The ballet Swan Lake was first performed at full length with music by Tchaikovsky in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
• 1959 - Vanguard 2, the first weather satellite, was launched to measure cloud-cover distribution.
• 1979 - About 120,000 troops of the People's Liberation Army of China crossed into northern Vietnam, starting the Sino-Vietnamese War.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1861 - With the Italian unification almost complete, King Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont, Savoy and Sardinia assumed the title as King of Italy.
• 1861 - Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as the first (and only) President of the Confederate States of America.
• 1885 - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain was first published. It was both praised and banned shortly thereafter.
• 1932 - The Empire of Japan established Manchukuo, a puppet state in northeastern China during the Sino-Japanese War.
• 1943 - Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Propaganda Minister, delivered the Sportpalast speech to motivate the German people when the tide of World War II was turning against Germany.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1594 - King Sigismund III of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was crowned King of Sweden.
• 1674 - The Third Anglo-Dutch War ended with the signing of the Treaty of Westminster.
• 1942 - Air raids on Darwin: The capital of Northern Territory, Australia was devastated by 242 bombers and fighters of the Imperial Japanese Navy.
• 1942 - U.S. Executive Order 9066 was signed, authorising the relocation and confinement of over 112,000 Japanese Americans.
• 1986 - The space station Mir of the Soviet space program was launched, establishing the first long-term research station in space.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1472 - James III of Scotland annexed the Orkney and Shetland Islands from Denmark-Norway.
• 1810 - Andreas Hofer, a Tyrolean patriot and the leader of a rebellion against Napoleon's forces, was executed.
• 1913 - King O'Malley drove in the first survey peg to mark the commencement of work on the construction of Canberra, Australia.
• 1959 - The Avro Arrow supersonic jet fighters programme in Canada was cancelled by the Diefenbaker government.
• 1965 - The Ranger 8 spacecraft successfully transmitted 7,137 photographs of the moon in the final 23 minutes of its mission before crashing in Mare Tranquillitatis.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1613 - Mikhail I was elected unanimously by the Zemsky Sobor to become Tsar, beginning the Romanov dynasty in Imperial Russia.
• 1804 - Built by Richard Trevithick, the first self-propelled steam engine or locomotive first ran in Wales.
• 1848 - The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was first published.
• 1952 - Protesters in Dhaka, East Pakistan walked into military fire in demand of the establishment of the Bengali language as an official language.
• 1965 - Black nationalist Malcolm X was assassinated in New York City by members of the Nation of Islam.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1819 - By the Adams-Onís Treaty, Spain sold Florida to the United States for five million U.S. dollars.
• 1943 - Members of the White Rose Society were found guilty of treason and guillotined by the Nazi regime in Germany.
• 1956 - Heartbreak Hotel propelled Elvis Presley onto the music charts.
• 1980 - The United States defeated the Soviet Union in Olympic ice hockey – an unlikely victory dubbed the Miracle on Ice.
• 1997 - Scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland announced the birth of a cloned sheep named Dolly.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1455 - Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz began printing the Gutenberg Bible.
• 1893 - Rudolf Diesel received a patent for the diesel engine.
• 1903 - Guantánamo Bay, Cuba was perpetually leased to the United States.
• 1945 - Joe Rosenthal took the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, an image that was later reproduced as the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial.
• 1947 - The International Organization for Standardization was founded. It is responsible for worldwide industrial and commercial ISO standards.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

Missing image
Pope_Gregory_XIII.jpg
Pope Gregory XIII

• 303 - Roman Emperor Galerius began to persecute Christians.
• 1582 - Pope Gregory XIII announced the Gregorian calendar, a modification of the Julian calendar in use since 45 BC.
• 1803 - Marbury v. Madison established judicial review in the United States.
• 1848 - Louis-Philippe, the Orléanist King of the French, abdicated and escaped to England.
• 1946 - Colonel Juan Perón was elected to his first term as President of Argentina.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1570 - Pope Pius V issued the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis to excommunicate Queen Elizabeth I and her followers in the Church of England.
• 1836 - Samuel Colt received a patent for the revolver.
• 1912 - Marie-Adélaïde, the eldest of six daughters of William IV, became the first reigning Grand Duchess of Luxembourg.
• 1921 - The Democratic Republic of Georgia was occupied by the Soviet Red Army.
• 1986 - EDSA Revolution: Corazón Aquino was inaugurated as President of the Philippines, as Ferdinand Marcos fled the nation after 20 years of rule.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1266 - King Manfred of Sicily was killed at the Battle of Benevento, fighting Angevin forces led by Charles, the Count of Anjou.
• 1815 - Napoléon Bonaparte escaped from exile in Elba.
• 1935 - Adolf Hitler ordered the German air force Luftwaffe reinstated, violating the Treaty of Versailles signed at the end of World War I.
• 1935 - In Daventry, England, Robert Watson-Watt first demonstrated the use of radar.
• 1993 - World Trade Center bombing: A van rented by Ramzi Yousef exploded in the underground garage of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing six and injuring more than 1,000 people.

Archive – More historical anniversaries...

• 1594 - The King of Navarre was crowned King Henry IV of France at the Cathedral of Chartres near