1801 – The U.S. House of Representatives broke an electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. Jefferson was elected president and Burr became vice president.
0197 – Battle of Lugdunum – Roman Emperor Septimius Severus defeats and kills his rival Clodius Albinus, securing full control over the Empire
0763 – Shi Chaoyi’s head is delivered to Chang’an, ending the An Shi Rebellion
1370 – Battle at Rudau: Germany beats Lithuania
1461 – Wars of the Roses: Second Battle of St Albans – Lancastrian army defeats Yorkists and recaptures King Henry VI
1568 – Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II agrees to pay tribute to the Ottoman Empire in exchange for peace
1598 – Boris Godunov chosen tsar of Russia
1600 – Philosopher Giordano Bruno was burnt alive at Campo de’ Fiori in Rome, charged of heresy.
1691 – Thomas Neale granted British patent for American postal service
1753 – February 17 is followed by March 1 as Sweden moves to the Gregorian from the Julian calendar.
1776 – The first volume of Gibbon’s “Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire” published
1801 – The U.S. House of Representatives broke an electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. Jefferson was elected president and Burr became vice president.
1817 – The first gaslit streetlights appeared on the streets of Baltimore, MD.
1863 – A precursor of the Red Cross and Red Crescent is founded – The “Committee for Relief to the Wounded” was created by a group of citizens in Geneva, Switzerland.
1865 – Columbia, SC, burned. The Confederates were evacuating and the Union Forces were moving in.
1871 – The victorious Prussian Army parades though Paris after the end of the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War.
1876 – Julius Wolff was credited with being the first to can sardines.
1897 – The National Congress of Mothers was organized in Washington, DC, by Alice McLellan Birney and Phoebe Apperson Hearst. It was the forerunner of the National PTA.
1904 – “Madama Butterfly” is premiered – Giacomo Puccini’s opera, one of the world’s most performed works of musical theater, was poorly received in its first performance.
1905 – American educator and women’s suffragist Frances Willard becomes 1st women honored in National Statuary Hall in the US Capital building, Washington, D.C.
1913 – First minimum wage law in US takes effect (Oregon)
1933 – “Newsweek” was first published.
1933 – Blondie Boopadoop married Dagwood Bumstead three years after Chic Young’s popular strip first debuted.
1934 – The first high school automobile driver’s education course was introduced in State College, PA.
1936 – The world’s first superhero, The Phantom, makes his first appearance in comics
1943 – New York Yankee Joe DiMaggio, enlists into the US army
1944 – During World War II, the Battle of Eniwetok Atoll began. U.S. forces won the battle on February 22, 1944.
1947 – The Voice of America began broadcasting to the Soviet Union.
1957 – A fire at a home for the elderly in Warrenton, Missouri kills 72 people.
1958 – Pope Pius XII declares Saint Clare of Assisi (1193~1253) the patron saint of television.
1964 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that congressional districts within each state had to be approximately equal in population. (Westberry v. Sanders)
1969 – Golda Meir sworn in as Israel’s first female prime minister
1972 – Sales of the Volkswagen Beetle model exceed those of Ford Model-T.
1973 – US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger meets Chinese leader Mao Zedong, where the latter jokingly offers to send 10 million Chinese women to the United States
1974 – Robert K. Preston, a disgruntled U.S. Army private, buzzes the White House with a stolen helicopter.
1979 – China invades Vietnam, marking the start of the Sino-Vietnamese War
1981 – Chrysler Corp reports largest corporate losses in US history
1985 – Colombian drug lord the ‘Godmother of Cocaine’ Griselda Blanco arrested in Irvine, California – later convicted and serves 15 years for manufacturing and distributing cocaine
1986 – Libyan bombers attack N’djamena Airport in Chad
1988 – Lt. Col. William Higgins, a U.S. officer with the United Nations truce monitoring group, is kidnapped (and later slain) in southern Lebanon.
1990 – Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan gives videotaped testimony for a second day about the Iran-Contra affair, for the trial of former national security adviser, John Poindexter
1992 – In Milwaukee, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was sentenced to life in prison. In November of 1994, he was beaten to death in prison.
1995 – Colin Ferguson was convicted of six counts of murder in the December 1993 Long Island Rail Road shootings. He was later sentenced to a minimum of 200 years in prison.
1996 – World chess champion Garry Kasparov beat the IBM supercomputer “Deep Blue” in Philadelphia, PA.
1997 – Pepperdine University announced that Kenneth Starr was leaving the Whitewater probe to take a full-time job at the school. Starr reversed the announcement four days later.
2005 – U.S. President George W. Bush named John Negroponte as the first national intelligence director.
2008 – Kosovo declaration of independence. It was the second declaration of independence by Kosovo’s Albanian-majority political institutions, the first having been proclaimed on 7 September 1990
2012 – The President of Germany, Christian Wulff, resigns over a corruption scandal
2013 – 37 people are killed and 130 are injured in a series of Baghdad car bombing
2014 – US Secretary of State John Kerry claims climate change requires urgent action and that only a small “window of time” remained open
2017 – Discovery of a new mostly underwater continent Zealandia in the South Pacific announced in research journal “GSA Today”
2019 – Protests continue by thousands in streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, against government corruption and inflation
2020 – India’s Supreme Court grants equal rights to women in the armed forces
2021 – Texan senator Ted Cruz flies to Cancun, Mexico with his family amid a winter disaster in his state, igniting widespread condemnation
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
