TODAY HISTORY LESSON: FEBRUARY 15
399 BC Philosopher Socrates is sentenced to death by the city of Athens for corrupting the minds of the youth of the city and for impiety
1763 Austria, Prussia & Saxony sign the Treaty of Hubertusburg, marking the end of the French and Indian War and of the Seven Years’ War
1764 St. Louis, Mo., was founded as a French fur-trading post.
1798 The first serious fist fight occurs in Congress.
1799 Printed ballots were authorized for use in elections in the state of Pennsylvania.
1804 New Jersey becomes the last northern state to abolish slavery.
1869 Charges of treason against Jefferson Davis are dropped.
1879 President Rutherford Hayes signed a bill allowing female attorneys to argue cases before the Supreme Court
1898 The U.S. battleship Maine blows up in Havana Harbor, killing 268 sailors and bringing hordes of Western cowboys and gunfighters rushing to enlist in the Spanish-American War.
1903 Morris and Rose Michtom, Russian immigrants, introduced the first teddy bear in America.
1925 The London Zoo announces it will install lights to cheer up fogged-in animals.
1933 Chicago Mayor Anton J. Cermak was killed in an assassination attempt on president-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami.
1934 U.S. Congress passes the Civil Works Emergency Relief Act, allotting new funds for Federal Emergency Relief Administration.
1936 Hitler announces building of Volkswagens
1946 Royal Canadian mounted police arrest 22 as Soviet spies.
1950 Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung sign a mutual defense treaty in Moscow.
1956 Pirates & Kansas City A’s cancel an exhibition game in Birmingham AL, because of local ordinance barring black from playing against white
1961 Eighteen members of the U.S. figure skating team are lost in an airplane crash in Belgium.
1965 Canada’s maple leaf flag is raised for the first time. The leaf symbolizes the country’s forests, the middle white stripe the arctic snow, and the red stripes the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
1971 After 1200 years Britain abandons 12-shilling system for decimal
1974 U.S. gas stations threaten to close because of federal fuel policies.
1978 Escaped mass murderer Ted Bundy recaptured, Pensacola FL
1987 ABC-TV begins broadcasting “Amerika” mini-series
1989 The Soviet Union pulls out of Afghanistan
1991 The leaders of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland signed the Visegard agreement, in which they pledged to cooperate in transforming thier countties to free-market economies.
1995 The FBI arrested Kevin Mitnick and charged him with cracking security in some of the nation’s most protected computers. He served five years in jail.
2001 First draft of the complete human genome is published in the journal “Nature”
2002 Olympics officials resolved the judging scandal by awarding Canadian pairs figure skaters Jamie Sale and David Pelletier a gold medal while allowing the Russians, Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, to keep their medal.
2002 U.S. President George W. Bush approved Nevada’s Yucca Mountain as a site for long-term disposal of radioactive nuclear waste.
2003 2003 The largest peace demonstration in history takes place. Up to 30 million people in 600 cities around the world protested against the Iraq War.
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
