1940 – Actress Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Academy Award.
45 B.C.- The first Leap Day is recognized by proclamation of Julius Caesar.
1504 – Christopher Columbus uses a lunar eclipse to frighten hostile Jamaican Indians
1704 – French & Indians attack Deerfield, Massachusetts, kill 50, abduct 100
1712 – February 29 is followed by February 30 in Sweden, in a move to abolish the Swedish calendar for a return to the Old style.
1768 – Polish nobleman Casimir Pulaski joins the Bar Confederation to defend the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth against Russian influence
1784 – The Marquis de Sade is transferred from Vincennes fortress to the Bastille.
1832 – Charles Darwin walks through the tropical forests of Bahia in Brazil, describing the experience as being in “transports of pleasure”
1856 – Hostilities in Russo-Turkish War cease
1864 – Lt. William B. Cushing leads a landing party from the USS Monticello to Smithville, NC, in an attempt to capture Confederate Brig. Gen. Louis Hebert, only to discover that Hebert and his men had already moved on Wilmington.
1908 – “Dutch scientist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes announces he discovered “solid Helium.”
1932 – TIME magazine features eccentric American politician William “Alfalfa” Murray on its cover after Murray stated his intention to run for President of the United States.
1936 – The Soviet government renames the First Leningrad Medical Institute “The Pavlov Institute” two days after Ivan Pavlov’s death and preserved his brain.
1940 – Actress Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Academy Award.
1944 – 5 leaders of Indonesia Communist Party sentenced to death
1944 – US forces catch Japanese troops off-guard and easily take control of the Admiralty Islands in Papua New Guinea.
1952 – The first pedestrian “Walk/Don’t Walk” signs are installed at 44th Street and Broadway at Times Square.
1964 – President Lyndon B. Johnson reveals the US has secretly developed the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, an advanced, long‐range high-speed and high-altitude reconnaissance airplane
1968 – National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Comm) reports against racism & demands aid given to blacks
1968 – Jocelyn Burnell, of Cambridge University, discovers first pulsar.
1972 – Henry “Hank” Aaron becomes first baseball player to sign a baseball contract for $200,000 a year.
1988 – A Nazi document is discovered that implicates participation of Austrian president and former U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim in WWII deportations.
1988 – NYC Mayor Koch calls Reagan a “WIMP” in the war on drugs
1996 – Serb forces withdraw from Sarajevo, ending the siege after 1,425 days, the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare
2020 – US and Taliban sign deal to end 18-year war in Afghanistan in Doha, Qatar. US and NATO allies will withdraw their troops after 14 months if deal kept.
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
