1349 – 900 Jews are burned alive in Strasbourg and similar number banned from the city after being blamed for the spread of the Black Death
1747 – Astronomer James Bradley presents his discovery of the wobbling motion of the Earth on its axis to the Royal Society, London
1778 – The Stars and Stripes was carried to a foreign port, in France, for the first time. It was aboard the American ship Ranger.
1803 – Chief Justice John Marshall declares that any act of U.S. Congress that conflicts with the Constitution is void
1849 – The first photograph of a U.S. President, while in office, was taken by Matthew Brady in New York City. President James Polk was the subject of the picture.
1859 – Oregon became the 33rd member of the Union.
1870 – Seraph Young becomes the first woman to legally vote in the modern United States, two days after the Utah legislature passed a law allowing women the vote
1899 – The U.S. Congress approved voting machines for use in federal elections.
1903 – The U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor was established.
1912 – Arizona was admitted as the 48th U.S. state.
1920 – The League of Women Voters was founded in Chicago. The first president of the organization was Maude Wood Park.
1929 – The “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” took place in Chicago, IL. Seven gangsters who were rivals of Al Capone were killed.
1942 – The Polish resistance movement, the Home Army, is formed and will eventually become the largest resistance movement in occupied Europe
1946 – ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was unveiled. The device, built at the University of Pennsylvania, was the world’s first general purpose electronic computer.
1957 – Georgia Senate unanimously approves Sen Leon Butts’ bill barring blacks from playing baseball with whites
1966 – Russian writers Andrei Sinyavsky & Joey Daniel found guilty under the offense of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda for publishing their satirical writings abroad
1971 – Richard Nixon installs secret taping system in the White House
1971 – Tehran agreement signed; oil companies accept 55 percent tax rate, immediate increase in posted prices, and further successive increases
1979 – Adolph Dubs, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, was kidnapped in Kabul by Muslim extremists. He was killed in a shootout between his abductors and police.
1983 – A 6-year-old boy became the first person to receive a heart and liver transplants in the same operation.
1985 – Cable News Network (CNN) reporter Jeremy Levin was freed. He had been being held in Lebanon by extremists.
1989 – Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini called on Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie because of his novel “The Satanic Verses.”
1989 – The first of 24 satellites of the Global Positioning System are placed into orbit.
1989 – Union Carbide agreed to pay $470 million to the government of India. The court-ordered settlement was a result of the 1984 Bhopal gas leak disaster
1990 – Space probe Voyager 1 takes a photograph of the entire solar system, the images transmitted in real-time with earth a ‘pale blue dot’
1998 – U.S. authorities officially announced that Eric Rudolph was a suspect in a bombing of an abortion clinic in Alabama.
2000 – The spacecraft NEAR Shoemaker enters orbit around asteroid 433 Eros, the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid.
2001 – The Kansas Board of Education reversed its 1999 ruling and restored evolution to the state’s science curriculum.
2002 – The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Shays-Meehan bill. The bill, if passed by the U.S. Senate, would ban millions of unregulated money that goes to the national political parties.
2003 – Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, was euthanized because of incurable lung cancer.
2005 – Seven people are killed and 151 wounded in a series of bombings by suspected Al-Qaeda-linked militants that hit the Philippines’ Makati financial district in Metro Manila, Davao City, and General Santos City.
2008 – Northern Illinois University shooting: a gunman opened fire in a lecture hall of the DeKalb County, Illinois university resulting in 24 casualties; 6 fatalities (including gunman) and 18 injured.
2018 – Ex-student Nikolas Cruz shoots and kills 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Florida, before being captured
2021 – Guinea declares an Ebola epidemic after three deaths, its first deaths since 2016
Happy Valentine’s Day – The exact origins and identity of St. Valentine are unclear. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, “At least three different Saint Valentines, all of them martyrs, are mentioned in the early martyrologies under the date of 14 February.” One was a priest in Rome, the second one was a bishop of Interamna (now Terni, Italy) and the third St. Valentine was a martyr in the Roman province of Africa. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/st-valentine-beheaded
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
