February 20 in History

February 20 is the 51st day of the year. There are 315 days remaining until the end of the year. 

• 1685 – Rene-Robert Cavelier established Fort St. Louis at Matagorda Bay thus forming the basis for France’s claim to Texas.
• 1792 – The United States Post Office Department was created.
• 1872 – In New York City, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened.
• 1873 – The University of California opened its first medical school in San Francisco.
• 1877 – Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake premièred at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.
• 1901 – The legislature of  Hawaii Territory convened for the first time.
• 1931 – Congress approved the construction of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge by the state of California.
• 1933 – The Congress of the US proposed the 21st Amendment to US Constitution ending prohibition.
• 1935 – Caroline Mikkelsen became the first woman to set foot in Antarctica.
• 1942 – Lieutenant Edward O’Hara became America's first World War II flying ace.
• 1943 – American movie studio executives agreed to allow the Office of War Information to censor films.
• 1943 – The Saturday Evening Post published the first of Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms in support of US President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address theme of Four Freedoms.
• 1952 – Emmett Ashford became the first African-American umpire in organized baseball.
• 1962 – While on Friendship 7, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth.
• 1998 – American figure skater Tara Lipinski became the youngest gold-medalist at the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.