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. 

February 19 in History

February 19 is the 50th day of the year. There are 316 days remaining until the end of the year.

• 1674 - A provision of the Treaty of Westminster transferred the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam to England, and it was renamed New York.
• 1807 – In Alabama, former US Vice President Aaron Burr was arrested for treason.
• 1846 – In Austin, Texas, the newly formed Texas state government was officially installed. 
• 1847 – The first group of rescuers reached the Donner Party, which had become snow bound in the Sierra Nevada mountains in November. There were only seven survivors from the original 87 members of the wagon train, and they had resorted to cannibalism to stay alive.
• 1859 – The defense of temporary insanity was successfully used in the United States for the first time.
• 1861 – Serfdom was abolished in Russia.
• 1963 – The publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique reawakened the feminist movement in the United States.
• 2002 – NASA’s Mars Odyssey space probe began mapping the surface of Mars using a thermal emission imaging system.

February 18 in History

February 18 is the 49th day of the year. There are 316 days remaining until the end of the year.

• 1841 – The first ongoing filibuster in the United States Senate began and lasted until March 11th.
• 1878 – John Tunstall was murdered by outlaw Jesse Evans, sparking the Lincoln County War in Lincoln County, New Mexico. 
• 1885 – Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first published.
• 1901 – Winston Churchill made his first speech in the House of Commons.
• 1911 – The first official flight with air mail took place in Allahabad, British India, when Henri Pequet, a 23-year-old pilot, delivered 6,500 letters to Naini, about 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) away.
• 1913 – Pedro Lascurain became President of Mexico for 45 minutes - the shortest term to date of any person as president of any country
• 1930 – Elm Farm Ollie became the first cow to fly in a fixed-wing aircraft and also the first cow to be milked in an aircraft.
• 1946 – Sailors of the Royal Indian Navy mutinied in Mumbai harbour, from where it would spread throughout British India and involved 78 ships, 20 shore establishments, and 20,000 sailors
• 1954 – The first Church of Scientology was established in Los Angeles, California.
• 1970 – The Chicago Seven were found not guilty of conspiring to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
• 1972 – The California Supreme Court invalidated the state's death penalty in the case of People v. Anderson, and commutes the sentences of all death row inmates to life imprisonment.
• 1978 – The first Ironman Triathlon competition took place on the island of Oahu, Hawaii.
• 1979 – Snow fell in the Sahara Desert in southern Algeria for the only time in recorded history.
• 2001 – Seven-time NASCAR champion Dale Earnhardt died in an crash at the Daytona 500.

February 17 in History

February 17 is the 48th day of the year. There are 318 days remaining until the end of the year.

• 1621 – Myles Standish was appointed as first commander of Plymouth Colony.
• 1801 – An electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr was resolved when Jefferson was elected, by the United States House of Representatives, President of the United States and Burr became Vice President.
• 1864 – The H. L. Hunley became the first submarine to engage and sink a warship, the USS Housatonic.
• 1904 – Madama Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini premièred at Teatro alla Scala (La Scala Opera House) in Milan, Italy.
• 1933 – Newsweek magazine was published for the first time.
• 1933 – The Blaine Act ended Prohibition in the United States.
• 1968 – In Springfield, Massachusetts, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame opened.
• 1972 – Sales of the Volkswagen Beetle exceeded those of the Ford Model-T.

February 16 in History

February 16 is the 47th day of the year. There are 319 days remaining until the end of the year.

• 1852 – Studebaker Brothers Wagon Company, precursor of the automobile manufacturer, was established
• 1868 – In NYC, the Jolly Corks organization was renamed the  Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks.
• 1923 – Howard Carter unsealed the burial chamber of Pharaoh Tutankhamun.
• 1937 – Wallace H. Carothers received a United States patent for nylon.
• 1957 – The Toddlers’ Truce resulted in a controversial television shut down between 6.00 pm and 7.00 pm (so young children could be put to bed before the evening schedule began) was abolished in the United Kingdom.
• 1959 – Fidel Castro became Premier of Cuba.
• 1960 – The U.S. Navy submarine USS Triton began Operation Sandblast, setting sail from New London, Connecticut, to begin the first submerged circumnavigation of the globe.
• 1961 – The DuSable Museum of African American History was chartered.
• 1968 – In Haleyville, Alabama, the first 9-1-1 emergency telephone system went into service.
• 1978 – The first computer bulletin board system (CBBS in Chicago, Illinois) was created.
• 1985 – Hezbollah, a Shi’a Muslim militant group and political party based in Lebanon, was founded.
• 2005 – The National Hockey League canceled the entire regular season, becoming the first major sports league in North America to do so over a labor dispute.
• 2006 – The last Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) was decommissioned by the US Army.

February 15 in History

February 15 is the 46th day of the year. There are 320 days remaining until the end of the year.

• 1113 – The Knights Hospitallers was established by Pope Paschal II.
• 1764 – The city of St. Louis, Missouri was established.
• 1820 – Susan B. Anthony, American suffragist, was born. She died in 1906. 
• 1845 – Elihu Root, American statesman & Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was born. He died in 1937.
• 1879 – President Rutherford Hayes signed a bill allowing women attorneys to argue cases before the US Supreme Court.
• 1898 – The USS Maine exploded and sank in Havana Harbor, killing more than 260.
• 1906 – The British Labour Party was organized.
• 1949 – Excavations began at Cave 1 of the Qumran caves, where the first seven Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.
• 1971  – On Decimal Day, the United Kingdom decimalised the pound sterling.
• 1972 – Sound recordings were granted United States’ federal copyright protection for the first time.
• 2001 – First draft of the complete Human Genome was published in the scientific journal Nature.
• 2005 – You Tube was launched in the United States.
• 2010 – Jeanne M. Holm, the first female 1-star general in the USAF and was the first female two-star general in any service branch of the United States, died. She was born in 1921. 

February 14 in History

February 14 is the 45th day of the year. There are 321 days remaining until the end of the year. 

• 1349 – Approximately 2,000 Jews were burned to death or forcibly removed from the city of Strasbourg by mobs.
• 1778 – The US flag was formally recognized by a foreign naval vessel for the first time.
• 1803 – Chief Justice John Marshall declared any act of Congress that conflicts with the Constitution is void.
• 1819 – Christopher Sholes, American inventor of the QWERTY keyboard, was born. He died in 1890.
• 1849 – In New York City, James Polk became the first serving President of the US to have his photograph taken.
• 1852 – Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, the first hospital providing in-patient beds specifically for children, was founded in London.
• 1855 – Texas was linked by telegraph to the rest of the United States, with the completion of a connection between New Orleans and Marshall, Texas.
• 1859 – Oregon was admitted as the 33rd US state.
• 1859 – George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr., American engineer and inventor of the Ferris wheel, was born. He died in 1896.
• 1870 - Esther Hobart Morris became the first woman Justice of the Peace in America.
• 1876 – Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray applied for a patent for the telephone.
• 1899 – Voting machines were approved by the US Congress for use in federal elections.
• 1912 – Arizona was admitted as the 48th US state.
• 1920 – The League of Women Voters was founded in Chicago, Illinois.
• 1924 – The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company changed its name to International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).
• 1946 – The Bank of England was nationalized.
• 1949 – The Knesset (Israeli parliament) convened for the first time.
• 1962 – First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy took TV viewers on a tour of the White House.
• 2000 – The first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid occurred when the NEAR Shoemaker entered orbit around asteroid 433 Eros.