Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/February

Selected anniversaries / On this day archive

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February 1: Imbolc / Saint Brigid's Day in Ireland; the Fajr decade begins in Iran; Black History Month begins in Canada and the United States

Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir

1329 – The Teutonic Knights successfully besieged the hillfort of Medvėgalis in Samogitia, Lithuania, and baptised the defenders in the Catholic rite.
1814 – More than 1,200 people died in the most destructive recorded eruption of Mayon in the Philippines.
1979 – Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile and soon led the Iranian Revolution to overthrow the Pahlavi dynasty.
2009 – Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir (pictured) became the first female prime minister of Iceland.

Menas of Ethiopia (d. 1563)
Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix (d. 1761)
Mary Shelley (d. 1851)
Harry Styles (b. 1994)

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February 2: Candlemas (Western Christianity); Groundhog Day in Canada and the United States

F-16 Fighting Falcon

1709 – Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk was rescued by English captain Woodes Rogers and his crew after spending four years as a castaway on an uninhabited island in the Pacific, providing the inspiration for Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe.
1934 – The Export–Import Bank of the United States, the country's official export credit agency, was established.
1974 – The F-16 Fighting Falcon (pictured), the most numerous fixed-wing aircraft currently in military service, made its first flight.
2004 – Swiss tennis player Roger Federer became the top-ranked men's singles player, a position he held for a record 237 consecutive weeks.

William Stanley (b. 1829)
Likelike (d. 1887)
Marian Cruger Coffin (d. 1957)
Philip Seymour Hoffman (d. 2014)

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February 3: Feast day of Saint Laurence of Canterbury (Western Christianity); Four Chaplains' Day in the United States (1943)

British bomber flying to join the Battle of Keren

1813 – Argentine War of Independence: José de San Martín and the Mounted Grenadiers Regiment defeated Spanish royalist forces in the Battle of San Lorenzo.
1941 – Second World War: Free French and British forces (aircraft pictured) began the Battle of Keren to capture the strategic town of Keren in Italian East Africa.
1953 – Hundreds of native creoles known as Forros were massacred on São Tomé Island by the colonial administration and Portuguese landowners.
2023 – A freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, releasing hazardous materials into the surrounding area.

Coloman, King of Hungary (d. 1116)
Abu Bakar of Johor (b. 1833)
Simone Weil (b. 1909)
Kanna Hashimoto (b. 1999)

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February 4: Lichun begins in East Asia (2024)

Yasser Arafat

1169 – A strong earthquake struck the eastern coast of Sicily, causing at least 15,000 deaths.
1969 – Yasser Arafat (pictured) was elected chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
1974 – American newspaper heiress and socialite Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, which she later joined, in one of the most well-known cases of Stockholm syndrome.
1999 – Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old immigrant from Guinea, was shot and killed by four New York City Police Department plain-clothed officers, prompting outrage both within and outside the city.

Bill Haywood (b. 1869)
Virginia M. Alexander (b. 1899)
Jean Bolikango (b. 1909)
Hilda Hilst (d. 2004)

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February 5: Constitution Day in Mexico (1917)

A device for producing Bakelite

1909 – Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland announced his invention of Bakelite (production device pictured), the world's first synthetic plastic.
1913 – Claudio Monteverdi's last opera, L'incoronazione di Poppea, was performed theatrically for the first time in more than 250 years.
1958 – After a mid-air collision with a fighter plane during a practice exercise off Tybee Island, Georgia, a U.S. Air Force bomber jettisoned a Mark 15 nuclear bomb, which was presumed lost.
1985 – The mayors of Carthage and Rome signed a symbolic peace treaty to officially end the Third Punic War, 2,134 years after it began.
2019 – Pope Francis became the first pope to celebrate a papal Mass in the Arabian Peninsula.

Marcus Ward Lyon Jr. (b. 1875)
William Bostock (b. 1892)
Margaret Oakley Dayhoff (d. 1983)
Bhuvneshwar Kumar (b. 1990)

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February 6: Sámi National Day (1917); Waitangi Day in New Zealand (1840)

News reel of the Munich air disaster

1788 – Massachusetts became the sixth state to ratify the constitution of the United States.
1819 – British official Stamford Raffles signed a treaty with Sultan Hussein Shah of Johor, establishing Singapore as a trading post for the East India Company.
1919 – More than 65,000 workers in Seattle began a five-day general strike to gain higher wages after two years of U.S. World War I wage controls.
1958 – The aircraft carrying the Manchester United football team crashed while attempting to take off from Munich-Riem Airport in West Germany, killing 8 players and 23 people in total (news reel featured).

Joseph Priestley (d. 1804)
Barbara W. Tuchman (d. 1989)
Jack Kirby (d. 1994)
Gary Moore (d. 2011)

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February 7

Bruce McCandless II untethered in space

1497 – Supporters of the Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola collected and publicly burned thousands of vanity items such as cosmetics, art and books in Florence, Italy.
1914 – Kid Auto Races at Venice, featuring the first appearance of comedy actor Charlie Chaplin's character the Tramp, was released.
1984 – During the Space Shuttle Challenger mission STS-41-B, astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart performed the first untethered spacewalk (pictured).
2005 – President Ilham Aliyev issued a decree on the redenomination of Azerbaijan's currency, with 1 new manat equal to 5000 old manats.
2014 – An inquiry report of the United Nations Human Rights Council found systematic and wide-ranging violations of human rights in North Korea.

Bartholomäus Sastrow (d. 1603)
John Deere (b. 1804)
Desmond Doss (b. 1919)
Steve Nash (b. 1974)

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February 8

Mary, Queen of Scots

1587 – Mary, Queen of Scots (pictured), was executed at Fotheringhay Castle for her involvement in the Babington Plot to murder her cousin, Elizabeth I of England.
1879 – Angered by a controversial umpiring decision, cricket spectators rioted and attacked the England team during a match in Sydney, Australia.
1924 – Gee Jon became the first person in the United States to be executed by lethal gas.
1948 – The closing ceremony of the first Olympics held after World War II was held in St. Moritz, Switzerland.
1968 – Local police in Orangeburg, South Carolina, fired into a crowd of people who were protesting segregation, killing three and injuring twenty-seven others.
1983 – The Irish-bred race horse Shergar was stolen by gunmen, who demanded a £2 million ransom.

Daniele Barbaro (b. 1514)
Marina de Escobar (b. 1554)
Neila Sathyalingam (b. 1938)
Walther Bothe (d. 1957)

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February 9: Chinese New Year's Eve (2024)

Participants in the Mud March

1799 – Quasi-War: USS Constellation captured the French frigate Insurgente in a single-ship action in the Caribbean Sea.
1861 – American Civil War: Jefferson Davis was named the provisional president of the Confederate States of America.
1907 – More than 3,000 women in London participated in the Mud March (pictured), the first large procession organised by the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies.
1976 – The Australian Defence Force was formed by the integration of the Australian Army, the Royal Australian Navy, and the Royal Australian Air Force.
2016 – Two commuter trains collided head-on at Bad Aibling in southeastern Germany, killing 12 people and injuring 85.

Judith Quiney (d. 1662)
Aletta Jacobs (b. 1854)
Howard Martin Temin (d. 1994)
Masatoshi Gündüz Ikeda (d. 2003)

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February 10: Feast day of Saint Scholastica (Christianity); Chinese New Year (2024); National Memorial Day of the Exiles and Foibe in Italy

Delegates at the Inter-Allied Women's Conference

1355 – A tavern dispute between University of Oxford students and townspeople became a riot that left about 90 people dead.
1919 – The Inter-Allied Women's Conference opened as a counterpart to the Paris Peace Conference, marking the first time that women were allowed formal participation in an international treaty negotiation.
1939 – Spanish Civil War: The Nationalists concluded their conquest of Catalonia and sealed the border with France.
2009 – The first accidental hypervelocity collision between two intact satellites in low Earth orbit took place when Iridium 33 and Kosmos 2251 destroyed each other.

Ira Remsen (b. 1846)
Edith Clarke (b. 1883)
Joseph Lister (d. 1912)
Joan Curran (d. 1999)

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February 11: National Foundation Day (Japan) (660 BC)

UCL Main Building

1826 – London University, later University College London (pictured), was founded as the first secular university in England.
1851 – As part of celebrations marking the separation of Victoria from New South Wales, the inaugural first-class cricket match in Australia began at the Launceston Racecourse in Tasmania.
1976 – The Frente de Liberación Homosexual made their final public appearance, shortly before the group's dissolution due to political repression after the 1976 Argentine coup d'état.
2001 – The computer worm Anna Kournikova, which would affect millions of users worldwide, was released by a 20-year-old Dutch student.

Thomas Edison (b. 1847)
Helene Kröller-Müller (b. 1869)
Keith Holyoake (b. 1904)
Jennifer Aniston (b. 1969)

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February 12: Red Hand Day; Shrove Monday (Western Christianity, 2024)

Edvard Munch's The Scream

1691 – A papal conclave convened to select a new pope after the death of Pope Alexander VIII.
1924 – George Gershwin's composition Rhapsody in Blue premiered at Aeolian Hall in New York.
1994 – Edvard Munch's painting The Scream (pictured) was stolen from the National Gallery of Norway.
2003 – Protesters in La Paz and the Bolivian government brokered a deal to end two days of rioting against a proposed salary tax.

Ethan Allen (d. 1789)
Charles Darwin (b. 1809)
Bill Russell (b. 1934)
Anna Anderson (d. 1984)

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February 13: Shrove Tuesday (Western Christianity, 2024)

Coso artifact

1891 – Frances Coles was killed in the last of eleven unsolved murders of women that took place in or near the impoverished Whitechapel district in the East End of London.
1961 – Geode prospectors near Olancha, California, discovered what they claimed to be a 500,000-year-old rock with a 1920s-era spark plug encased within (pictured).
2017 – Kim Jong-nam, the half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, was assassinated using VX nerve agent in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Muhammad ibn Ra'iq (d. 942)
Isabella d'Este (d. 1539)
Dorothy Bliss (b. 1916)
Balu Mahendra (d. 2014)

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February 14: Valentine's Day; Ash Wednesday (Western Christianity, 2024)

Part of the Pale Blue Dot photograph

1655 – Arauco War: A series of coordinated Mapuche attacks took place against Spanish settlements and forts in colonial Chile, beginning a ten-year period of warfare.
1779 – Native Hawaiians killed the English explorer Captain James Cook after he attempted to kidnap Kalaniʻōpuʻu, the ruling chief of the island of Hawaii.
1924 – The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company was renamed as International Business Machines (IBM), later growing into one of the world's largest companies by market capitalization.
1990 – NASA's Voyager 1 space probe took the Pale Blue Dot photograph of Earth (cropped version pictured) from a record distance of 40.5 au (6.06 billion km; 3.76 billion mi).
2007 – The first of several bombings in Zahedan, Iran, killed 18 members of the Revolutionary Guards.

Valentin Friedland (b. 1490)
Eleanora Atherton (b. 1782)
Nadezhda Krupskaya (b. 1869)
Vito Genovese (d. 1969)

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February 15: National Flag of Canada Day (1965); Statehood Day in Serbia (1804)

Don Dunstan in 1968

438 – The Codex Theodosianus, a compilation of the laws of the Roman Empire, was published.
1763 – Prussia, Saxony and the Habsburg monarchy signed the Treaty of Hubertusburg, ending the Third Silesian War.
1949 – Gerald Lankester Harding and Roland de Vaux began excavations at Cave 1 of the Qumran Caves in the West Bank, the location of the first seven Dead Sea Scrolls.
1979 – Don Dunstan (pictured) resigned as Premier of South Australia, ending a decade of sweeping social liberalisation.
1999 – Abdullah Öcalan, one of the founding members of the militant organization the Kurdistan Workers' Party, was arrested by Turkish security forces in Nairobi, Kenya.

Gisela of Swabia (d. 1043)
Matt Groening (b. 1954)
Mo Tae-bum (b. 1989)
Dawa Dem (d. 2018)

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February 16: Day of the Shining Star in North Korea; Elizabeth Peratrovich Day in Alaska

Act of Independence of Lithuania

1249 – King Louis IX dispatched André de Longjumeau as the French ambassador to the Mongol Empire.
1918 – The Council of Lithuania signed the Act of Independence (pictured), proclaiming the restoration of an independent Lithuania.
1922 – A landslide in Byblos revealed a sarcophagus in an underground tomb, later discovered to be part of a large Bronze Age necropolis.
1996 – Eleven people died in a train collision in Silver Spring, Maryland, leading to the creation of comprehensive U.S. federal rules for the design of passenger cars.

Richard of Dover (d. 1184)
Coluccio Salutati (b. 1331)
Michael Holding (b. 1954)
Elizabeth Olsen (b. 1989)

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February 17

Helicopter stolen in the 1974 White House incident

1859 – Cochinchina campaign: French Navy forces captured the Citadel of Saigon, defended by 1,000 Vietnamese soldiers of the Nguyễn dynasty.
1904 – Italian composer Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly premiered at La Scala in Milan to poor reviews, forcing him to revise the opera.
1964 – Gabonese military officers overthrew President Léon M'ba, but French forces, honouring a 1960 treaty, forcibly reinstated him two days later.
1974 – A U.S. Army soldier stole a Bell UH-1 helicopter (pictured) and landed it on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C.
2011 – Arab Spring: Bahraini security forces killed four protesters in a pre-dawn raid at the Pearl Roundabout in Manama, while the "Day of Rage" took place in Libya with nationwide protests against Muammar Gaddafi's government.

Jovian (d. 364)
Joseph Favre (b. 1849)
María de las Mercedes Barbudo (d. 1849)
Don Tallon (b. 1916)

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February 18

Protesters during the Revolution of Dignity

3102 BCE – According to Hindu scriptures, Kali Yuga, the last of the four stages that the world goes through as part of the cycle of yugas, began.
1814 – War of the Sixth Coalition: French troops led by Napoleon forced the Army of Bohemia to retreat after it advanced dangerously close to Paris.
1977 – The Xinjiang 61st Regiment Farm fire started during Chinese New Year when a firecracker ignited the wreaths of late Mao Zedong, killing 694 personnel.
2014 – A series of violent events (pictured) involving protesters, riot police, and unknown shooters began in Kyiv that culminated in the ousting of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych five days later.

Angilbert (d. 814)
Per Brahe the Younger (b. 1602)
Ōyama Sutematsu (d. 1919)
J. Robert Oppenheimer (d. 1967)

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February 19: Family Day in Canada (2024)

A depiction of the Venezuelan crisis of 1902–1903

1811 – Peninsular War: Outnumbered French forces under Édouard Mortier routed and nearly destroyed Spanish troops at the Battle of the Gebora near Badajoz, Spain.
1903 – A blockade against Venezuela (depicted), caused by President Cipriano Castro's refusal to pay foreign debts, is lifted.
1942 – World War II: U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the forcible relocation of over 112,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps.
1948 – The Southeast Asian Youth Conference, which is believed to have inspired armed communist rebellions in different Asian countries, opened in Calcutta, India.
2006 – A methane explosion in a coal mine in Nueva Rosita, Mexico, trapped and killed 65 miners.

Nicolaus Copernicus (b. 1473)
Choekyi Gyaltsen, 10th Panchen Lama (b. 1938)
Jennifer Doudna (b. 1964)
Harper Lee (d. 2016)

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February 20: Day of the Heavenly Hundred Heroes in Ukraine (2014)

Avro CF-105 Arrow

1685 – The French colonization of Texas began with the landing of colonists led by Robert de La Salle near Matagorda Bay.
1959 – Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker cancelled the Avro CF-105 Arrow interceptor-aircraft program (pictured) amid much political debate.
1970 – The Wat Phra Dhammakaya in Pathum Thani province, one of the largest Buddhist temples in Thailand, was founded.
1998 – At the age of 15, American figure skater Tara Lipinski became the youngest gold medal winner in the history of the Winter Olympic Games up until that time.

Wulfric of Haselbury (d. 1154)
Elizabeth Holloway Marston (b. 1893)
Gail Kim (b. 1977)
Tōru Takemitsu (d. 1996)

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February 21:

Malcolm X

1746 – Jacobite rising of 1745: The siege of Inverness ended with British forces surrendering to the Jacobite army.
1952 – A number of student protesters demanding the establishment of Bengali as an official language were killed by police in Dhaka, East Pakistan.
1965 – Black nationalist Malcolm X was assassinated while giving a speech in New York City's Audubon Ballroom.
1973 – After accidentally straying into Israeli-occupied airspace, Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114 was shot down by two fighter aircraft, killing 108 of the 113 people on board.

Gaius Caesar (d. AD 4)
Léo Delibes (b. 1836)
Incas (parakeet) (d. 1921)
Elliot Page (b. 1987)

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February 22:

USS Connecticut

1316 – The Catalan forces of Ferdinand of Majorca defeated troops loyal to Princess Matilda of Hainaut at the Battle of Picotin on the Peloponnese peninsula in modern-day Greece.
1909 – The sixteen United States Navy battleships of the Great White Fleet, led by Connecticut (pictured), completed a circumnavigation of the globe.
1997 – Scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland announced the existence of Dolly, a female sheep who was the first mammal to have successfully been cloned from an adult cell.
2006 – Seven men staged the largest cash robbery in Britain at a Securitas depot in Tonbridge, Kent, United Kingdom.

August Bebel (b. 1840)
Saufatu Sopoanga (b. 1952)
Chuck Jones (d. 2002)

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February 23: The Emperor's Birthday in Japan (1960)

Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima

1739 – The identity of English highwayman Dick Turpin was uncovered by his former schoolmate, who recognised his handwriting, leading to Turpin's trial.
1847 – Mexican–American War: The United States Army used artillery to repulse the much larger Mexican army at the Battle of Buena Vista near Saltillo.
1941 – Plutonium was first chemically identified by chemist Glenn T. Seaborg and his team at the University of California, Berkeley.
1945 – American photographer Joe Rosenthal took the Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima (pictured) during the Battle of Iwo Jima, an image that was later reproduced on the Marine Corps War Memorial.
2017 – Syrian civil war: Allied troops led by the Turkish Armed Forces captured the city of al-Bab from the Islamic State.

Pope Paul II (b. 1417)
George Taylor (d. 1781)
James Herriot (d. 1995)

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February 24: Lantern Festival in China (2024); Independence Day in Estonia

Theatre Royal, Drury Lane

1720 – War of the Quadruple Alliance: Spanish forces began a failed assault on the British settlement of Nassau in the Bahamas.
1809 – After having stood for only 15 years, London's Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (pictured), the third building of that name, burned down.
1968 – Vietnam War: South Vietnamese forces led by Ngô Quang Trưởng recaptured the citadel of Huế.
1978 – Five men disappeared after attending a college basketball game in Chico, California; the bodies of four of them were discovered in June that year.

Edmund Andros (d. 1714)
Carlo Buonaparte (d. 1785)
Risa Hontiveros (b. 1966)

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February 25: Soviet Occupation Day in Georgia (1921); National Day in Kuwait (1961)

Henck Arron

628 – Khosrow II, the last great king of the Sasanian Empire, was overthrown by his son Kavad II.
1866 – Miners in Calaveras County, California, discovered a human skull that was taken to show that humans had existed during the Pliocene, a thesis that was later disproved.
1956 – In a speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced the personality cult and dictatorship of his predecessor Joseph Stalin.
1980 – The first prime minister of independent Suriname, Henck Arron (pictured), was deposed in a military coup led by Dési Bouterse.
2020 – Hong Kong–based writer and publisher Gui Minhai, known for writing about Chinese Communist Party politicians, was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment for intelligence violations.

Sharafkhan Bidlisi (b. 1543)
George Harrison (b. 1943)
Kana Hanazawa (b. 1989)

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February 26

Napoleon leaving Elba

1606 – Dutch explorer Willem Janszoon made the first recorded European landing in Australia, although he believed that he was on New Guinea.
1815 – Napoleon escaped from the Italian island of Elba (depicted), to which he had been exiled after the signing of the Treaty of Fontainebleau.
1917 – The Original Dixieland Jass Band recorded "Livery Stable Blues", the first jazz single ever released.
2008 – In the first significant cultural visit from the United States to North Korea since the Korean War, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra performed in East Pyongyang Grand Theatre.

Reginald St John Battersby (b. 1900)
Raosaheb Gogte (d. 2000)
Joseph Wapner (d. 2017)

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February 27: Feast day of Saint Gregory of Narek (Catholicism)

Mary of Guise

1560 – The Treaty of Berwick was signed, setting the terms under which an English fleet and army could enter Scotland to expel French troops defending the regency of Mary of Guise (pictured).
1962 – Two dissident Republic of Vietnam Air Force pilots bombed the Independence Palace in Saigon in a failed attempt to assassinate President Ngo Dinh Diem.
1982 – The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, known for its performances of Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy operas, gave its final performance.
2002 – Violent riots, perceived to have been instigated by a train fire that killed 59 Hindu pilgrims, broke out in the Indian state of Gujarat, killing at least 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, over three days.

Pietro Gnocchi (b. 1689)
Ellen Terry (b. 1847)
Tina Strobos (d. 2012)

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February 28: Kalevala Day / Finnish Culture Day

Protesters in Taipei before the shooting

1638 – The National Covenant was formally adopted in opposition to proposed reforms to the Church of Scotland by King Charles I.
1897 – Ranavalona III, the last sovereign ruler of the Kingdom of Madagascar, was deposed by French military forces.
1928 – Indian physicist C. V. Raman and his colleagues discovered what is now known as Raman scattering, for which he later became the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.
1947 – Nationalist soldiers fired on protesters in Taipei (crowd pictured), triggering widespread uprisings and the violent suppression in the Taiwanese White Terror.
1975 – A London Underground train failed to stop at the terminal Moorgate station, crashing and causing the deaths of 43 people.

Cornelius Gemma (b. 1535)
Pierre Fatou (b. 1878)
Anna Muzychuk (b. 1990)

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February 29: Beginning of the Nineteen-Day Fast (Baháʼí Faith, 2024)

Stanisław II Augustus of Poland

1704 – Queen Anne's War: French and Native American forces raided the English settlement of Deerfield, Massachusetts, killing more than 50 colonists.
1768 – A group of Polish nobles established the Bar Confederation to defend the internal and external independence of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth against Russian influence and King Stanisław II Augustus (portrait shown).
1960 – The deadliest earthquake in Moroccan history struck the city of Agadir, killing at least 12,000 people.
1980 – La Bougie du Sapeur, a humorous French newspaper that is published only on leap days, printed its first issue.
2008 – Belgian author Misha Defonseca admitted that her bestselling memoir about surviving the Holocaust was in fact a literary forgery.

Oswald of Worcester (d. 992) · Ina Coolbrith (d. 1928) · Pedro Sánchez (b. 1972)

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Selected anniversaries / On this day archive

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