155 Martyrdom of Polycarp, an early Church Father who was a disciple of the Apostle John. Arrested at age 86, Polycarp was burned at the stake for refusing to deny the Christian faith.
303 Emperor Diocletian orders the general persecution of Christians in Rome.
553 Pope Vigilius ratifies verdicts of Council of Constantinople. Vigilius had opposed the council altogether and remained in sanctuary from May 552 to December. However, in February he yielded and formally ratified the 14 anathemas. Yet the Western church, which had taken the edicts of the Council of Chalcedon seriously, could not accept the verdicts, and no compromise between East and West was ever truly reached.
1447 Death of Humphrey Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester. Humphrey was the fourth son of King Henry IV and a strong supporter of humanism, patronizing English and Italian artists, writers and philosophers, for which he was known as "Good Duke Humphrey." Unfortunately, his political acumen was not as good. Although he served his brother, Henry V, in a series of campaigns in the Hundred Year's War, after Henry died and he was named temporary regent for the infant Henry VI, he soon began a feud with Chancellor Henry Beaufort that lasted for more than twenty years. The feud ended with the arrest of Gloucester and his subsequent death from, most likely, natural causes five days later, but the poor timing of his demise led to a rumor that he had been murdered, which was used as a rallying point in later uprisings.
1516 The Habsburg Charles I succeeds Ferdinand in Spain.
1540 Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado begins his unsuccessful search for the fabled Seven Cities of Gold in the American Southwest.
1554 Death of Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk. Ambition was the driving force and the downfall of Henry Grey, who used his daughter Lady Jane as a pawn in a deadly political game. Though he survived his ill-contrived plan to place Jane on the throne, he was subsequently arrested for his part in the Wyat rebellion, and was beheaded.
1574 The 5th War of Religion breaks out in France.
1602 Death of Agostino Carraci, painter and fresco artist who also produced some fine engravings.
1615 The Estates-General in Paris is dissolved, having been in session since October 1614.
1633 Birth of Samuel Pepys, English diarist.
1685 Birth of Georg Friedrich Handel, German composer.
1743 Birth of Meyer Amschel Rothschild, banker and founder of the Rothschild dynasty in Europe.
1778 Baron von Steuben joins the Continental Army at Valley Forge.
1821 Poet John Keats dies of tuberculosis at the age of 25.
1822 Boston was granted a charter to incorporate as a city.
1836 The Alamo is besieged by Santa Anna.
1846 The Liberty Bell tolls for the last time, to mark George Washington's birthday.
1847 Forces led by Zachary Taylor defeat the Mexicans at the Battle of Buena Vista.
1848 The sixth president of the United States, John Quincy Adams, died of a stroke at age 80.
1854 Great Britain officially recognizes the independence of the Orange Free State.
1855 Death of Carl Friedrich Gauss, German mathematician who also made contributions to other sciences.
1861 Texas becomes the seventh state to secede from the Union.
1861 President-elect Lincoln arrived secretly in Washington to take office, an assassination plot having been foiled in Baltimore.
1868 Birth of W.E.B. [William Edward Burghardt] Du Bois, U.S. historian and civil rights leader, founder of what became the NAACP.
1870 Mississippi was readmitted to the Union.
1883 Birth of Victor Fleming, film director (The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind)
1885 John Lee survives three attempts to hang him in Exeter Prison, as the trap fails to open.
1886 Charles M. Hall, a young U.S. chemist, completed his electrolytic process for the separation of aluminum from its ore, a mere eight months since he graduated from college.
1893 Rudolf Diesel received a German patent for the diesel engine. His engine burns fuel oil rather than gasoline, and uses high compressed of the gases in the cylinder rather than a spark to ignite the fuel. Diesel engines were used widely in Europe for their efficiency and power, and are still used today in most heavy industrial machinery. Diesel cars never caught on in the U.S., partly because the diesel engines greater efficiency is counter-balanced by its higher emissions of soot, odor, and air pollutants. However, some environmentalists argue that in spite of the diesel engines exhaust pollution, its fuel efficiency may make it more environmentally sound than the gasoline engine in the long run.
1898 Writer Emile Zola is imprisoned in France for his letter J'accuse in which he accuses the French government of anti-semitism and the wrongful imprisonment of army captain Alfred Dreyfus.
1899 Birth of Erich Kastner, German poet, novelist and children's author (Emil and the Detectives).
1901 Britain and Germany agree on a boundary between German East Africa and Nyasaland.
1904 Japan guarantees Korean sovereignty in exchange for military assistance.
1904 Birth of William Shirer, CBS broadcaster and author (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich).
1910 The United Wireless Telegraph Company in Philadelphia sponsored the first-ever Morse code radio contest on February 23, 1910. Participants from telegraph companies competed to send and receive Morse code messages, and the contestants were judged on speed and accuracy.
1916 Secretary of State Lansing hints that the U.S. may have to abandon the policy of avoiding "entangling foreign alliances".
1919 Benito Mussolini quits the Italian Socialist Party to form the Fascist movement "Fasci del Combattimento".
1921 An airmail plane sets a record of 33 hours and 20 minutes from San Francisco to New York.
1924 Birth of Allan MacLeod Cormack, physicist, developed the CAT scan.
1926 President Calvin Coolidge opposes a large air force, believing it would be a menace to world peace.
1936 In Russia, an unmanned balloon rises to a record height of 25 miles.
1938 Twelve Chinese fighter planes drop bombs on Japan.
1940 Folk singer Woody Guthrie writes one of his best-known songs, "This Land is Your Land." This song reflected not only Guthrie's support for the common folk, but also his deep love for his country. The verse celebrated the beauty and grandeur of America while the chorus drove home the populist sentiment that the nation belonged to all the people, not merely the rich and powerful. Probably the most famous of his more than 1,000 songs, "This Land is Your Land" was also one of his last. Guthrie died in 1967, having lived long enough to see his music inspire a whole new generation and "This Land is Your Land" become a rallying song for the Civil Rights movement.
1942 A Japanese submarine shells an oil refinery near Santa Barbara, California, the first Axis bombs to hit American soil.
1944 American bombers strike the Marianas Islands bases, only 1,300 miles from Tokyo.
1945 Eisenhower opens a large offensive in the Rhineland.
1945 During World War II, U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima captured Mount Suribachi, where they raised the American flag.
1945 U.S. 3rd Army breached the Siegfried Line north of Moselle.
1946 Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita is hanged in Manila, the Philippines, for war crimes.
1947 Several hundred Nazi organizers are arrested in Frankfurt by U.S. and British forces.
1950 New York's Metropolitan Museum exhibits a collection of Habsburg art. The first showing of this collection in the U.S.
1954 Mass innoculation begins as Salk's polio vaccine is given to children for first time.
1955 Eight nations meet in Bangkok for the first SEATO council.
1960 Whites join Negro students in a sit-in at a Winston-Salem, N.C. Woolworth store.
1964 The U.S. and Britain recognize the new Zanzibar government.
1965 Comedian Stan Laurel dies at age 74, eight years after the death of his long-time comedy partner, Oliver Hardy. Laurel and Hardy made more than 100 films together, 27 of them feature length, during their three decades working together. After Hardy's death, Laurel vowed never to perform again. He continued to write comedy sketches until his death.
1966 According to the U.S. military headquarters in Saigon, 90,000 South Vietnamese deserted in 1965. This number was almost 14 percent of total South Vietnamese army strength and was twice the number of those that deserted in 1964. By contrast, the best estimates showed that fewer than 20,000 Viet Cong defected during the previous year.
1967 American troops begin the largest offensive of the war, near the Cambodian border.
1971 The South Vietnamese advance into Laos grinds to a halt.
1972 Black activist Angela Davis is released from jail where she was held for kidnapping , conspiracy and murder.
1981 An attempted coup began in Spain as 200 members of the Civil Guard invaded the Parliament, taking lawmakers hostage. (However, the attempt collapsed 18 hours later.)
1991 French forces unofficially start the Persian Gulf ground war by crossing the Saudi-Iraqi border.
1993 President Clinton won United Nations support for a plan to airdrop relief supplies to starving Bosnians during an Oval Office meeting with Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
1994 Bosnian Croats and Moslems agree upon a ceasefire and a future U.S. sponsored Bosniak-Croat Federation that would make up one entity in the future Bosnia-Herzegovina (the other is the Republic of Serbs).
1997 Scientists in Scotland announced they had succeeded in cloning an adult mammal, producing a lamb named ``Dolly.'' (Dolly, however, was put down this Feb. 14 after a life marred by premature aging and disease.)
1997 Schindler's List is shown on NBC, the first network to broadcast a movie without commercial interruption. Ford Motor Company, which sponsored the broadcast, showed one commercial before and after the film.
1998 Forty-two people were killed, some 26,000 homes and businesses damaged or destroyed, by tornadoes in central Florida.
1998 President Clinton gave cautious approval to a U.N. agreement reached by Secretary-General Kofi Annan with Saddam Hussein for monitoring suspected weapons sites in Iraq.
1999 Serb and Albanian negotiators fail to find common ground during peacetalks in Ramboulliet castle near Paris, France. The Serbs refused to allow the deployment of NATO-led international peacekeeping force, while the Albanians refused the demilitarization of Kosovan Liberation Army guerrillas.
2001 Radomir Markovic, former Serbian secret police chief under the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, is arrested for his role in politically motivated assassinations between October 1998 and january 2001.
2002 Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt was kidnapped by a rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. (Her whereabouts remain unknown.)
303 Emperor Diocletian orders the general persecution of Christians in Rome.
553 Pope Vigilius ratifies verdicts of Council of Constantinople. Vigilius had opposed the council altogether and remained in sanctuary from May 552 to December. However, in February he yielded and formally ratified the 14 anathemas. Yet the Western church, which had taken the edicts of the Council of Chalcedon seriously, could not accept the verdicts, and no compromise between East and West was ever truly reached.
1447 Death of Humphrey Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester. Humphrey was the fourth son of King Henry IV and a strong supporter of humanism, patronizing English and Italian artists, writers and philosophers, for which he was known as "Good Duke Humphrey." Unfortunately, his political acumen was not as good. Although he served his brother, Henry V, in a series of campaigns in the Hundred Year's War, after Henry died and he was named temporary regent for the infant Henry VI, he soon began a feud with Chancellor Henry Beaufort that lasted for more than twenty years. The feud ended with the arrest of Gloucester and his subsequent death from, most likely, natural causes five days later, but the poor timing of his demise led to a rumor that he had been murdered, which was used as a rallying point in later uprisings.
1516 The Habsburg Charles I succeeds Ferdinand in Spain.
1540 Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado begins his unsuccessful search for the fabled Seven Cities of Gold in the American Southwest.
1554 Death of Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk. Ambition was the driving force and the downfall of Henry Grey, who used his daughter Lady Jane as a pawn in a deadly political game. Though he survived his ill-contrived plan to place Jane on the throne, he was subsequently arrested for his part in the Wyat rebellion, and was beheaded.
1574 The 5th War of Religion breaks out in France.
1602 Death of Agostino Carraci, painter and fresco artist who also produced some fine engravings.
1615 The Estates-General in Paris is dissolved, having been in session since October 1614.
1633 Birth of Samuel Pepys, English diarist.
1685 Birth of Georg Friedrich Handel, German composer.
1743 Birth of Meyer Amschel Rothschild, banker and founder of the Rothschild dynasty in Europe.
1778 Baron von Steuben joins the Continental Army at Valley Forge.
1821 Poet John Keats dies of tuberculosis at the age of 25.
1822 Boston was granted a charter to incorporate as a city.
1836 The Alamo is besieged by Santa Anna.
1846 The Liberty Bell tolls for the last time, to mark George Washington's birthday.
1847 Forces led by Zachary Taylor defeat the Mexicans at the Battle of Buena Vista.
1848 The sixth president of the United States, John Quincy Adams, died of a stroke at age 80.
1854 Great Britain officially recognizes the independence of the Orange Free State.
1855 Death of Carl Friedrich Gauss, German mathematician who also made contributions to other sciences.
1861 Texas becomes the seventh state to secede from the Union.
1861 President-elect Lincoln arrived secretly in Washington to take office, an assassination plot having been foiled in Baltimore.
1868 Birth of W.E.B. [William Edward Burghardt] Du Bois, U.S. historian and civil rights leader, founder of what became the NAACP.
1870 Mississippi was readmitted to the Union.
1883 Birth of Victor Fleming, film director (The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind)
1885 John Lee survives three attempts to hang him in Exeter Prison, as the trap fails to open.
1886 Charles M. Hall, a young U.S. chemist, completed his electrolytic process for the separation of aluminum from its ore, a mere eight months since he graduated from college.
1893 Rudolf Diesel received a German patent for the diesel engine. His engine burns fuel oil rather than gasoline, and uses high compressed of the gases in the cylinder rather than a spark to ignite the fuel. Diesel engines were used widely in Europe for their efficiency and power, and are still used today in most heavy industrial machinery. Diesel cars never caught on in the U.S., partly because the diesel engines greater efficiency is counter-balanced by its higher emissions of soot, odor, and air pollutants. However, some environmentalists argue that in spite of the diesel engines exhaust pollution, its fuel efficiency may make it more environmentally sound than the gasoline engine in the long run.
1898 Writer Emile Zola is imprisoned in France for his letter J'accuse in which he accuses the French government of anti-semitism and the wrongful imprisonment of army captain Alfred Dreyfus.
1899 Birth of Erich Kastner, German poet, novelist and children's author (Emil and the Detectives).
1901 Britain and Germany agree on a boundary between German East Africa and Nyasaland.
1904 Japan guarantees Korean sovereignty in exchange for military assistance.
1904 Birth of William Shirer, CBS broadcaster and author (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich).
1910 The United Wireless Telegraph Company in Philadelphia sponsored the first-ever Morse code radio contest on February 23, 1910. Participants from telegraph companies competed to send and receive Morse code messages, and the contestants were judged on speed and accuracy.
1916 Secretary of State Lansing hints that the U.S. may have to abandon the policy of avoiding "entangling foreign alliances".
1919 Benito Mussolini quits the Italian Socialist Party to form the Fascist movement "Fasci del Combattimento".
1921 An airmail plane sets a record of 33 hours and 20 minutes from San Francisco to New York.
1924 Birth of Allan MacLeod Cormack, physicist, developed the CAT scan.
1926 President Calvin Coolidge opposes a large air force, believing it would be a menace to world peace.
1936 In Russia, an unmanned balloon rises to a record height of 25 miles.
1938 Twelve Chinese fighter planes drop bombs on Japan.
1940 Folk singer Woody Guthrie writes one of his best-known songs, "This Land is Your Land." This song reflected not only Guthrie's support for the common folk, but also his deep love for his country. The verse celebrated the beauty and grandeur of America while the chorus drove home the populist sentiment that the nation belonged to all the people, not merely the rich and powerful. Probably the most famous of his more than 1,000 songs, "This Land is Your Land" was also one of his last. Guthrie died in 1967, having lived long enough to see his music inspire a whole new generation and "This Land is Your Land" become a rallying song for the Civil Rights movement.
1942 A Japanese submarine shells an oil refinery near Santa Barbara, California, the first Axis bombs to hit American soil.
1944 American bombers strike the Marianas Islands bases, only 1,300 miles from Tokyo.
1945 Eisenhower opens a large offensive in the Rhineland.
1945 During World War II, U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima captured Mount Suribachi, where they raised the American flag.
1945 U.S. 3rd Army breached the Siegfried Line north of Moselle.
1946 Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita is hanged in Manila, the Philippines, for war crimes.
1947 Several hundred Nazi organizers are arrested in Frankfurt by U.S. and British forces.
1950 New York's Metropolitan Museum exhibits a collection of Habsburg art. The first showing of this collection in the U.S.
1954 Mass innoculation begins as Salk's polio vaccine is given to children for first time.
1955 Eight nations meet in Bangkok for the first SEATO council.
1960 Whites join Negro students in a sit-in at a Winston-Salem, N.C. Woolworth store.
1964 The U.S. and Britain recognize the new Zanzibar government.
1965 Comedian Stan Laurel dies at age 74, eight years after the death of his long-time comedy partner, Oliver Hardy. Laurel and Hardy made more than 100 films together, 27 of them feature length, during their three decades working together. After Hardy's death, Laurel vowed never to perform again. He continued to write comedy sketches until his death.
1966 According to the U.S. military headquarters in Saigon, 90,000 South Vietnamese deserted in 1965. This number was almost 14 percent of total South Vietnamese army strength and was twice the number of those that deserted in 1964. By contrast, the best estimates showed that fewer than 20,000 Viet Cong defected during the previous year.
1967 American troops begin the largest offensive of the war, near the Cambodian border.
1971 The South Vietnamese advance into Laos grinds to a halt.
1972 Black activist Angela Davis is released from jail where she was held for kidnapping , conspiracy and murder.
1981 An attempted coup began in Spain as 200 members of the Civil Guard invaded the Parliament, taking lawmakers hostage. (However, the attempt collapsed 18 hours later.)
1991 French forces unofficially start the Persian Gulf ground war by crossing the Saudi-Iraqi border.
1993 President Clinton won United Nations support for a plan to airdrop relief supplies to starving Bosnians during an Oval Office meeting with Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
1994 Bosnian Croats and Moslems agree upon a ceasefire and a future U.S. sponsored Bosniak-Croat Federation that would make up one entity in the future Bosnia-Herzegovina (the other is the Republic of Serbs).
1997 Scientists in Scotland announced they had succeeded in cloning an adult mammal, producing a lamb named ``Dolly.'' (Dolly, however, was put down this Feb. 14 after a life marred by premature aging and disease.)
1997 Schindler's List is shown on NBC, the first network to broadcast a movie without commercial interruption. Ford Motor Company, which sponsored the broadcast, showed one commercial before and after the film.
1998 Forty-two people were killed, some 26,000 homes and businesses damaged or destroyed, by tornadoes in central Florida.
1998 President Clinton gave cautious approval to a U.N. agreement reached by Secretary-General Kofi Annan with Saddam Hussein for monitoring suspected weapons sites in Iraq.
1999 Serb and Albanian negotiators fail to find common ground during peacetalks in Ramboulliet castle near Paris, France. The Serbs refused to allow the deployment of NATO-led international peacekeeping force, while the Albanians refused the demilitarization of Kosovan Liberation Army guerrillas.
2001 Radomir Markovic, former Serbian secret police chief under the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, is arrested for his role in politically motivated assassinations between October 1998 and january 2001.
2002 Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt was kidnapped by a rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. (Her whereabouts remain unknown.)
Francois: Do you know what kind of a bomb it was?
Clouseau: The exploding kind.
Clouseau: The exploding kind.
