Today in history

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Re: Today in history

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January 31
1606 Guy Fawkes is hanged, drawn and quartered for his part in the Gunpowder Plot, an attempt to blow up Parliament.
1620 Virginia colony leaders write to the Virginia Company in England, asking for more orphaned apprentices for employment.
1788 The Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart dies.
1835 A man with two pistols misfires at President Andrew Jackson at the White House.
1865 House of Representatives approves a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery.
1911 The German Reichstag exempts royal families from tax obligations.
1915 Germans use poison gas on the Russians at Bolimov.
1915 German U-boats sink two British steamers in the English Channel.
1916 President Woodrow Wilson refuses the compromise on Lusitania reparations.
1917 Germany resumes unlimited sub warfare, warning that all neutral ships that are in the war zone will be attacked.
1935 The Soviet premier tells Japan to get out of Manchuria.
1943 The Battle of Stalingrad ends as small groups of German soldiers of the Sixth Army surrender to the victorious Red Army forces.
1944 U.S. troops under Vice Adm. Spruance land on Kwajalien atoll in the Marshall Islands.
1950 Paris protests the Soviet recognition of Ho Chi Minh's Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
1966 U.S. planes resume bombing of North Vietnam after a 37-day pause.
1968 In Vietnam, the Tet Offensive begins as Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers attack strategic and civilian locations throughout South Vietnam.
1976 Ernesto Miranda, famous from the Supreme Court ruling on Miranda vs. Arizona is stabbed to death.
1981 Lech Walesa announces an accord in Poland, giving Saturdays off to laborers.


Born on January 31
1734 Robert Morris, signatory of the Declaration of Independence.
1797 Franz Schubert, Austrian composer (C Major Symphony, The Unfinished Symphony).
1919 Jackie Robinson, first African-American baseball player in the modern major leagues.
duc, sequere, aut de via decede
"frapper fort, frapper vite, frappée souvent-- Adm William "Bull" Halsey
“We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”--Gen George Patton
"Our Liberty is insured by four "Boxes", the Ballot box, the Jury box, the Soap box and the Cartridge box"

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Re: Today in history

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February 1
1327 Edward III is coronated King of England.
1587 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, signs the Warrant of Execution for Mary Queen of Scots.
1633 The tobacco laws of Virginia are codified, limiting tobacco production to reduce dependence on a single-crop economy.
1793 France declares war on Britain and the Netherlands.
1861 A furious Governor Sam Houston storms out of a legislative session upon learning that Texas has voted 167-7 to secede from the Union.
1902 U.S. Secretary of State John Hay protests Russian privileges in China as a violation of the "open door policy."
1905 Germany contests French rule in Morocco.
1909 U.S. troops leave Cuba after installing Jose Miguel Gomez as president.
1930 A Loening Air Yacht of Air Ferries makes its first passenger run between San Francisco and Oakland, California..
1942 Planes of the U.S. Pacific fleet attack Japanese bases in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands.
1943 American tanks and infantry are battered at German positions at Faid Pass in North Africa.
1944 U.S. Army troops invade two Kwajalein Islands in the Pacific.
1945 U.S. Rangers and Filipino guerrillas rescue 513 American survivors of the Bataan Death March.
1951 Three A-bomb tests are completed in the desert of Nevada.
1960 Four black students stage a sit-in at a segregated Greensboro, N.C. lunch counter.
1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson rejects Charles de Gaulle's plan for a neutral Vietnam.
1965 Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and 770 others are arrested in protest against voter discrimination in Alabama.
1968 U.S. troops drive the North Vietnamese out of Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon.
1968 South Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu declares martial law.
1986 Two days of anti-government riots in Port-au-Prince result in 14 dead.


Born on February 1
1552 Sir Edward Coke, English jurist who helped the development of English law with his arguments for the supremacy of common law over royal prerogative.
1878 Hattie Caraway, first woman elected to the U.S. Senate.
1901 Clark Gable, American film actor (Mutiny on the Bounty, Gone With the Wind).
1902 Langston Hughes, African-American poet
1931 Boris Yeltsin, The first president of the Republic of Russia and prime minister of the Russian Federation.
duc, sequere, aut de via decede
"frapper fort, frapper vite, frappée souvent-- Adm William "Bull" Halsey
“We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”--Gen George Patton
"Our Liberty is insured by four "Boxes", the Ballot box, the Jury box, the Soap box and the Cartridge box"

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Re: Today in history

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February 6
1626 Huguenot rebels and the French sign the Peace of La Rochelle.
1778 France recognizes the United States and signs a treaty of aid in Paris.
1788 Massachusetts becomes the sixth state to ratify the Constitution.
1862 The Battle of Fort Henry, Tenn., begins the Mississippi Valley campaign.
1891 The Dalton Gang commits its first crime, a train robbery in Alila, Calif.
1899 The Spanish-American War ends.
1900 President McKinley appoints W.H. Taft commissioner to report on the Philippines.
1904 Japan's foreign minister severs all ties with Russia, citing delaying tactics in negotiations over Manchuria.
1916 Germany admits full liability for Lusitania incident and recognizes the United State's right to claim indemnity.
1922 The Washington Disarmament Conference comes to an end with signature of final treaty forbidding fortification of the Aleutian Islands for 14 years.
1926 Mussolini warns Germany to stop agitation in Tyrol.
1929 Germany accepts Kellogg-Briand pact.
1933 Adolf Hitler's Third Reich begins press censorship.
1936 Adolf Hitler opens the Fourth Winter Olympics.
1941 The RAF clears the way as British take Benghazi, trapping thousands of Italians.
1944 Kwajalein Island in the Central Pacific falls to U.S. Army troops.
1945 MacArthur reports the fall of Manila, and the liberation of 5,000 prisoners.
1963 The United States reports that all Soviet offensive arms are out of Cuba.
1964 Cuba blocks the water supply to Guantanamo Naval Base in rebuke of the United State's seizure of four Cuban fishing boats.
1964 Paris and London agree to build a rail tunnel under the English Channel.
1965 Seven U.S. GIs are killed in a Viet Cong raid on a base in Pleiku.
1968 Charles de Gaulle opens the 19th Winter Olympics in France.
1975 President Gerald Ford asks Congress for $497 million in aid to Cambodia.
1977 Queen Elizabeth marks her Silver Jubilee.


Born on February 6
1756 Aaron Burr, 3rd U.S. Vice President.
1895 George Herman "Babe" Ruth, baseball player with the Boston Red Sox, the New York Yankees and the Boston Braves. The first player to hit 60 home runs in one season.
1911 Ronald Reagan, film actor and 40th U.S. President (1981-1989).
1913 Mary Douglas Leakey, archaeologist and paleoanthropologist.
1932 Francois Truffaut, French film director (The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player).
1933 Walter E. Fountroy, politician and civil rights leader.
1940 Tom Brokaw, NBC News anchorman.
1945 Bob Marley, reggae musician.
duc, sequere, aut de via decede
"frapper fort, frapper vite, frappée souvent-- Adm William "Bull" Halsey
“We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”--Gen George Patton
"Our Liberty is insured by four "Boxes", the Ballot box, the Jury box, the Soap box and the Cartridge box"

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Suzuki Johnny
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Re: Today in history

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February 7
457 A Thracian officer by the name of Leo is proclaimed as emperor of the East by the army general, Aspar, on the death of the Emperor Marcian.
1668 The Netherlands, England and Sweden conclude an alliance directed against Louis XIV of France.
1783 The Siege of Gibraltar, which was pursued by the Spanish and the French since July 24, 1779, is finally lifted.
1818 The first successful U.S. educational magazine, Academician, begins publication in New York City.
1882 American pugilist John L. Sullivan becomes the last of the bare-knuckle world heavyweight champions with his defeat of Patty Ryan in Mississippi City.
1913 The Turks lose 5,000 men in a battle with the Bulgarian army in Gallipoli.
1915 Fieldmarshal Paul von Hindenburg moves on Russians at Masurian Lakes.
1917 The British steamer California is sunk off the coast of Ireland by a German U-boat.
1926 Negro History Week, originated by Carter G. Woodson, is observed for the first time.
1928 The United States signs an arbitration treaty with France.
1931 Amelia Earhart weds George Putnam in Connecticut.
1944 The Germans launch a second attack against the Allied beachead at Anzio, Italy. They hoped to push the Allies back into the sea.
1950 The United States recognizes Vietnam under the leadership of Emperor Bao Dai, not Ho Chi Minh who is recognized by the Soviets.
1963 The Mona Lisa is put on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
1964 The British band The Beatles are greeted by 25,000 fans upon their arrival in the United States at JFK Airport.
1965 U.S. jets hit Dong Hoi guerrilla base in reprisal for the Viet Cong raids.
1968 North Vietnamese use 11 Soviet-built light tanks to overrun the U.S. Special Forces camp at Lang Vei at the end of an 18-hour long siege.
1978 Ethiopia mounts a counter attack against Somalia.
1983 Iran opens an invasion in the southeast of Iraq.


Born on February 7
1477 Sir Thomas More, English statesman and writer, famous for Utopia, later executed for refusing to accept Henry VIII as the head of the church.
1804 John Deere, farm equipment manufacturer
1812 Charles Dickens, prolific English novelist whose stories reflected life in Victorian England. Some of his more famous works include Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol and A Tale of Two Cities.
1837 Sir James Murray, Scottish lexicographer and editor.
1867 Laura Ingalls Wilder, author whose works were the basis for television's Little House on the Prairie.
1885 Sinclair Lewis, novelist of satire and realism. (Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry).
1905 Ulf Svante von Euler-Chelpin, Swedish physiologist.
duc, sequere, aut de via decede
"frapper fort, frapper vite, frappée souvent-- Adm William "Bull" Halsey
“We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”--Gen George Patton
"Our Liberty is insured by four "Boxes", the Ballot box, the Jury box, the Soap box and the Cartridge box"

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Suzuki Johnny
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Re: Today in history

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February 8
1587 Mary, Queen of Scots is beheaded in Fotheringhay Castle for her alleged part in the conspiracy to usurp Elizabeth I.
1807 At Eylau, Napoleon's Marshal Pierre Agureau attacks Russian forces in a heavy snowstorm.
1861 Delegates from seceded states adopt a provisional Confederate Constitution.
1862 Union troops under Gen. Ambrose Burnside defeat a Confederate defense force at the Battle of Roanoke Island, N.C.
1865 Confederate raider William Quantrill and men attack a group of Federal wagons at New Market, Kentucky.
1887 Congress passes the Dawes Act, which gives citizenship to Indians living apart from their tribe.
1900 British General Buller is beaten at Ladysmith, South Africa as the British flee over the Tugela River.
1904 In a surprise attack at Port Arthur, Korea, the Japanese disable seven Russian warships.
1910 The Boy Scouts of America is incorporated.
1924 The gas chamber is used for the first time to execute a murderer.
1942 The Japanese land on Singapore.
1943 British General Orde Wingate leads a guerrilla force of "Chindits" against the Japanese in Burma.
1952 Elizabeth becomes Queen of England after her father, King George VI, dies.
1962 The U.S. Defense Department reports the creation of the Military Assistance Command in South Vietnam.
1965 South Vietnamese bomb the North Vietnamese communications center at Vinh Linh.
1971 South Vietnamese ground forces, backed by American air power, begin Operation Lam Son 719, a 17,000 man incursion into Laos that ends three weeks later in a disaster.
1990 CBS television temporarily suspends Andy Rooney for his anti-gay and ant-black remarks in a magazine interview.


Born on February 8
412 St. Proclus, Patriarch of Constantinople
1820 William T. Sherman, Union general in the American Civil War.
1828 Jules Verne, French novelist, one of the first writers of science fiction (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea).
1834 Dmitri Ivanovich Medeleyev, Russian chemist, developed the periodic table of elements.
1851 Kate (O'Flaherty ) Chopin, novelist, short story writer (The Awakening).
1906 Chester F. Carlson, physicist, inventor of xerography, the electrostatic dry-copy process.
1906 Henry Roth, writer (Call it Sleep).
1911 Elizabeth Bishop, poet.
1926 Neal Cassaday, writer, counterculture proponent.
1931 James Dean, film actor and 1950s teenage icon (Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden, Giant).
1940 Ted Koppel, television journalist.
duc, sequere, aut de via decede
"frapper fort, frapper vite, frappée souvent-- Adm William "Bull" Halsey
“We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”--Gen George Patton
"Our Liberty is insured by four "Boxes", the Ballot box, the Jury box, the Soap box and the Cartridge box"

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Suzuki Johnny
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Re: Today in history

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February 9
1567 Lord Darnley, the second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, is murdered in his sick-bed in a house in Edinburgh when the house blows up.
1799 The USS Constellation captures the French frigate Insurgente off the West Indies.
1825 The House of Representatives elects John Quincy Adams, sixth U.S. President.
1861 Jefferson F. Davis is elected president of the Confederate States of America.
1864 Union General George Armstrong Custer marries Elizabeth Bacon in their hometown of Monroe, Mich.
1904 Japanese troops land near Seoul, Korea, after disabling two Russian cruisers.
1909 France agrees to recognize German economic interests in Morocco in exchange for political supremacy.
1916 Conscription begins in Great Britain as the Military Service Act becomes effective.
1922 The U.S. Congress establishes the World War Foreign Debt Commission.
1942 Chiang Kai-shek meets with Sir Stafford Cripps, the British viceroy in India.
1943 The Red Army takes back Kursk 15 months after it fell to the Germans.
1946 Stalin announces the new five-year plan for the Soviet Union, calling for production boosts of 50 percent.
1951 Actress Greta Garbo gets U.S. citizenship.
1953 The French destroy six Viet Minh war factories hidden in the jungles of Vietnam.
1964 The U.S. embassy in Moscow is stoned by Chinese and Vietnamese students.
1978 Canada expels 11 Soviets in spying case.
1994 Nelson Mandela becomes the first black president of South Africa.


Born on February 9
1773 William Henry Harrison, ninth U.S. President and the first to die in office.
1814 Samuel Tilden, philanthropist.
1819 Lydia E. Pinkham, patent-medicine maker and entrepeneur.
1846 William Maybach, German engineer, designed the first Mercedes automobile.
1871 Howard T. Ricketts, pathologist.
1874 Amy Lowell, poet.
1880 James Stephens, Irish writer (The Charwoman's Daughter, The Crock of Gold).
1909 Dean Rusk, Secretary of State under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
1923 Brendan Behan, Irish playwright and poet (The Hostage, The Quare Fellow).
1944 Alice Walker, Pulitzer prize winning author (The Color Purple).
duc, sequere, aut de via decede
"frapper fort, frapper vite, frappée souvent-- Adm William "Bull" Halsey
“We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”--Gen George Patton
"Our Liberty is insured by four "Boxes", the Ballot box, the Jury box, the Soap box and the Cartridge box"

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Suzuki Johnny
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Re: Today in history

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February 10
1258 Hulagu, a Mongol leader, seizes Baghdad, bringing an end to the Abbasid caliphate.
1620 Supporters of Marie de Medici, the queen mother, who has been exiled to Blois, are defeated by the king's troops at Ponts de Ce, France.
1763 The Treaty of Paris ends the French-Indian War. France gives up all her territories in the New World except New Orleans and a few scattered islands.
1799 Napoleon Bonaparte leaves Cairo, Egypt, for Syria, at the head of 13,000 men.
1814 Napoleon personally directs lightning strikes against enemy columns advancing toward Paris, beginning with a victory over the Russians at Champaubert.
1840 Queen Victoria marries Prince Albert.
1846 Led by religious leader Brigham Young, the first Mormons begin a long westward exodus from Nauvoo, Il., to Utah.
1863 P.T. Barnum's star midgets, Tom Thumb and Lavinia Warren, are married.
1904 Russia and Japan declare war on each other.
1915 President Wilson blasts the British for using the U.S. flag on merchant ships to deceive the Germans.
1939 Japanese occupy island of Hainan in French Indochina.
1941 London severs diplomatic relations with Romania.
1941 Iceland is attacked by German planes.
1942 The war halts civilian car production at Ford.
1945 B-29s hit the Tokyo area.
1955 Bell Aircraft displays a fixed-wing vertical takeoff plane.
1960 Adolph Coors, the beer brewer, is kidnapped in Golden, Colo.
1966 Protester David Miller is convicted of burning his draft card.
1979 The Metropolitan Museum announces the first major theft in its 110-year history, $150,000 Greek marble head.
1986 The largest Mafia trial in history, with 474 defendants, opens in Palermo, Italy.


Born on February 10
1890 Boris Pasternak, Russian novelist and poet (Dr. Zhivago).
1893 Jimmy Durante, American comedian and film actor.
1894 Harold MacMillan, British prime minister (1957-1963).
1897 John F. Enders, virologist.
1898 Bertolt Brecht, German poet and dramatist (The Threepenny Opera).
1901 Stella Adler, actress and teacher.
1902 Walter Brattain, physicist, one of the inventors of the transistor.
1910 Dominique Georges Pire, Belgian cleric and educator.
1914 Larry Adler, harmonica virtuoso.
1920 Alex Comfort, English physician and author (Joy of Sex).
1927 (Mary Violet) Leontyne Price, opera singer.
duc, sequere, aut de via decede
"frapper fort, frapper vite, frappée souvent-- Adm William "Bull" Halsey
“We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”--Gen George Patton
"Our Liberty is insured by four "Boxes", the Ballot box, the Jury box, the Soap box and the Cartridge box"

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Suzuki Johnny
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Re: Today in history

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February 11
660 BC Traditional founding of Japan by Emperor Jimmu Tenno.
1531 Henry VIII is recognized as the supreme head of the Church of England.
1805 Sixteen-year-old Sacajawea, the Shoshoni guide for Lewis & Clark, gives birth to a son, with Meriwether Lewis serving as midwife.
1809 Robert Fulton patents the steamboat.
1815 News of the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812, finally reaches the United States.
1858 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous, a French miller's daughter, claims to have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes.
1903 Congress passes the Expedition Act, giving antitrust cases priority in the courts.
1904 President Theodore Roosevelt proclaims strict neutrality for the United States in the Russo-Japanese War.
1910 Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and Eleanor Alexander announce their wedding date--June 20, 1910.
1926 The Mexican government nationalizes all church property.
1936 The Reich arrests 150 Catholic youth leaders in Berlin.
1939 The Negrin government returns to Madrid, Spain.
1942 The German battleships Gneisenau, Scharnhorst and Prinz Eugen begin their famed channel dash from the French port of Brest. Their journey takes them through the English Channel on their way back to Germany.
1945 The meeting of President Franklin Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Marshal Joseph Stalin in Yalta, adjourns.
1951 U.N. forces push north across the 38th parallel for the second time in the Korean War.
1953 Walt Disney's film Peter Pan premieres.
1954 A 75,000-watt light bulb is lit at the Rockefeller Center in New York, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Thomas Edison's first light bulb.
1955 Nationalist Chinese complete the evacuation of the Tachen Islands.
1959 Iran turns down Soviet aid in favor of a U.S. proposal for aid.
1962 Poet and novelist Sylvia Plath commits suicide in London at age 30.
1964 Cambodian Prince Sihanouk blames the United States for a South Vietnamese air raid on a village in his country.
1965 President Lyndon Johnson orders air strikes against targets in North Vietnam, in retaliation for guerrilla attacks on the American military in South Vietnam.
1966 Vice President Hubert Humphrey begins a tour of Vietnam.
1974 Communist-led rebels shower artillery fire into a crowded area of Phnom Pehn, killing 139 and injuring 46 others.
1975 Mrs. Margaret Thatcher becomes the first woman to lead the British Conservative Party.
1990 South African political leader Nelson Mandela is released from prison in Paarl, South Africa, after serving more than 27 years of a life sentence.


Born on February 11
1535 Gregory XIV, Roman Catholic Pope.
1800 William Henry Fox Talbot, photography pioneer, produced the first book with photographic illustrations (The Pencil of Nature).
1833 Melville Weston Fuller, eighth U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice.
1847 Thomas Alva Edison, prolific American inventor who jointly or singly held over 1,300 patents.
1855 Josephine Marshall Jewell Dodge, American educator, pioneer in the concept of day nurseries for children.
1898 Leo Szilard, physicist, instrumental in the Manhattan Project.
1907 William J. Levitt, U.S. businessman and community builder who led the postwar housing revolutions with his Levittowns.
1908 Phillipe Dunne, screenwriter and director (How Green Was My Valley).
1912 Roy Fuller, poet and novelist.





http://www.history.com/this-day-in-hist ... 5bacd8ab76


1996
Kasparov loses chess game to computer

On this day in 1996, after three hours, world chess champion Garry Kasparov loses the first game of a six-game match against Deep Blue, an IBM computer capable of evaluating 200 million moves per second. Man was ultimately victorious over machine, however, as Kasparov bested Deep Blue in the match with three wins and two ties and took home the $400,000 prize. An estimated 6 million people worldwide followed the action on the Internet.

Kasparov had previously defeated Deep Thought, the prototype for Deep Blue developed by IBM researchers in 1989, but he and other chess grandmasters had, on occasion, lost to computers in games that lasted an hour or less. The February 1996 contest was significant in that it represented the first time a human and a computer had duked it out in a regulation, six-game match, in which each player had two hours to make 40 moves, two hours to finish the next 20 moves and then another 60 minutes to wrap up the game.
Kasparov, who was born in 1963 in Baku, Azerbaijan, became the Soviet Union’s junior chess champion at age 13 and in 1985, at age 22, the youngest world champ ever when he beat legendary Soviet player Anatoly Karpov. Considered by many to be the greatest chess player in the history of the game, Kasparov was known for his swashbuckling style of play and his ability to switch tactics mid-game.
In 1997, a rematch took place between Kasparov and an enhanced Deep Blue. Kasparov won the first game, the computer the second, with the next three games a draw. On May 11, 1997, Deep Blue came out on top with a surprising sixth game win–and the $700,000 match prize.

In 2003, Kasparov battled another computer program, “Deep Junior.” The match ended in a tie. Kasparov retired from professional chess in 2005.
duc, sequere, aut de via decede
"frapper fort, frapper vite, frappée souvent-- Adm William "Bull" Halsey
“We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”--Gen George Patton
"Our Liberty is insured by four "Boxes", the Ballot box, the Jury box, the Soap box and the Cartridge box"

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Re: Today in history

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February 12
1294 Kublai Khan, the conqueror of Asia, dies at the age of 80.
1554 Lady Jane Grey, the Queen of England for thirteen days, is beheaded on Tower Hill. She was barely 17 years old.
1709 Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish seaman whose adventures inspired the creation of Daniel Dafoe's Robinson Crusoe, is taken off Juan Fernandez Island after more than four years of living there alone.
1793 The first fugitive slave law, requiring the return of escaped slaves, is passed.
1818 Chile gains independence from Spain.
1836 Mexican General Santa Anna crosses the Rio Grande en route to the Alamo.
1909 The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is formed.
1912 China becomes a republic following the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty.
1921 Winston Churchill of London is appointed colonial secretary.
1924 George Gershwin's groundbreaking symphonic jazz composition Rhapsody in Blue premieres with Gershwin himself playing the piano with Paul Whiteman's orchestra.
1929 Charles Lindbergh announces his engagement to Anne Morrow.
1931 Japan makes its first television broadcast--a baseball game.
1935 The Macon, the last U.S. Navy dirigible, crashes off the coast of California, killing two people.
1938 Japan refuses to reveal naval data requested by the U.S. and Britain.
1940 The Soviet Union signs a trade treaty with Germany to aid against the British blockade.
1944 Wendell Wilkie enters the American presidential race against Franklin D. Roosevelt.
1949 Muslim Brotherhood chief Hassan el Banna is shot to death in Cairo.
1953 The Soviets break off diplomatic relations with Israel after the bombing of Soviet legation.
1966 The South Vietnamese win two big battles in the Mekong Delta.
1972 Senator Edward Kennedy advocates amnesty for Vietnam draft resisters.
1974 The Symbionese Liberation Army asks the Hearst family for $230 million in food for the poor.
1980 The Lake Placid Winter Olympics open in New York.
1987 A Court in Texas upholds $8.5 billion of a fine imposed on Texaco for the illegal takeover of Getty Oil.
1999 The U.S. Senate fails to pass two articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton. He had been accused of perjury and obstruction of justice by the House of Representatives.


Born on February 12
1768 Francis II, the last Holy Roman Emperor
1775 Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams
1809 Charles Darwin, naturalist and influential theorist of evolution (On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection).
1809 Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President of the United State (1861-1865).
1828 George Meredith, English poet and novelist.
1857 Eugene Atget, French photographer, took over 10,000 photographs documenting Paris.
1874 Auguste Perret, French architect, pioneer in designs of reinforced concrete buildings.
1880 John L. Lewis, American labor leader.
1893 Omar Bradley, U.S. army general during World War II.
duc, sequere, aut de via decede
"frapper fort, frapper vite, frappée souvent-- Adm William "Bull" Halsey
“We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”--Gen George Patton
"Our Liberty is insured by four "Boxes", the Ballot box, the Jury box, the Soap box and the Cartridge box"

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Suzuki Johnny
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Re: Today in history

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1633
Galileo in Rome for Inquisition
On this day in 1633, Italian philosopher, astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei arrives in Rometo face charges of heresy for advocating Copernican theory, which holds that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Galileo officially faced the Roman Inquisition in April of that same year and agreed to plead guilty in exchange for a lighter sentence. Put under house arrest indefinitely by Pope Urban VIII, Galileo spent the rest of his days at his villa in Arcetri, near Florence, before dying on January 8, 1642.

Today, Galileo is recognized for making important contributions to the study of motion and astronomy. His work influenced later scientists such as the English mathematician and physicist Sir Isaac Newton, who developed the law of universal gravitation. In 1992, the Vatican formally acknowledged its mistake in condemning Galileo.

February 13
167 Polycarp, a disciple of St. John and Bishop of Smyrna, is martyred on the west coast of Asia Minor.
1542 Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII, is beheaded for adultery.
1689 British Parliament adopts the Bill of Rights.
1692 In the Glen Coe highlands of Scotland, thirty-eight members of the MacDonald clan are murdered by soldiers of the neighboring Campbell clan for not pledging allegiance to William of Orange. Ironically the pledge had been made but not communicated to the clans. The event is remembered as the Massacre of Glencoe.
1862 The four day Battle of Fort Donelson, Tennessee, begins.
1865 The Confederacy approves the recruitment of slaves as soldiers, as long as the approval of their owners is gained.
1866 Jesse James holds up his first bank.
1914 The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) is founded.
1936 First social security checks are put in the mail.
1945 The Royal Air Force Bomber Command devastates the German city of Dresden with night raids by 873 heavy bombers. The attacks are joined by 521 American heavy bombers flying daylight raids.
1949 A mob burns a radio station in Ecuador after the broadcast of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds."
1951 At the Battle of Chipyong-ni, in Korea, U.N. troops contain the Chinese forces' offensive in a two-day battle.
1953 The Pope asks the United States to grant clemency to convicted spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
1968 The United States sends 10,500 more combat troops to Vietnam.
1970 General Motors is reportedly redesigning automobiles to run on unleaded fuel.
1972 Enemy attacks in Vietnam decline for the third day as the United States continues its intensive bombing strategy.
1984 Konstantin Chernenko is selected to succeed Yuri Andropov as Party General Secretary in the Soviet Union.


Born on February 13
1599 Alexander VII, Roman Catholic Pope.
1682 Giovanni Piazzetta, painter (Fortune Teller).
1764 Charles de Talleyrand, Napoleon's foreign minister.
1849 Lord Randolph Churchill, English politician, Winston Churchill's father and member of Parliament.
1873 Feodor Chaliapin, opera singer.
1892 Grant Wood, painter (American Gothic).
1902 Georges Simenon, novelist.
1910 William B. Shockley, physicist, co-inventor of the transistor.
1919 Tennessee Ernie Ford, country and gospel singer.
1922 Harold "Hal" Moore Jr., US Army lieutenant general, author; led 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment at 1965 Battle of Ia Drang Valley; his best-known book, co-authored with combat journalist Joe Galloway, is "We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young," an account of that battle.
1923 Charles "Chuck" Yeager, American test pilot, the first man to break the sound barrier.
1933 Kim Novak, actress.
duc, sequere, aut de via decede
"frapper fort, frapper vite, frappée souvent-- Adm William "Bull" Halsey
“We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”--Gen George Patton
"Our Liberty is insured by four "Boxes", the Ballot box, the Jury box, the Soap box and the Cartridge box"

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Re: Today in history

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February 14
Happy Valentine's Day!Today is St. Valentine's Day, the feast day of two Christian martyrs named Valentine: one a priest and physician, the other the Bishop of Terni. Both are purported to have been beheaded on this day. The custom of sending handmade 'valentines' to one's beloved became popular during the 17th century and was first commercialized in the United States in the 1840s.
1349 2,000 Jews are burned at the stake in Strasbourg, Germany.
1400 The deposed Richard II is murdered in Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire.
1549 Maximilian II, brother of the Emperor Charles V, is recognized as the future king of Bohemia.
1779 American Loyalists are defeated by Patriots at Kettle Creek, Ga.
1797 The Spanish fleet is destroyed by the British under Admiral Jervis (with Nelson in support) at the battle of Cape St. Vincent, off Portugal.
1848 James Polk becomes the first U.S. President to be photographed in office by Matthew Brady.
1859 Oregon is admitted as the thirty-third state.
1870 Esther Morris becomes the world's first female justice of the peace.
1876 Rival inventors Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell both apply for patents for the telephone.
1900 General Roberts invades South Africa's Orange Free State with 20,000 British troops.
1904 The "Missouri Kid" is captured in Kansas.
1912 Arizona becomes the 48th state in the Union.
1915 Kaiser Wilhelm II invites the U.S. Ambassador to Berlin in order to confer on the war.
1918 Warsaw demonstrators protest the transfer of Polish territory to the Ukraine.
1920 The League of Women Voters is formed in Chicago in celebration of the imminent ratification of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote.
1924 Thomas Watson founds International Business Machines Corp.
1929 Chicago gang war between Al Capone and George "Bugs" Moran culminates with several Moran confederates being gunned down in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
1939 Germany launches the battleship Bismarck.
1940 Britain announces that all merchant ships will be armed.
1942 Japanese paratroopers attack Sumatra. Aidan MacCarthy's RAF unit flew to Palembang, in eastern Sumatra, where 30 Royal Australian Air Force Lockheed A-28 Hudson bombers were waiting.
1945 800 Allied aircraft firebomb the German city of Dresden. Smaller followup bombing raids last until April with a total death toll of between 35,000 to 130,000 civilians.
1945 The siege of Budapest ends as the Soviets take the city. Only 785 German and Hungarian soldiers managed to escape.
1949 The United States charges the Soviet Union with interning up to 14 million in labor camps.
1955 A Jewish couple loses their fight to adopt Catholic twins as the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to rule on state law.
1957 The Georgia state senate outlaws interracial athletics.
1965 Malcolm X's home is firebombed. No injuries are reported.
1971 Moscow publicizes a new five-year plan geared to expanding consumer production.
1973 The United States and Hanoi set up a group to channel reconstruction aid directly to Hanoi.
1979 Armed guerrillas attack the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
1985 Vietnamese troops surround the main Khmer Rouge base at Phnom Malai.
1989 Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini charges that Salman Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, is blasphemous and issues an edict (fatwa) calling on Muslims to kill Rushdie.


Born on February 14
1760 Richard Allen, first black ordained by a Methodist-Episcopal church.
1817 Frederick Douglass, slave, and later, activist and author.
1819 Christopher Latham Sholes, inventor of the first practical typewriter.
1845 Quinton Hogg, English philanthropist.
1859 George Washington Gale Ferris, inventor of the Ferris Wheel.
1894 Jack Benny, comedian, radio and television performer, and violinist.
1894 Mary Lucinda Cardwell Dawson, founded the National Negro Opera Company (NNOC) and was appointed to President John F. Kennedy's National Committee on Music.






On February 14around the year 278A.D., Valentine, a holy priest in Rome in the days of Emperor Claudius II, was executed.

Under the rule of Claudius the Cruel, Rome was involved in many unpopular and bloody campaigns. The emperor had to maintain a strong army, but was having a difficult time getting soldiers to join his military leagues. Claudius believed that Roman men were unwilling to join the army because of their strong attachment to their wives and families.
To get rid of the problem, Claudius banned all marriages and engagements in Rome. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret.
When Valentine’s actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death. Valentine was arrested and dragged before the Prefect of Rome, who condemned him to be beaten to death with clubs and to have his head cut off. The sentence was carried out on February 14, on or about the year 270.
Legend also has it that while in jail, St. Valentine left a farewell note for the jailer’s daughter, who had become his friend, and signed it “From Your Valentine.”
For his great service, Valentine was named a saint after his death.
In truth, 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.

Legends vary on how the martyr’s name became connected with romance. The date of his death may have become mingled with the Feast of Lupercalia, a pagan festival of love. On these occasions, the names of young women were placed in a box, from which they were drawn by the men as chance directed. In 496 AD, Pope Gelasius decided to put an end to the Feast of Lupercalia, and he declared that February 14 be celebrated as St Valentine’s Day.

Gradually, February 14 became a date for exchanging love messages, poems and simple gifts such as flowers.
duc, sequere, aut de via decede
"frapper fort, frapper vite, frappée souvent-- Adm William "Bull" Halsey
“We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”--Gen George Patton
"Our Liberty is insured by four "Boxes", the Ballot box, the Jury box, the Soap box and the Cartridge box"

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Re: Today in history

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February 15
1798 The first serious fist fight occurs in Congress.
1804 New Jersey becomes the last northern state to abolish slavery.
1862 Union General Ulysses S. Grant launches a major assault on Fort Donelson, Tenn.
1869 Charges of treason against Jefferson Davis are dropped.
1898 The U.S. battleship Maine blows up in Havana Harbor, killing 268 sailors and bringing hordes of Western cowboys and gunfighters rushing to enlist in the Spanish-American War.
1900 The British threaten to use natives in the Boer War fight.
1925 The London Zoo announces it will install lights to cheer up fogged-in animals.
1934 U.S. Congress passes the Civil Works Emergency Relief Act, allotting new funds for Federal Emergency Relief Administration.
1940 Hitler orders that all British merchant ships will be considered warships.
1942 British forces in Singapore surrender to Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita.
1943 The Germans break the American Army's lines at the Fanid-Sened Sector in Tunisia, North Africa.
1944 American bombers attack the Abbey of Monte Cassino in an effort to neutralize it as a German observation post in central Italy.
1946 Royal Canadian mounted police arrest 22 as Soviet spies.
1950 Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung sign a mutual defense treaty in Moscow.
1957 Andrei Gromyko replaces Dmitri T. Shepilov as the Soviet Foreign Minister.
1961 Eighteen members of the U.S. figure skating team are lost in an airplane crash in Belgium.
1965 Canada's maple leaf flag is raised for the first time.
1967 Thirteen U.S. helicopters are shot down in one day in Vietnam
1974 U.S. gas stations threaten to close because of federal fuel policies.


Born on February 15
1564 Galileo Galilei, Italian astronomer and mathematician.
1710 Louis XV, King of France
1726 Abraham Clark, signer of Declaration of Independence.
1797 Henry Steinway, piano maker
1820 Susan B. Anthony, suffragette and political activist.
1882 John Barrymore, actor, sibling to actors Lionel Barrymore & Ethel Barrymore, father of actors John Drew Barrymore & Diana Barrymore and grandfather of actor Drew Barrymore.
1905 Harold Arlen, composer, arranger and pianist ("Stormy Weather," "It's Only a Paper Moon").
1954 Matt Groening, cartoonist (The Simpsons).
duc, sequere, aut de via decede
"frapper fort, frapper vite, frappée souvent-- Adm William "Bull" Halsey
“We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”--Gen George Patton
"Our Liberty is insured by four "Boxes", the Ballot box, the Jury box, the Soap box and the Cartridge box"

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Re: Today in history

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February 16
1760 Cherokee Indians held hostage at Fort St. George are killed in revenge for Indian attacks on frontier settlements.
1804 US Navy lieutenant Steven Decatur leads a small group of sailors into Tripoli harbor and burns the USS Philadelphia, captured earlier by Barbary pirates.
1862 Fort Donelson, Tennessee, falls to Grant's Federal forces, but not before Nathan Bedford Forrest escapes.
1865 Columbia, South Carolina, surrenders to Federal troops.
1923 Bessie Smith makes her first recording "Down Hearted Blues."
1934 Thousands of Socialists battle Communists at a rally in New York's Madison Square Garden.
1937 Dupont patents a new thread, nylon, which will replace silk in a number of products and reduce costs.
1940 The British destroyer HMS Cossack rescues British seamen from a German prison ship, the Altmark, in a Norwegian fjord.
1942 Tojo outlines Japan's war aims to the Diet, referring to "new order of coexistence" in East Asia.
1945 American paratroopers land on Corregidor, in a campaign to liberate the Philippines.
1951 Stalin contends the U.N. is becoming the weapon of aggressive war.
1952 The FBI arrests 10 members of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina.
1957 A U.S. flag flies over an outpost in Wilkes Land, Antarctica.
1959 Fidel Castro takes the oath as Cuban premier in Havana.
1965 Four persons are held in a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty, Liberty Bell and the Washington Monument.
1966 The World Council of Churches being held in Geneva, urges immediate peace in Vietnam.
1978 China and Japan sign a $20 billion trade pact, which is the most important move since the 1972 resumption of diplomatic ties.


Born on February 16
1620 Frederick William, founder of Brandenburg-Prussia.
1838 Henry Adams, U.S. historian, son and grandson of the presidents.
1852 Charles Taze Russell, founder of the International Bible Students Association which later became the Jehovah's Witnesses.
1845 Quinton Hogg, English philanthropist.
1886 Van Wyck Brooks, biographer, critic and literary historian.
1903 Edgar Bergen, ventriloquist and radio comedian.
1904 George Kennan, U.S. diplomat and historian.
1944 Richard Ford, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (The Sportswriter, Independence Day).





1923
Archaeologist opens tomb of King Tut

On this day in 1923, in Thebes, Egypt, English archaeologist Howard Carter enters the sealed burial chamber of the ancient Egyptian ruler King Tutankhamen.

Because the ancient Egyptians saw their pharaohs as gods, they carefully preserved their bodies after death, burying them in elaborate tombs containing rich treasures to accompany the rulers into the afterlife. In the 19th century, archeologists from all over the world flocked to Egypt, where they uncovered a number of these tombs. Many had long ago been broken into by robbers and stripped of their riches.

When Carter arrived in Egypt in 1891, he became convinced there was at least one undiscovered tomb–that of the little known Tutankhamen, or King Tut, who lived around 1400 B.C. and died when he was still a teenager. Backed by a rich Brit, Lord Carnarvon, Carter searched for five years without success. In early 1922, Lord Carnarvon wanted to call off the search, but Carter convinced him to hold on one more year.

In November 1922, the wait paid off, when Carter’s team found steps hidden in the debris near the entrance of another tomb. The steps led to an ancient sealed doorway bearing the name Tutankhamen. When Carter and Lord Carnarvon entered the tomb’s interior chambers on November 26, they were thrilled to find it virtually intact, with its treasures untouched after more than 3,000 years. The men began exploring the four rooms of the tomb, and on February 16, 1923, under the watchful eyes of a number of important officials, Carter opened the door to the last chamber.

Inside lay a sarcophagus with three coffins nested inside one another. The last coffin, made of solid gold, contained the mummified body of King Tut. Among the riches found in the tomb–golden shrines, jewelry, statues, a chariot, weapons, clothing–the perfectly preserved mummy was the most valuable, as it was the first one ever to be discovered. Despite rumors that a curse would befall anyone who disturbed the tomb, its treasures were carefully cataloged, removed and included in a famous traveling exhibition called the “Treasures of Tutankhamen.” The exhibition’s permanent home is the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
duc, sequere, aut de via decede
"frapper fort, frapper vite, frappée souvent-- Adm William "Bull" Halsey
“We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”--Gen George Patton
"Our Liberty is insured by four "Boxes", the Ballot box, the Jury box, the Soap box and the Cartridge box"

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Re: Today in history

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February 17
1454 At a grand feast, Philip the Good of Burgundy takes the "vow of the pheasant," by which he swears to fight the Turks.
1598 Boris Godunov, the boyar of Tarar origin, is elected czar in succession to his brother-in-law Fydor.
1720 Spain signs the Treaty of the Hague with the Quadruple Alliance ending a war that was begun in 1718.
1801 The House of Representatives breaks an electoral college tie and chooses Thomas Jefferson over Aaron Burr.
1864 The Confederate submarine Hunley sinks the USS Housatonic in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina.
1865 The South Carolina capital city, Columbia, is destroyed by fire as Major General William Tecumseh Sherman marches through.
1909 Apache chief Geronimo dies of pneumonia at age 80, while still in captivity at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
1919 Germany signs an armistice giving up territory in Poland.
1925 The first issue of Harold Ross' magazine, The New Yorker, hits the stands, selling for 15 cents a copy.
1933 The League of Nations censures Japan in a worldwide broadcast.
1935 Thirty-one prisoners escape an Oklahoma prison after murdering a guard.
1938 The first color television is demonstrated at the Dominion Theatre in London.
1944 U.S forces land on Eniwetok atoll in the South Pacific.
1945 Gen. MacArthur's troops land on Corregidor in the Philippines.
1951 Packard introduces its "250" Chassis Convertible.
1955 Britain announces its ability to make hydrogen bombs.
1959 The United States launches its first weather station in space, Vanguard II.
1960 Martin Luther King Jr. is arrested in the Alabama bus boycott.
1963 Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev visits the Berlin Wall.
1969 Russia and Peru sign their first trade accord.
1973 President Richard Nixon names Patrick Gray director of the FBI.
1975 Art by Cezanne, Gauguin, Renoir, and van Gogh, valued at $5 million, is stolen from the Municipal Museum in Milan.
1979 China begins a "pedagogical" war against Vietnam. It will last until March.
1985 Murray Haydon becomes the third person to receive an artificial heart.
Born on February 17
1774 Raphaelle Peale, U.S. painter
1864 A(ndrew) B(arton) "Banjo" Paterson, Australian poet and journalist.
1874 Thomas J. Watson Sr., U.S. industrialist.
1902 Marian Anderson, American singer.
1908 Walter Lanier "Red" Barber, baseball announcer for the Cincinnati Reds, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees.
1929 Chaim Potok, novelist (The Chosen, The Promise).





1972
Beetle overtakes Model T as world’s best-selling car

On this day in 1972, the 15,007,034th Volkswagen Beetle comes off the assembly line, breaking a world car production record held for more than four decades by the Ford Motor Company’s iconic Model T, which was in production from 1908 and 1927.

The history of the VW Beetle dates back to 1930s Germany. In 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany and announced he wanted to build new roads and affordable cars for the German people. At that time, Austrian-born engineer Ferdinand Porsche (1875-1951) was already working on creating a small car for the masses. Hitler and Porsche later met and the engineer was charged with designing the inexpensive, mass-produced Volkswagen, or “people’s car.” Hitler’s plan was that people could buy the cars by making regular payments into a savings stamp program. In 1938, work began on the Volkswagen factory, located in present-day Wolfsburg, Germany; however, full-scale vehicle production didn’t begin until after World War II.

In the 1950s, the Volkswagen arrived in the U.S., where the initial reception was tepid, due in part to the car’s historic Nazi connection as well as its small size and unusual rounded shape (which later led to it being dubbed the “Beetle”). In 1959, the advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach launched a groundbreaking campaign that promoted the car’s diminutive size as a distinct advantage to consumers, and over the next several years, VW became the top-selling auto import in the U.S. In 1998, Volkswagen began selling the highly touted “New Beetle” while still continuing production of its predecessor. After more than 60 years and over 21 million vehicles produced, the last original Beetle rolled off the line in Puebla, Mexico, on July 30, 2003.

The world’s original best-selling car, Henry Ford’s Model T, first went into production at a Detroit, Michigan, plant in 1908. Referred to as the car that “put the world on wheels,” the Model T revolutionized the automotive industry–and American society in general–by providing affordable, reliable transportation for the average person. In 1913, Ford Motor Company began employing the moving assembly line at its plant in Highland Park, Michigan, which reduced the assembly speed of a chassis from 12 hours and eight minutes to one hour and 33 minutes. The following year, Ford produced 308,162 vehicles, more than the output of all other car makers combined. By 1924, the 10 millionth Model T came off the assembly line. When production finally ended, after 19 years, in May 1927, over 15 million Model Ts had been built.
duc, sequere, aut de via decede
"frapper fort, frapper vite, frappée souvent-- Adm William "Bull" Halsey
“We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”--Gen George Patton
"Our Liberty is insured by four "Boxes", the Ballot box, the Jury box, the Soap box and the Cartridge box"

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Re: Today in history

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February 18
1478 George, the Duke of Clarence, who had opposed his brother Edward IV, is murdered in the Tower of London.
1688 Quakers in Germantown, Pa. adopt the first formal antislavery resolution in America.
1813 Czar Alexander enters Warsaw at the head of his Army.
1861 Victor Emmanuel II becomes the first King of Italy.
1861 Jefferson F. Davis is inaugurated as the Confederacy's provisional president at a ceremony held in Montgomery, Ala.
1865 Union troops force the Confederates to abandon Fort Anderson, N.C.
1878 The bitter and bloody Lincoln County War begins with the murder of Billy the Kid's mentor, Englishman rancher John Tunstall.
1885 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, is published in New York.
1907 600,000 tons of grain are sent to Russia to relieve the famine there.
1920 Vuillemin and Chalus complete their first flight over the Sahara Desert.
1932 Manchurian independence is formally declared.
1935 Rome reports sending troops to Italian Somalia.
1939 The Golden Gate Exposition opens in San Francisco.
1943 German General Erwin Rommel takes three towns in Tunisia, North Africa.
1944 The U.S. Army and Marines invade Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific.
1945 U.S. Marines storm ashore at Iwo Jima.
1954 East and West Berlin drop thousands of propaganda leaflets on each other after the end of a month long truce.
1962 Robert F. Kennedy says that U.S. troops will stay in Vietnam until Communism is defeated.
1964 The United States cuts military aid to five nations in reprisal for having trade relations with Cuba.
1967 The National Art Gallery in Washington agrees to buy a Da Vinci for a record $5 million.
1968 Three U.S. pilots that were held by the Vietnamese arrive in Washington.
1972 The California Supreme Court voids the death penalty.
1974 Randolph Hearst is to give $2 million in free food for the poor in order to open talks for his daughter Patty.
1982 Mexico devalues the peso by 30 percent to fight an economic slide.


Born on February 18
1516 Queen Mary I, also known as Bloody Mary for her persecution of Protestants.
1795 George Peabody, U.S. merchant and philanthropist.
1848 Louis Comfort Tiffany, glassware artist and designer.
1859 Shalom Aleichem, Yiddish author.
1862 Charles M. Schwab, "Boy Wonder" of the steel industry. President of both U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel.
1892 Wendell Wilkie, Presidential candidate against President Franklin Roosevelt.
1909 Wallace Stegner, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (Angle of Repose).
1922 Helen Gurley Brown, editor of Cosmopolitan magazine.
1929 Len Deighton, English spy writer (The Ipcress File).
1931 Toni Morrison, Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author (The Bluest Eye, Beloved).
1934 Audre Lord, poet.


1885
On this day in 1885, Mark Twain publishes his famous–and famously controversial–novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Twain (the pen name of Samuel Clemens) first introduced Huck Finn as the best friend of Tom Sawyer, hero of his tremendously successful novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Though Twain saw Huck’s story as a kind of sequel to his earlier book, the new novel was far more serious, focusing on the institution of slavery and other aspects of life in the antebellum South.

At the book’s heart is the journey of Huck and his friend Jim, a runaway slave, down the Mississippi River on a raft. Jim runs away because he is about to be sold and separated from his wife and children, and Huck goes with him to help him get to Ohio and freedom. Huck narrates the story in his distinctive voice, offering colorful descriptions of the people and places they encounter along the way. The most striking part of the book is its satirical look at racism, religion and other social attitudes of the time. While Jim is strong, brave, generous and wise, many of the white characters are portrayed as violent, stupid or simply selfish, and the naive Huck ends up questioning the hypocritical, unjust nature of society in general.

Even in 1885, two decades after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn landed with a splash. A month after its publication, a Concord, Massachusetts, library banned the book, calling its subject matter “tawdry” and its narrative voice “coarse” and “ignorant.” Other libraries followed suit, beginning a controversy that continued long after Twain’s death in 1910. In the 1950s, the book came under fire from African-American groups for being racist in its portrayal of black characters, despite the fact that it was seen by many as a strong criticism of racism and slavery. As recently as 1998, an Arizona parent sued her school district, claiming that making Twain’s novel required high school reading made already existing racial tensions even worse.

Aside from its controversial nature and its continuing popularity with young readers, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been hailed by many serious literary critics as a masterpiece. No less a judge than Ernest Hemingway famously declared that the book marked the beginning of American literature: “There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
duc, sequere, aut de via decede
"frapper fort, frapper vite, frappée souvent-- Adm William "Bull" Halsey
“We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”--Gen George Patton
"Our Liberty is insured by four "Boxes", the Ballot box, the Jury box, the Soap box and the Cartridge box"

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Re: Today in history

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February 19
1408 The revolt of Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, against King Henry IV, ends with his defeat and death at Bramham Moor.
1701 Philip V of Spain makes his ceremonial entry into Madrid.
1807 Vice President Aaron Burr is arrested in Alabama for treason. He is later found innocent.
1847 Rescuers finally reach the ill-fated Donner Party in the Sierras.
1861 Russian Tsar Alexander II abolishes serfdom.
1902 Smallpox vaccination becomes obligatory in France.
1903 The Austria-Hungary government decrees a mandatory two year military service.
1915 British and French warships begin their attacks on the Turkish forts at the mouth of the Dardenelles, in an abortive expedition to seize the straits of Gallipoli.
1917 American troops are recalled from the Mexican border.
1919 The First Pan African Congress meets in Paris, France.
1925 President Calvin Coolidge proposes the phasing out of inheritance tax.
1926 Dr. Lane of Princeton estimates the earth's age at one billion years.
1942 Port Darwin, on the northern coast of Australia, is bombed by the Japanese.
1944 The U.S. Eighth Air Force and Royal Air Force begin "Big Week," a series of heavy bomber attacks against German aircraft production facilities.
1965 Fourteen Vietnam War protesters are arrested for blocking the United Nations' doors in New York.
1966 Robert F. Kennedy suggests the United States offer the Vietcong a role in governing South Vietnam.
1976 Britain slashes welfare spending.
1981 The U.S. State Department calls El Salvador a "textbook case" of a Communist plot.
1987 New York Governor Mario Cuomo declares that he will not run for president in the next election.


Born on February 19
1473 Nicholas Copernicus, Polish astronomer who introduced the idea that the earth revolved around the sun.
1683 Philip V, King of Spain.
1817 William III, King of the Netherlands.
1859 Svante Arrhenius, Swedish chemist, founder of physical chemistry.
1902 Kay Boyle, short story writer ("The White Horses of Vienna").
1911 Merle Oberon, film actress.
1917 Carson McCullers, writer (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter).
1940 Smokey Robinson, American singer and songwriter.
1952 Amy Tan, novelist (The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife).


Donner Party rescued

On this day in 1847, the first rescuers reach surviving members of the Donner Party, a group of California-bound emigrants stranded by snow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

In the summer of 1846, in the midst of a Western-bound fever sweeping the United States, 89 people–including 31 members of the Donner and Reed families–set out in a wagon train from Springfield, Illinois. After arriving at Fort Bridger, Wyoming, the emigrants decided to avoid the usual route and try a new trail recently blazed by California promoter Lansford Hastings, the so-called “Hastings Cutoff.” After electing George Donner as their captain, the party departed Fort Bridger in mid-July. The shortcut was nothing of the sort: It set the Donner Party back nearly three weeks and cost them much-needed supplies. After suffering great hardships in the Wasatch Mountains, the Great Salt Lake Desert and along the Humboldt River, they finally reached the Sierra Nevada Mountains in early October. Despite the lateness of the season, the emigrants continued to press on, and on October 28 they camped at Truckee Lake, located in the high mountains 21 kilometers northwest of Lake Tahoe. Overnight, an early winter storm blanketed the ground with snow, blocking the mountain pass and trapping the Donner Party.

Most of the group stayed near the lake–now known as Donner Lake–while the Donner family and others made camp six miles away at Alder Creek. Building makeshift tents out of their wagons and killing their oxen for food, they hoped for a thaw that never came. Fifteen of the stronger emigrants, later known as the Forlorn Hope, set out west on snowshoes for Sutter’s Fort near San Francisco on December 16. Three weeks later, after harsh weather and lack of supplies killed several of the expedition and forced the others to resort to cannibalism, seven survivors reached a Native American village.

News of the stranded Donner Party traveled fast to Sutter’s Fort, and a rescue party set out on January 31. Arriving at Donner Lake 20 days later, they found the camp completely snowbound and the surviving emigrants delirious with relief at their arrival. Rescuers fed the starving group as well as they could and then began evacuating them. Three more rescue parties arrived to help, but the return to Sutter’s Fort proved equally harrowing, and the last survivors didn’t reach safety until late April. Of the 89 original members of the Donner Party, only 45 reached California.
duc, sequere, aut de via decede
"frapper fort, frapper vite, frappée souvent-- Adm William "Bull" Halsey
“We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”--Gen George Patton
"Our Liberty is insured by four "Boxes", the Ballot box, the Jury box, the Soap box and the Cartridge box"

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Re: Today in history

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February 20
1513 Pope Julius II dies. He will lay in rest in a huge tomb sculptured by Michelangelo.
1725 New Hampshire militiamen partake in the first recorded scalping of Indians by whites in North America.
1792 The U.S. Postal Service is created.
1809 The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the power of the federal government is greater than any individual state in the Union.
1831 Polish revolutionaries defeat the Russians in the Battle of Grochow.
1864 Confederate troops defeat a Union army sent to bring Florida into the union at the Battle of Olustee, Fla.
1900 J.F. Pickering patents his airship.
1906 Russian troops seize large portions of Mongolia.
1915 President Woodrow Wilson opens the Panama-Pacific Expo in San Francisco to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal.
1918 The Soviet Red Army seizes Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine.
1938 Hitler demands self-determination for Germans in Austria and Czechoslovakia.
1941 The United States sends war planes to the Pacific.
1942 Lt. Edward O'Hare downs five out of nine Japanese bombers that are attacking the carrier Lexington.
1943 German troops of the Afrika Korps break through the Kasserine Pass, defeating U.S. forces.
1954 The Ford Foundation gives a $25 million grant to the Fund for Advancement of Education.
1959 The FCC applies the equal time rule to TV newscasts of political candidates.
1962 Mercury astronaut John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit the Earth.
1963 Moscow offers to allow on-site inspection of nuclear testing.
1965 Ranger 8 hits the moon and sends back 7,000 photos to the United States.
1968 North Vietnamese army chief in Hue orders all looters to be shot on sight.
1971 Young people protest having to cut their long hair in Athens, Greece.
1982 Carnegie Hall in New York begins $20 million in renovations.
Born on February 20
1726 William Prescott, U.S. Revolutionary War hero at the Battle of Bunker Hill.
1808 Honore Daumier, French caricaturist.
1844 Ludwig Boltzmann, atomic physics engineer
1888 Marie Rambert, ballet dancer and director.
1894 Curt Richter, biologist.
1898 Jimmy Yancey, American blues pianist.
1901 Rene Dubos, microbiologist, developed the first commercial antibiotic.
1901 Louis I. Kahn, architect.
1902 Ansel Adams, American landscape photographer, especially of western wilderness and mountain panoramas.
1904 Aleksey Nikolayevich Kosygin, Premier of the Soviet Union (1964-1980).
1924 Gloria Vanderbilt, fashion designer
1925 Robert Altman, film director (Nashville, The Player).
1927 Sidney Poitier, American actor, first African American male to win an Oscar (Lillies of the Field).



On this day in 1792, President George Washington signs legislation creating the U.S. Postal Service.

Prior to the American Revolution, correspondence between parties depended largely upon hired private couriers, friends and the help of merchants. Individual colonies set up informal post offices in taverns and shops where horse-drawn carriages or riders would pick up and drop off mail en route. In 1707, the British government established the position of Postmaster General to better coordinate postal service in the colonies, though the business was still conducted largely by private individuals. In 1737, a 31-year-old American colonist named Benjamin Franklin took over as Postmaster General and oversaw the colonial postal service from England until he was dismissed for subversive acts on behalf of the rebellious colonies in 1774. Franklin then returned to America and helped create a rival postal system for the emerging nation.

Based on Franklin’s recommendations, the Continental Congress created the Constitutional Post in 1775. During the Revolutionary War, then-Commanding General George Washington depended heavily on the postal service to carry messages between the Army and Congress. Although Article IX of the Articles of Confederation written in 1781 authorized Congress to [establish and regulate] post offices from one State to another, the formation of an official U.S. Postal Service remained a work in progress.

Finally, on February 20, 1792, President Washington formally created the U.S. Postal Service with the signing of the Postal Service Act, which outlined in detail Congressional power to establish official mail routes. The act allowed for newspapers to be included in mail deliveries and made it illegal for postal officials to open anyone’s mail. In 1792, a young American nation of approximately 4 million people enjoyed federally funded postal services including 75 regional post offices and 2,400 miles of postal routes. The cost of sending a letter ranged from 6 cents to 12 cents. Under Washington, the Postal Service administration was headquartered in Philadelphia. In 1800, it followed other federal agencies to the nation’s new capital in Washington, D.C.
duc, sequere, aut de via decede
"frapper fort, frapper vite, frappée souvent-- Adm William "Bull" Halsey
“We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”--Gen George Patton
"Our Liberty is insured by four "Boxes", the Ballot box, the Jury box, the Soap box and the Cartridge box"

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Re: Today in history

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February 21
1595 The Jesuit poet Robert Southwell is hanged for "treason," being a Catholic.
1631 Michael Romanov, son of the Patriarch of Moscow, is elected Russian Tsar.
1744 The British blockade of Toulon is broken by 27 French and Spanish warships attacking 29 British ships.
1775 As troubles with Great Britain increase, colonists in Massachusetts vote to buy military equipment for 15,000 men.
1797 Trinidad, West Indies surrenders to the British.
1828 The first issue of the Cherokee Phoenix is printed, both in English and in the newly invented Cherokee alphabet.
1849 In the Second Sikh War, Sir Hugh Gough's well placed guns win a victory over a Sikh force twice the size of his at Gujerat on the Chenab River, assuring British control of the Punjab for years to come.
1862 The Texas Rangers win a Confederate victory in the Battle of Val Verde, New Mexico.
1878 The world's first telephone book is issued by the New Haven Connecticut Telephone Company containing the names of its 50 subscribers.
1885 The Washington Monument is dedicated in Washington, D.C.
1905 The Mukden campaign of the Russo-Japanese War, begins.
1916 The Battle of Verdun begins with an unprecedented German artillery barrage of the French lines.
1940 The Germans begin construction of a concentration camp at Auschwitz.
1944 Hideki Tojo becomes chief of staff of the Japanese army.
1949 Nicaragua and Costa Rica sign a friendship treaty ending hostilities over their borders.
1951 The U. S. Eighth Army launches Operation Killer, a counterattack to push Chinese forces north of the Han River in Korea.
1956 A grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama indicts 115 in a Negro bus boycott.
1960 Havana places all Cuban industry under direct control of the government.
1965 El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcom X) is assassinated in front of 400 people.
1972 Richard Nixon arrives in Beijing, China, becoming the first U.S. president to visit a country not diplomatically recognized by the U.S.
1974 A report claims that the use of defoliants by the U.S. has scarred Vietnam for a century.


Born on February 21
1794 Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, Mexican Revolutionary.
1801 John Henry Newman, English theologian and writer.
1821 Charles Scribner, founded the publishing firm which became Charles Scribner's Sons and also founded Scribner's magazine.
1893 Andrés Segovia, Spanish classical guitarist.
1907 W.H. Auden, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet (The Age of Anxiety).
1920 Robert S. Johnson, American World War II fighter ace who shot down 27 German planes.
1927 Erma Bombeck, author and humorist (The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank).








On this day in 1948, the National Association for Stock Car Racing–or NASCAR, as it will come to be widely known–is officially incorporated. NASCAR racing will go on to become one of America’s most popular spectator sports, as well as a multi-billion-dollar industry.

The driving force behind the establishment of NASCAR was William “Bill” France Sr. (1909-1992), a mechanic and auto-repair shop owner from Washington, D.C., who in the mid-1930s moved to Daytona Beach, Florida. The Daytona area was a gathering spot for racing enthusiasts, and France became involved in racing cars and promoting races. After witnessing how racing rules could vary from event to event and how dishonest promoters could abscond with prize money, France felt there was a need for a governing body to sanction and promote racing. He gathered members of the racing community to discuss the idea, and NASCAR was born, with its official incorporation in February 1921. France served as NASCAR’s first president and played a key role in shaping its development in the sport’s early decades.

NASCAR held its first Strictly Stock race on June 19, 1949, at the Charlotte Speedway in North Carolina. Some 13,000 fans were on hand to watch Glenn Dunnaway finish the 200-lap race first in his Ford; however, Jim Roper (who drove a Lincoln) collected the $2,000 prize after Dunnaway was disqualified for illegal rear springs on his vehicle. In the early years of NASCAR, competitors drove the same types of cars that people drove on the street–Buicks, Cadillacs, Oldsmobiles, among others–with minimal modifications. (Today, the cars are highly customized.)

In 1950, the first NASCAR-based track, the Darlington Raceway in South Carolina, opened. More new raceways followed, including the Daytona International Speedway, which opened in 1959. Lee Petty won the first Daytona 500, which was run on February 22 of that year. The Daytona 500 became NASCAR’s season opener and one of its premiere events. Lee Petty’s son Richard, who began his racing career in 1958, won the Daytona 500 a record seven times and became NASCAR’s first superstar before retiring in 1992. On February 18, 1979, the first live flag-to-flag coverage of the Daytona 500 was broadcast on television. An end-of-the-race brawl between drivers Cale Yarborough and Donnie and Bobby Allison was a huge publicity generator and helped boost NASCAR’s popularity on a national scale.

In 1972, France’s son, William France Jr., took over the presidency of NASCAR from his father. Over the next three decades, the younger France (1933-2007) was instrumental in transforming NASCAR from a regional sport popular primarily in the southeast U.S. into one with a global fan base. France led NASCAR into a new era of lucrative corporate sponsorships and billion-dollar TV contracts. Today, NASCAR has three national series as well as four regional series and two international series. The organization sanctions over 1,200 races at 100 tracks across North America.
duc, sequere, aut de via decede
"frapper fort, frapper vite, frappée souvent-- Adm William "Bull" Halsey
“We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”--Gen George Patton
"Our Liberty is insured by four "Boxes", the Ballot box, the Jury box, the Soap box and the Cartridge box"

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Re: Today in history

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February 22
1349 Jews are expelled from Zurich, Switzerland.
1613 Mikhail Romanov is elected czar of Russia.
1797 The last invasion of Britain takes place when some 1,400 Frenchmen land at Fishguard in Wales.
1819 Spain signs a treaty with the United States ceding eastern Florida.
1825 Russia and Britain establish the Alaska/Canada boundary.
1862 Jefferson Davis is inaugurated president of the Confederacy in Richmond, Va. for the second time.
1864 Nathan Bedford Forrest's brother, Jeffrey, is killed at Okolona, Mississippi.
1865 Federal troops capture Wilmington, N.C.
1879 Frank Winfield Woolworth's 'nothing over five cents' shop opens at Utica, New York. It is the first chain store.
1902 A fistfight breaks out in the Senate. Senator Benjamin Tillman suffers a bloody nose for accusing Senator John McLaurin of bias on the Philippine tariff issue.
1909 The Great White Fleet returns to Norfolk, Virginia, from an around-the-world show of naval power.
1911 Canadian Parliament votes to preserve the union with the British Empire.
1920 The American Relief Administration appeals to the public to pressure Congress to aid starving European cities.
1924 Columbia University declares radio education a success.
1926 Pope Pius rejects Mussolini's offer of aid to the Vatican.
1932 Adolf Hitler is the Nazi Party candidate for the presidential elections in Germany.
1935 All plane flights over the White House are barred because they are disturbing President Roosevelt's sleep.
1942 President Franklin Roosevelt orders Gen. Douglas MacArthur to leave the Philippines.
1951 The Atomic Energy Commission discloses information about the first atom-powered airplane.
1952 French forces evacuate Hoa Binh in Indochina.
1954 U.S. is to install 60 Thor nuclear missiles in Britain.
1962 A Soviet bid for new Geneva arms talks is turned down by the U.S.
1963 Moscow warns the U.S. that an attack on Cuba would mean war.
1967 Operation Junction City becomes the largest U.S. operation in Vietnam.
1984 Britain and the U.S. send warships to the Persian Gulf following an Iranian offensive against Iraq.


Born on February 22
1403 Charles VII, King of France.
1732 George Washington, Commander-in-chief of Continental forces during the American Revolution and first U.S. President.
1778 Rembrandt Peale, American painter known for portraits of U.S. founding fathers.
1857 Lord Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout Movement.
1857 Heinrich Hertz, German physicist, the first person to broadcast and receive radio waves.
1892 Edna St. Vincent Millay, poet.
1900 Sean O'Faolain, Irish short story writer.
1925 Edward Gorey, American writer and illustrator.
1932 Edward Kennedy, Massachusetts Senator, brother of John F. Kennedy.
1944 Jonathan Demme, film director (The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia).




Miracle on Ice February 22, 1980

In one of the most dramatic upsets in Olympic history, the underdog U.S. hockey team, made up of college players, defeats the four-time defending gold-medal winning Soviet team at the XIII Olympic Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York. The Soviet squad, previously regarded as the finest in the world, fell to the youthful American team 4-3 before a frenzied crowd of 10,000 spectators. Two days later, the Americans defeated Finland 4-2 to clinch the hockey gold.

The Soviet team had captured the previous four Olympic hockey golds, going back to 1964, and had not lost an Olympic hockey game since 1968. Three days before the Lake Placid Games began, the Soviets routed the U.S. team 10-3 in an exhibition game at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The Americans looked scrappy, but few blamed them for it–their average age, after all, was only 22, and their team captain, Mike Eruzione, was recruited from the obscurity of the Toledo Blades of the International League.

Few had high hopes for the seventh-seeded U.S. team entering the Olympic tournament, but the team soon silenced its detractors, making it through the opening round of play undefeated, with four victories and one tie, thus advancing to the four-team medal round. The Soviets, however, were seeded No. 1 and as expected went undefeated, with five victories in the first round.

On Friday afternoon, February 22, the American amateurs and the Soviet dream team met before a sold-out crowd at Lake Placid. The Soviets broke through first, with their new young star, Valery Krotov, deflecting a slap shot beyond American goalie Jim Craig’s reach in the first period. Midway through the period, Buzz Schneider, the only American who had previously been an Olympian, answered the Soviet goal with a high shot over the shoulder of Vladislav Tretiak, the Soviet goalie.

The relentless Soviet attack continued as the period progressed, with Sergei Makarov giving his team a 2-1 lead. With just a few seconds left in the first period, American Ken Morrow shot the puck down the ice in desperation. Mark Johnson picked it up and sent it into the Soviet goal with one second remaining. After a brief Soviet protest, the goal was deemed good, and the game was tied.

In the second period, the irritated Soviets came out with a new goalie, Vladimir Myshkin, and turned up the attack. The Soviets dominated play in the second period, outshooting the United States 12-2, and taking a 3-2 lead with a goal by Alesandr Maltsev just over two minutes into the period. If not for several remarkable saves by Jim Craig, the Soviet lead would surely have been higher than 3-2 as the third and final 20-minute period began.

Nearly nine minutes into the period, Johnson took advantage of a Soviet penalty and knocked home a wild shot by David Silk to tie the contest again at 3-3. About a minute and a half later, Mike Eruzione, whose last name means “eruption” in Italian, picked up a loose puck in the Soviet zone and slammed it past Myshkin with a 25-foot wrist shot. For the first time in the game, the Americans had the lead, and the crowd erupted in celebration.

There were still 10 minutes of play to go, but the Americans held on, with Craig making a few more fabulous saves. With five seconds remaining, the Americans finally managed to get the puck out of their zone, and the crowd began counting down the final seconds. When the final horn sounded, the players, coaches, and team officials poured onto the ice in raucous celebration. The Soviet players, as awestruck as everyone else, waited patiently to shake their opponents’ hands.

The so-called Miracle on Ice was more than just an Olympic upset; to many Americans, it was an ideological victory in the Cold War as meaningful as the Berlin Airlift or the Apollo moon landing. The upset came at an auspicious time: President Jimmy Carter had just announced that the United States was going to boycott the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and Americans, faced with a major recession and the Iran hostage crisis, were in dire need of something to celebrate. After the game, President Carter called the players to congratulate them, and millions of Americans spent that Friday night in revelry over the triumph of “our boys” over the Russian pros.

As the U.S. team demonstrated in their victory over Finland two days later, it was disparaging to call the U.S. team amateurs. Three-quarters of the squad were top college players who were on their way to the National Hockey League (NHL), and coach Herb Brooks had trained the team long and hard in a manner that would have made the most authoritative Soviet coach proud. The 1980 U.S. hockey team was probably the best-conditioned American Olympic hockey team of all time–the result of countless hours running skating exercises in preparation for Lake Placid. In their play, the U.S. players adopted passing techniques developed by the Soviets for the larger international hockey rinks, while preserving the rough checking style that was known to throw the Soviets off-guard. It was these factors, combined with an exceptional afternoon of play by Craig, Johnson, Eruzione, and others, that resulted in the miracle at Lake Placid.

This improbable victory was later memorialized in a 2004 film, Miracle, starring Kurt Russell.
duc, sequere, aut de via decede
"frapper fort, frapper vite, frappée souvent-- Adm William "Bull" Halsey
“We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”--Gen George Patton
"Our Liberty is insured by four "Boxes", the Ballot box, the Jury box, the Soap box and the Cartridge box"

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Re: Today in history

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February 23
303 Emperor Diocletian orders the general persecution of Christians in Rome.
1516 The Hapsburg 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.
1574 The 5th War of Religion breaks out in France.
1615 The Estates-General in Paris is dissolved, having been in session since October 1614.
1778 Baron von Steuben joins the Continental Army at Valley Forge.
1821 Poet John Keats dies of tuberculosis at the age of 25.
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.
1854 Great Britain officially recognizes the independence of the Orange Free State.
1861 Texas becomes the seventh state to secede from the Union.
1885 John Lee survives three attempts to hang him in Exeter Prison, as the trap fails to open.
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.
1901 Britain and Germany agree on a boundary between German East Africa and Nyasaland.
1904 Japan guarantees Korean sovereignty in exchange for military assistance.
1916 Secretary of State Lansing hints that the U.S. may have to abandon the policy of avoiding "entangling foreign alliances".
1921 An airmail plane sets a record of 33 hours and 20 minutes from San Francisco to New York.
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.
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 U.S. Marines plant an American flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima.
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 Hapsburg 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.
1967 American troops begin the largest offensive of the war, near the Cambodian border.
1972 Black activist Angela Davis is released from jail where she was held for kidnapping , conspiracy and murder.
1991 French forces unofficially start the Persian Gulf ground war by crossing the Saudi-Iraqi border.


Born on February 23
1633 Samuel Pepys, English diarist.
1685 George F. Handel, German composer.
1743 Meyer Amschel Rothschild, banker and founder of the Rothschild dynasty in Europe.
1868 W.E.B. [William Edward Burghardt] Du Bois, U.S. historian and civil rights leader, founder of what became the NAACP.
1883 Victor Fleming, film director (The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind)
1899 Erich Kastner, German poet, novelist and children's author (Emil and the Detectives).
1904 William Shirer, CBS broadcaster and author (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich).
1924 Allan MacLeod Cormack, physicist, developed the CAT scan.




1945
U.S. flag raised on Iwo Jima

During the bloody Battle for Iwo Jima, U.S. Marines from the 3rd Platoon, E Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Regiment of the 5th Division take the crest of Mount Suribachi, the island’s highest peak and most strategic position, and raise the U.S. flag. Marine photographer Louis Lowery was with them and recorded the event. American soldiers fighting for control of Suribachi’s slopes cheered the raising of the flag, and several hours later more Marines headed up to the crest with a larger flag. Joe Rosenthal, a photographer with the Associated Press, met them along the way and recorded the raising of the second flag along with a Marine still photographer and a motion-picture cameraman.

Rosenthal took three photographs atop Suribachi. The first, which showed five Marines and one Navy corpsman struggling to hoist the heavy flag pole, became the most reproduced photograph in history and won him a Pulitzer Prize. The accompanying motion-picture footage attests to the fact that the picture was not posed. Of the other two photos, the second was similar to the first but less affecting, and the third was a group picture of 18 soldiers smiling and waving for the camera. Many of these men, including three of the six soldiers seen raising the flag in the famous Rosenthal photo, were killed before the conclusion of the Battle for Iwo Jima in late March.

In early 1945, U.S. military command sought to gain control of the island of Iwo Jima in advance of the projected aerial campaign against the Japanese home islands. Iwo Jima, a tiny volcanic island located in the Pacific about 700 miles southeast of Japan, was to be a base for fighter aircraft and an emergency-landing site for bombers. On February 19, 1945, after three days of heavy naval and aerial bombardment, the first wave of U.S. Marines stormed onto Iwo Jima’s inhospitable shores.

The Japanese garrison on the island numbered 22,000 heavily entrenched men. Their commander, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, had been expecting an Allied invasion for months and used the time wisely to construct an intricate and deadly system of underground tunnels, fortifications, and artillery that withstood the initial Allied bombardment. By the evening of the first day, despite incessant mortar fire, 30,000 U.S. Marines commanded by General Holland Smith managed to establish a solid beachhead.

During the next few days, the Marines advanced inch by inch under heavy fire from Japanese artillery and suffered suicidal charges from the Japanese infantry. Many of the Japanese defenders were never seen and remained underground manning artillery until they were blown apart by a grenade or rocket, or incinerated by a flame thrower.

While Japanese kamikaze flyers slammed into the Allied naval fleet around Iwo Jima, the Marines on the island continued their bloody advance across the island, responding to Kuribayashi’s lethal defenses with remarkable endurance. On February 23, the crest of 550-foot Mount Suribachi was taken, and the next day the slopes of the extinct volcano were secured.

By March 3, U.S. forces controlled all three airfields on the island, and on March 26 the last Japanese defenders on Iwo Jima were wiped out. Only 200 of the original 22,000 Japanese defenders were captured alive. More than 6,000 Americans died taking Iwo Jima, and some 17,000 were wounded.
duc, sequere, aut de via decede
"frapper fort, frapper vite, frappée souvent-- Adm William "Bull" Halsey
“We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”--Gen George Patton
"Our Liberty is insured by four "Boxes", the Ballot box, the Jury box, the Soap box and the Cartridge box"

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