February 12th
 

1809 ~ Birthday of Charles Darwin, Naturalist.

1893 ~ Birthday of Omar Bradley, General.

1924 ~ George Gershwin's ''Rhapsody in Blue'' premiered in New York City.

1938 ~ Anschluss: German troops enter Austria.

1942 ~ Birthday of Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel.

1984 ~ Birthday of Lolly Badcock, Porn Actress.

1994 ~ Edvard Munch's "The Scream" was stolen from a museum in Norway.

1999 ~ The U.S. Senate voted to acquit President Clinton on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.

2000 ~ Death of Charles M. Schulz, creator of the “Peanuts” comic strip.

2002 ~ The war crimes trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic began in The Hague.

Rats.

February 13th
 

1883 ~ Death of Richard Wagner, Composer.

1923 ~ Birthday of Chuck Yeager, pilot of first supersonic flight.

1935 ~ A jury found Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh.

1945 ~ The RAF & USAAF created a firestorm in Dresden, Germany which killed tens of thousands of civilians.

1960 ~ France tested its first nuclear weapon.

1974 ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in literature, was exiled from the Soviet Union.

1988 ~ Winter Olympic Games opened in Calgary, Alberta.

1991 ~ Hundreds of Iraqi civilians were killed when a pair of laser-guided bombs destroyed an underground facility in Baghdad identified by U.S. officials as a military installation, but which Iraqi officials said was a bomb shelter.

1997 ~ Tune-up and repair work on the Hubble Space Telescope performed by astronauts from the Space Shuttle Discovery.

2002 ~ Death of Waylon Jennings, American musician.

February 14th
 

1766 ~ Birthday of Thomas Malthus, Economist.

1779 ~ James Cook was killed by the natives of the Sandwich Islands.

1895 ~ First performance of Oscar Wilde's last play "The Importance of Being Earnest”.

1929 ~ The St. Valentine's Day Massacre took place in a Chicago garage.

1966 ~ Australian currency was decimalized.

1989 ~ The first of the 24 Global Positioning System satellites was placed into orbit.

1989 ~ Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini called on Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie, author of ''The Satanic Verses,'' a novel Khomeini condemned as blasphemous.

2000 ~ The spacecraft NEAR Shoemaker entered orbit around asteroid 433 Eros, the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid.

2003 ~ Death of Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned mammal.

Feastdays & Holidays

Catholicism ~ Feast day of Saint Valentine.

February 15th
 

1874 ~ Birthday of Sir Ernest Shackleton, British polar explorer.

1898 ~ The USS Maine exploded and sank in Havana Harbor, killing more than 260.

1942 ~ Sigapore fell to the Japanese. The Sook Ching massacre followed.

1954 ~ Birthday of Matt Groening, Satirist.

1965 ~ Death of Nat “King” Cole, Singer.

1965 ~ A new red and white maple leaf design was adopted as the flag of Canada replacing the old Canadian Red Ensign banner.

1974 ~ Birthday of Gina Lynn, Porn actress.

1988 ~ Death of Richard Feynman, Physicist.

1995 ~ Kevin Mitnick was arrested by the FBI and charged with breaking into some of the more "secure" U.S. computer systems.

2005 ~ YouTube was launched.

Doesn't seem possible that Nat King Cole has been gone some 50 years now, or that the Canadian Maple Leaf flag has been around that long either. Wow, time flies when you're having fun.

February 16th
 

1923 ~ Howard Carter unsealed the burial chamber of Pharaoh Tutankhamun.

1935 ~ Birthday of Sonny Bono, Singer & Congressman.

1937 ~ Wallace Carothers received a patent for nylon.

1942 ~ Birthday of Kim Jong Il, North Korean leader.

1959 ~ Fidel Castro became premier of Cuba after the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista.

1978 ~ The first computer bulletin board system, CBBS, was created in Chicago, Illinois.

1985 ~ Hezbollah founded.

1986 ~ The Soviet liner Mikhail Lermontov ran aground in the Marlborough Sounds, New Zealand.

2001 ~ Death of William Masters, American gynecologist and sexologist (Masters and Johnson).

2005 ~ The Kyoto Protocol came into effect.

February 17th
 

1653 ~ Birthday of Arcangelo Corelli, Composer.

1801 ~ An electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr was resolved when Jefferson was elected President and Burr Vice President by the House of Representatives.

1844 ~ Birthday of Aaron Montgomery Ward, American department store founder.

1867 ~ The first ship passed through the Suez Canal.

1895 ~ Swan Lake, one of the more famous ballets, with music by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, was first completely performed in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

1962 ~ Death of Bruno Walter, Conductor.

1972 ~ President Nixon departed on his historic trip to China.

1973 ~ Birthday of SaRenna Lee, Porn actress.

1979 ~ China invaded Vietnam.

1992 ~ Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was sentenced in Milwaukee to life in prison.

February 18th
 

1745 ~ Birthday of Alessandro Volta, Physicist, eponym for the unit of the electric potential.

1838 ~ Birthday of Ernst Mach, Austrian Physicist & Philosopher.

1861 ~ In Montgomery, Alabama Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as the first and only President of the Confederate States of America.

1885 ~ Mark Twain's “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” was first published.

1930 ~ While studying photographs taken in January, Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto.

1933 ~ Birthday of Yoko Ono, Singer, Artist, wife of John Lennon.

1969 ~ Lulu and Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees marry.

1967 ~ Death of J. Robert Oppenheimer, American physicist.

2001 ~ FBI agent Robert Hanssen is arrested for spying for the Soviet Union.

2005 ~ The UK law banning fox hunting, hare coursing and other sports which kill wild mammals is enforced from this date.

February 19th
 

1743 ~ Birthday of Luigi Boccherini, Italian Composer.

1915 ~ The Battle of Gallipoli began.

1942 ~ Some 250 Japanese warplanes attacked Darwin, Australia. The attack killed at least 243 people.

1942 ~ President Franklin Roosevelt signed the order allowing the U.S. military to relocate Japanese-Americans to internment camps.

1943 ~ Rommel's Afrika Korps began to spank the Allies in the Battle of the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia (Operation Torch).

1945 ~ About 30,000 U.S. Marines land on Iwo Jima.

1964 ~ Paul Simon wrote "The Sounds of Silence”, the song which would take him and Art Garfunkel to stardom.

1980 ~ Bon Scott, the lead singer of the Australian hard rock band AC/DC, died after a night of heavy drinking.

1986 ~ The Soviet Union launched the Mir space station.

1997 ~ Death of Deng Xiaoping, the last of China's major Communist revolutionaries.

February 20th
 

1792 ~ President Washington signed an act creating the U.S. Post Office.

1902 ~ Birthday of Ansel Adams, Photographer.

1904 ~ Birthday of Alexei Kosygin, Premier of the Soviet Union.

1927 ~ Birthday of Sidney Poitier, Actor.

1952 ~ The film The African Queen opened in New York City.

1958 ~ An announcement was made that the Sheerness Docks, established the in the 17th century by Samuel Pepys, were to close.

1962 ~ John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth aboard Friendship 7.

1966 ~ Death of Chester Nimitz, American admiral.

1989 ~ Part of a British Army barracks in Ternhill, England is destroyed by an IRA bomb.

2009 ~ Two Tamil Tigers aircraft, packed with C4 explosives en route in a kamikaze style attack on the national airforce headquarters, were shot down.

February 21st
 

1875 ~ Birthday of Jeanne Calment. She lived for 122 years 164 days, the longest confirmed lifespan for any human being in history.

1893 ~ Birthday of Andrés Segovia, Spanish guitarist.

1903 ~ Birthday of Anaïs Nin, Writer.

1907 ~ Birthday of W. H. Auden, Poet.

1916 ~ The Battle of Verdun began. French casualties during the battle were estimated at 550,000 with German losses set at 434,000, half of the total being fatalities.

1947 ~ Edwin Land demonstrated the first "instant camera", the Polaroid Land Camera, to a meeting of the Optical Society of America.

1953 ~ Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the structure of the DNA molecule.

1965 ~ Malcolm X was assassinated in New York City by members of the Nation of Islam.

1988 ~ TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart confessed to his congregation that he was guilty of an unspecified sin, and said he was leaving the pulpit temporarily. Reports linked Swaggart to a prostitute.

1995 ~ When he landed in Leader, Saskatchewan, Steve Fossett became the first man to make a solo baloon flight across the Pacific Ocean.

February 22nd
 

1732 ~ Birthday of George Washington, 1st U.S. President.

1857 ~ Birthday of Robert Baden-Powell, Chief Scout of the World.

1879 ~ Frank Woolworth opened a five-cent store in Utica, N.Y.

1935 ~ Airplanes were no longer permitted to fly over the White House.

1946 ~ George Kennan, the American charge d'affaires in Moscow, sent an 8,000-word telegram - the "Long Telegram" - to the Department of State detailing his views on the Soviet Union, and U.S. policy toward the communist state. Kennan's analysis provided one of the most influential underpinnings for America's Cold War policy of containment.

1980 ~ In the Olympic competition, the U.S. Ice Hockey team defeated the Soviets 4–3 at Lake Placid, NY.

1982 ~ Birthday of Jenna Haze, Porn Actress.

1987 ~ Death of Andy Warhol, Celebrity

1994 ~ Double agent Aldrich Ames was arrested.

1997 ~ Ian Wilmut and his colleagues at the Roslin Institute announced that a sheep had been successfully cloned, and named the clone Dolly.

February 23rd
 

1633 ~ Birthday of Samuel Pepys, Diarist.

1685 ~ Birthday of Georg Friederich Händel, Composer.

1836 ~ The siege of the Alamo began in San Antonio , Texas.

1893 ~ Rudolf Diesel received a patent for the diesel engine.

1915 ~ Birthday of Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay.

1927 ~ President Calvin Coolidge signed a bill creating the Federal Radio Commission, forerunner of the Federal Communications Commission.

1945 ~ The Stars and Stripes raised over Iwo Jima . The 28th Regiment of the 5th Marine Division took Mount Suribachi.

1954 ~ Lasting prevention of polio reported in vaccine tests.

1965 ~ Death of Stan Laurel, Actor & Comedian.

1998 ~ Osama bin Laden published a fatwa declaring jihad against all Jews and "Crusaders" (commonly interpreted to refer to the people of Europe and the United States).

February 24th
 

1786 ~ Birthday of Wilhelm Grimm, Philologist & Folklorist.

1803 ~ The U.S. Supreme Court, in Marbury v. Madison, established the principle of judicial review.

1856 ~ Death of Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, Russian mathematician.

1868 ~ The U.S. House of Representatives impeached President Andrew Johnson.

1903 ~ The U.S. signed an agreement acquiring a naval station at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

1949 ~ At White Sands NM, "Project Bumper” a WAC CORPORAL attached to a German built V-2 rocket, reached a height of 250 miles above sea level, the first rocket to reach outer space. The entire trip took 6-1/2 minutes from firing.

1955 ~ Birthday of Steve Jobs, Computer Pioneer.

1942 ~ Birthday of Teri Weigel, Porn Actress.

1981 ~ Buckingham Palace announced the engagement of Charles, Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer.

2001 ~ Death of Claude E. Shannon, "father of information theory".

2008 ~ After nearly fifty years, Fidel Castro retired as the President of Cuba.