Today in History

February 20th

  • 1339 – The Milanese army and the St. George’s (San Giorgio) Mercenaries of Lodrisio Visconti clashed in the Battle of Parabiago.
  • 1472 – Orkney and Shetland are pawned by Norway to Scotland in lieu of a dowry for Margaret of Denmark.
  • 1547 – Edward VI of England is crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey.
  • 1685 – René-Robert Cavelier establishes Fort St. Louis at Matagorda Bay thus forming the basis for France’s claim to Texas.
  • 1792 – The Postal Service Act, establishing the United States Post Office Department, is signed by United States President George Washington.
  • 1798 – Louis-Alexandre Berthier removes Pope Pius VI from power.
  • 1810 – Andreas Hofer, Tirolean patriot and leader of rebellion against Napoleon’s forces, is executed.
  • 1813 – Manuel Belgrano defeats the royalist army of Pío de Tristán during the Battle of Salta.
  • 1816 – Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville premieres at the Teatro Argentina in Rome.
  • 1835 – Concepción, Chile is destroyed by an earthquake.
  • 1846 – Polish insurgents lead an uprising in Kraków to incite a fight for national independence.
  • 1864 – American Civil War: Battle of Olustee: The largest battle fought in Florida during the war.
  • 1865 – End of the Uruguayan War, with a peace agreement between President Tomás Villalba and rebel leader Venancio Flores, setting the scene for the destructiveWar of the Triple Alliance.
  • 1872 – In New York City the Metropolitan Museum of Art opens.
  • 1873 – The University of California opens its first medical school in San Francisco.
  • 1877 – Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake receives its première performance at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.
  • 1901 – The legislature of Hawaii Territory convenes for the first time.
  • 1909 – Publication of the Futurist Manifesto in the French journal Le Figaro.
  • 1913 – King O’Malley drives in the first survey peg to mark commencement of work on the construction of Canberra.
  • 1921 – The Young Communist League of Czechoslovakia is founded.
  • 1931 – The Congress of the United States approves the construction of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge by the state of California.
  • 1933 – The Congress of the United States proposes the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution that will end Prohibition in the United States.
  • 1933 – Adolf Hitler secretly meets with German industrialists to arrange for financing of the Nazi Party‘s upcoming election campaign.
  • 1935 – Caroline Mikkelsen becomes the first woman to set foot in Antarctica.
  • 1942 – Lieutenant Edward O’Hare becomes America’s first World War II flying ace.
  • 1943 – American movie studio executives agree to allow the Office of War Information to censor movies.
  • 1943 – The Parícutin volcano begins to form in Parícutin, Mexico.
  • 1943 – The Saturday Evening Post publishes the first of Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms in support of United States President Franklin Roosevelt‘s 1941 State of the Union address theme of Four Freedoms.
  • 1944 – World War II: The “Big Week” began with American bomber raids on German aircraft manufacturing centers.
  • 1944 – World War II: The United States takes Eniwetok Island.
  • 1952 – Emmett Ashford becomes the first African-American umpire in organized baseball by being authorized to be a substitute umpire in the Southwestern International League.
  • 1956 – The United States Merchant Marine Academy becomes a permanent Service Academy.
  • 1959 – The Avro Arrow program to design and manufacture supersonic jet fighters in Canada is cancelled by the Diefenbaker government amid much political debate.
  • 1962 – Mercury program: While aboard Friendship 7, John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit the earth, making three orbits in four hours, 55 minutes.
  • 1965 – Ranger 8 crashes into the Moon after a successful mission of photographing possible landing sites for the Apollo program astronauts.
  • 1971 – The United States Emergency Broadcast System is accidentally activated in an erroneous national alert.
  • 1978 – The last Order of Victory is bestowed upon Leonid Brezhnev.
  • 1986 – The Soviet Union launches its Mir spacecraft. Remaining in orbit for 15 years, it is occupied for ten of those years.
  • 1987 – Unabomber: In Salt Lake City, a bomb explodes in a computer store.
  • 1988 – The Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast votes to secede from Azerbaijan and join Armenia, triggering the Nagorno-Karabakh War.
  • 1989 – An IRA bomb destroys a section of a British Army barracks in Ternhill, England.
  • 1991 – A gigantic statue of Albania’s long-time leader, Enver Hoxha, is brought down in the Albanian capital Tirana, by mobs of angry protesters.
  • 1998 – American figure skater Tara Lipinski becomes the youngest gold-medalist at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.
  • 2003 – During a Great White concert in West Warwick, Rhode Island, a pyrotechnics display sets the Station nightclub ablaze, killing 100 and injuring over 200 others.
  • 2005 – Spain becomes the first country to vote in a referendum on ratification of the proposed Constitution of the European Union, passing it by a substantial margin, but on a low turnout.
  • 2006 – In South Korea the United Liberal Democrats, the three top political parties was merged into Grand National Party.
  • 2009 – Two Tamil Tigers aircraft packed with C4 explosives en route to the national airforce headquarters are shot down by the Sri Lankan military before reaching their target, in a kamikaze style attack.
  • 2010 – In Madeira Island, Portugal, heavy rain causes floods and mudslides, resulting in at least 43 deaths, in the worst disaster in the history of the archipelago.
  • 2013 – The smallest extrasolar planet, Kepler-37b is discovered.
  • 2014 – Dozens of Euromaidan anti-government protesters died in Ukraine’s capital Kiev, many reportedly killed by snipers.
  • 2015 – Two trains collide in the Swiss town of Rafz resulting in as many as 49 people injured and Swiss Federal Railways cancelling some services.

All above information obtained from Wikipedia.org

Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_20

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