Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/February

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

Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir

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

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

F-16 Fighting Falcon

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

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

British bomber flying to join the Battle of Keren

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

February 4: Lichun begins in East Asia (2024)

Yasser Arafat

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

February 5: Constitution Day in Mexico (1917)

A device for producing Bakelite

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

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

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

February 7

Bruce McCandless II untethered in space

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

February 8

Mary, Queen of Scots

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

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

Participants in the Mud March

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

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

Delegates at the Inter-Allied Women's Conference

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

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

UCL Main Building

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

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

Edvard Munch's The Scream

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

February 13: Shrove Tuesday (Western Christianity, 2024)

Coso artifact

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

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

Part of the Pale Blue Dot photograph

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

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

Don Dunstan in 1968

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

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

Act of Independence of Lithuania

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

February 17

Helicopter stolen in the 1974 White House incident

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

February 18

Protesters during the Revolution of Dignity

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

February 19: Family Day in Canada (2024)

A depiction of the Venezuelan crisis of 1902–1903

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

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

Avro CF-105 Arrow

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

February 21

Malcolm X

• 1746 – Jacobite rising of 1745: The siege of Inverness ended with British forces surrendering to the Jacobite army.
• 1862 – American Civil War: The Confederate Army began an attempt to gain control of the Southwest with a major victory in the Battle of Valverde.
• 1952 – A number of student protesters demanding the establishment of Bengali as an official language were killed by police in Dhaka, East Pakistan.
• 1965 – American Black nationalist Malcolm X (pictured) was assassinated while giving a speech in New York City's Audubon Ballroom.
• 1973 – After accidentally straying into Israeli-occupied airspace, Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114 was shot down by two fighter aircraft, killing 108 of the 113 people on board.

February 22

Daytona International Speedway

• 1371 – Robert II became King of Scots as the first monarch of the House of Stewart.
• 1959 – Lee Petty won the first Daytona 500 NASCAR auto race at the Daytona International Speedway (pictured) in Daytona Beach, Florida.
• 1974 – Samuel Byck attempted to hijack an aircraft at Baltimore/Washington International Airport with the intention of crashing it into the White House to assassinate Richard Nixon, but he was stopped by police.
• 2019 – A group broke into the North Korean embassy in Madrid and stole several mobile telephones and digital storage devices.

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

Aluminium

• 1854 – The Orange River Convention was signed in Bloemfontein, with the United Kingdom agreeing to recognise the independence of the Orange Free State in present-day South Africa.
• 1886 – American inventor Charles Martin Hall discovered an inexpensive method of producing aluminium (sample pictured).
• 1944 – In response to an insurgency in Chechnya, the Soviet Union began the forced deportation of the native Chechen and Ingush of North Caucasus.
• 1987 – SN 1987A, a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, was observed from Earth.
• 2021 – Caused by gang rivalries, riots in four Ecuadorian prisons resulted in the deaths of 79 inmates.

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

George Frideric Handel

• 1711 – Rinaldo by George Frideric Handel (pictured), the first Italian-language opera written specifically for the London stage, premiered.
• 1809 – Napoleonic Wars: French admiral Villaret de Joyeuse unconditionally surrendered to the British, which ended the British invasion of Martinique and began a five-year occupation of the island.
• 1979 – Uganda–Tanzania War: Ugandan government forces fled Masaka, Uganda, as the Tanzania People's Defence Force bombarded and captured the town.
• 1989 – United Airlines Flight 811 experienced uncontrolled decompression after leaving Honolulu International Airport, Hawaii, blowing seats out of the aircraft and killing nine passengers.

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

USS Ranger

• 1843 – Royal Navy captain Lord George Paulet began a five-month occupation of the Hawaiian Islands.
• 1933 – USS Ranger (pictured), the United States Navy's first purpose-built aircraft carrier, was launched.
• 1951 – After being postponed due to World War II, the inaugural Pan American Games opened in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
• 1994 – Israeli physician Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Palestinian Muslims praying at the mosque in Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs, killing 29 people and wounding 125 others.
• 2009 – At their headquarters in Pilkhana, members of the Bangladesh Rifles began a mutiny that resulted in 82 deaths.

February 26

Nabonassar's name in Akkadian

• 747 BC – According to Ptolemy, the reign of the Babylonian king Nabonassar (name in Akkadian pictured) began, marking a new era characterized by the systematic maintenance of chronologically precise historical records.
• 1914 – RMS Britannic, the third and largest Olympic-class ocean liner of the White Star Line after RMS Olympic and RMS Titanic, was launched at the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast.
• 1979 – The Superliner railcar entered revenue service with Amtrak.
• 2014 – Former editor-in-chief of Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao Kevin Lau was stabbed, prompting concerns and protests about media freedom.

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

Memorial to the victims of the Sumgait pogrom

• 1776 – American Revolutionary War: A Patriot victory at the Battle of Moore's Creek Bridge resulted in the arrests of 850 Loyalists over the following days.
• 1814 – Peninsular War: In the south of France, Spanish, British and Portuguese soldiers under the command of Arthur Wellesley defeated French soldiers in the Battle of Orthez, causing the French to retreat east.
• 1988 – The Armenian community of Sumgait in Azerbaijan was the target of a violent pogrom (memorial pictured).
• 1996 – The multimedia franchise Pokémon was launched with the release of the video games Pocket Monsters Red and Green.

February 28: Kalevala Day / Finnish Culture Day

The first team of S.L. Benfica

• 1874 – In one of the longest cases ever heard in an English court, the claimant in the Tichborne case was convicted of perjury for attempting to assume the identity of the missing heir to the Tichborne baronetcy.
• 1904 – The most successful football club in Portugal, S.L. Benfica (first team pictured), was founded in Lisbon as Sport Lisboa.
• 1914 – In the aftermath of the Balkan Wars, Greeks living in southern Albania proclaimed the short-lived Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus.
• 1939 – In one of the most famous errors in lexicography, the erroneous word "dord" was discovered in Webster's New International Dictionary by an editor.
• 1974 – The British election ended in a hung parliament after the Liberal Party, under Jeremy Thorpe, achieved their highest ever number of votes.

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

A damaged building from the 1960 Agadir earthquake

• 1704 – Queen Anne's War: French and Native American forces raided the English settlement of Deerfield, Massachusetts, killing more than 50 colonists.
• 1944 – World War II: The Admiralty Islands campaign began when American forces assaulted Los Negros Island, the third largest of the Admiralty Islands.
• 1960 – The deadliest earthquake in Moroccan history (damaged building pictured) struck the city of Agadir, killing at least 12,000 people.
• 2004 – Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown following popular rebel uprising.
• 2012 – Construction of Tokyo Skytree, the world's tallest tower and third-tallest structure, was completed.