Wednesday, Feb. 18:

1885: Mark Twain’s 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' was published.

1929: The winners of the first Academy Awards were announced, their names listed on the back page of the academy’s newsletter and a ceremony held in May to honor the recipients with gold statuettes. The war drama 'Wings' was named Best Picture.

1930: Pluto was discovered by astronomer Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Pluto was, for a time, considered the ninth planet in the solar system before being disqualified from that status in 2006 due to new standards put in place by the International Astronomical Union.

2013: Eight masked gunmen stole about $50 million in diamonds from a plane on the runway at an airport in Brussels.

Tuesday, Feb. 17:

1801: After Thomas Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, tied in electoral votes ahead of third-place John Adams, the House of Representatives took up the task of deciding the election for America’s third president. The House chose Jefferson, with Burr as his vice president.

1820: The Missouri Compromise allowed the admittance of Missouri as a state without restrictions on slavery, while bringing Maine in as a free state. The agreement also banned slavery in future western states that emerged from the Louisiana Purchase north of Arkansas Territory.

1904: Met with boos and hisses from the audience, the opera 'Madame Butterfly' by Giacomo Puccini made its debut in Milan. Puccini pulled the opera after that debut and revised it, rereleasing it four months later in Brescia, Italy, to raucous applause and several curtain calls.

1972: The Volkswagen Beetle surpassed the Ford Model T as the most-manufactured vehicle model as the 15,007,034th Bug came off the production line.

2014: Jimmy Fallon debuted as the host of 'The Tonight Show' on NBC.

Monday, Feb. 16:

1804: U.S. Lieutenant Stephen Decatur led a force of 74 men in disguise into Tripoli harbor, where they boarded and destroyed the captured frigate USS Philadelphia to keep it from becoming part of the Tripolitan fleet during the First Barbary War.

1923: Archaeologist Howard Carter opened the tomb of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen, popularly known as King Tut.

1959: Fidel Castro was sworn in as prime minister of Cuba, a position he held until 1976, when he became the president of the Council of State and the president of the Council of Ministers, positions he held until 2008.

Sunday, Feb. 15:

1879: President Rutherford Hayes signed a law permitting women to be admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court bar and allowing them to argue cases before the court.

1903: The first stuffed bear to be dubbed 'Teddy’s bear,' named for President Theodore Roosevelt, went on sale at a toy store in New York. It was made of plush velvet with button eyes.

1950: With Disney facing financial difficulties, 'Cinderella' was released and became a box office hit, helping turn the studio’s fortunes around.

1965: Canada adopted its red maple leaf flag, the first banner for the nation that did not incorporate Great Britain’s Union Jack.

1989: The Soviet Union withdrew the last of its troops from Afghanistan, ending the Soviet-Afghan War that began in 1979.

2001: The journal Nature published a draft sequence and analysis of more than 90% of the human genome, the result of efforts by the Human Genome Project’s international consortium, which concluded its work in 2003 with 92% of the human genome sequenced. Mapping was completed by the Telomere-to-Telomere consortium in 2022.

Saturday, Feb. 14:

1818: Born into slavery, Frederick Douglass was uncertain of his birthday, but he chose to celebrate Feb.14. The year of his birth was also unclear but thought to be either 1817 or 1818.

1876: A lawyer for Alexander Graham Bell filed a patent application for the telephone.

1990: The spacecraft Voyager 1 snapped a photograph that became known as the 'Pale Blue Dot,' looking back toward Earth as the craft was 3.7billion miles from the sun.

2003: The first mammal cloned from an adult cell, a sheep named Dolly, was euthanized at the age of 6 after she had contracted a lung disease that was incurable.

2005: Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim launched the online video sharing platform YouTube.

2018: Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people and wounded 17 more in a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Cruz was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.

Friday, Feb. 13:

1633: Astronomer Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome to defend his writing before an Inquisition that accused him of defending the Copernican idea that the sun was at the center of the universe instead of the Earth. He agreed to plead guilty for a lighter sentence and was kept under house arrest until his death in 1642.

1689: William and Mary were proclaimed joint sovereigns in Great Britain after a bloodless revolution in which Mary’s father, King James II, was allowed to flee to France. Parliament offered the crown to the couple on the condition they accept a new Bill of Rights that limited their power.

1945: Allied forces began firebombing the city of Dresden, Germany, killing an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 people.

2000: The last new Peanuts comic strip appeared in newspapers after the death of cartoonist Charles Schulz. The strip was first published in newspapers in 1950.

Thursday, Feb. 12:

1793: Congress passed the first fugitive slave law, compelling states that had ended slavery to return enslaved people who are captured to the people who had enslaved them.

1900: A group of 500 children in Jacksonville, Florida, first performed 'Lift Every Voice and Sing,' which had been written for a celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday by James Weldon Johnson. His brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, set it to music, and it later became known as the Black national anthem.

1909: The civil rights organization the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was formed on the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.

1914: Ground was broken for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.

1994: Thieves broke into the National Museum in Oslo, Norway, stealing Edvard Munch’s famous painting 'The Scream.' The painting was recovered nearly two months later, undamaged.

Wednesday, Feb. 11:

1878: The Boston Bicycle Club became the first such group for recreational cyclists.

1916: An activist for women’s rights and social justice, Emma Goldman was arrested in New York for spreading information about birth control.

1937: The sit-down strike at a General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, ended after 44 days. The strike is considered a strong factor in the rise of the United Auto Workers union and the labor movement.

1963: Though the pilot ran the previous summer, the cooking show 'The French Chef' began its regular run as a weekly series that made Julia Child a household name.

1990: Nelson Mandela was released from prison in South Africa after 27 years.

Tuesday, Feb. 10:

1846: Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began their migration from Illinois to Utah.

1966: Ralph Nader testified before Congress about safety concerns in the auto industry. His book, 'Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile,' had been an indictment of automakers he accused of shuffling safety down their list of priorities as they sought to deliver greater power and style to drivers.

1967: The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, establishing presidential succession and the process of a temporary transfer of power if a president becomes 'unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.'

1996: Deep Blue, an IBM computer that could evaluate 200million moves per second, beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a game of chess to open their six-game match. Kasparov ended up winning three games and tying Deep Blue twice in the remaining five games to claim a $400,000 prize.

Monday, Feb. 9:

1775: The British Parliament declared the colony of Massachusetts to be in rebellion.

1942: Daylight saving time, also known as 'war time,' went into effect. The change was made to conserve fuel and was repealed in 1945, but in 1966 Congress standardized the process nationally with the Uniform Time Act.

1964: An estimated 73million Americans watched The Beatles make their live U.S. television debut on 'The Ed Sullivan Show.'

1986: Halley’s Comet made its most recent visit to our solar system and its first since 1910. The comet is next expected to return to our solar system in 2061.

2020: For the first time in Academy Award history, a foreign-language film claimed the best picture honors, with South Korea’s 'Parasite' winning the Oscar.

Sunday, Feb. 8:

1587: Mary, Queen of Scots, was beheaded for treason, having been found complicit in a plot to murder her cousin, England’s Queen Elizabeth I.

1887: The Dawes Severalty Act gave the president the authority to divide Native American reservations into privately owned plots, leading to tribes losing 62% of their holdings when 86million acres were sold to nontribal entities.

1910: The Boy Scouts of America was incorporated.

1926: The first Negro History Week, created by Carter G. Woodson, began. In 1976, it became Black History Month. Woodson chose the second week in February because it contained the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln (Feb.12) and Frederick Douglass (Feb.14).

2020: Some of the first test kits from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used for detecting COVID-19 arrived at New York’s public health lab, which reported these early tests gave 'untrustworthy results.'

Saturday, Feb. 7:

1812: The Mississippi River flowed backward for several hours, a so-called fluvial tsunami, after the strongest of a series of severe earthquakes near New Madrid, Missouri, estimated at magnitude 8.8.

1964: Thousands of fans lined up at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York as the arrival of The Beatles kicked off the British Invasion.

2009: More than 130 people who had been out on the Lake Erie ice to fish required rescue after an ice floe about 8 miles long broke apart. One man died of an apparent heart attack after nearly making his way back to shore.

2013: Mississippi became the last state to officially abolish slavery. It ratified the 13th Amendment in 1995 but did not properly file the paperwork.

Friday, Feb. 6:

1778: With the signing of a Treaty of Alliance, France threw its support behind the United States in the Revolutionary War.

1820: The first organized emigration of Black people freed from slavery in the United States left New York for Freetown, Sierra Leone.

1952: Britain’s King George VI died at age 56, leading to the ascension of Queen Elizabeth II.

2014: Comedian Jay Leno hosted 'The Tonight Show' on NBC for the last time.

2020: The first U.S. death of the COVID-19 pandemic occurred.

Thursday, Feb. 5:

1922: The first issue of the magazine Reader’s Digest was published.

1937: President Franklin Roosevelt proposed expanding the U.S. Supreme Court from nine to as many as 15 justices. Later in the year, the U.S. Senate voted 70-20 against the plan.

1990: Columbia University graduate and Harvard University law student Barack Obama became the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review.

2003: More than a month ahead of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations security council the United States had 'solid intelligence' that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The claim was false, however, and Powell later referred to his speech at the U.N. as a 'blot' on his record.

2019: Pope Francis admitted that priests and bishops in the Catholic Church have sexually abused nuns and even subjected some to 'sexual slavery.'

2020: President Donald Trump was acquitted in his first impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate.

Wednesday, Feb. 4:

1789: George Washington was unanimously elected to be the first president of the United States by 69 presidential electors. John Adams was elected as vice president.

1938: 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarves' had its general release as Disney’s first full-length animated feature. Disney borrowed most of the $1.5million needed to make the film, which grossed nearly $8million in its original general release, becoming the most successful sound film at the time.

1974: Newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. In April 1974, a surveillance photo showed Hearst taking part in an armed bank robbery with the SLA, which she later said she joined of her own free will.

2004: Mark Zuckerberg launched the social media platform The Facebook.

2013: It was confirmed, based on DNA evidence, that remains discovered under a parking lot in England were those of King Richard III. The remains were later reinterred at Leicester Cathedral.

Tuesday, Feb. 3:

1870: The 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, guaranteeing a citizen’s right to vote 'shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.'

1913: The 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, giving Congress the power to collect income tax.

1959: A small plane crashed in Iowa, killing musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. 'The Big Bopper' Richardson. The song 'American Pie' by Don McLean refers to the tragedy as 'the day the music died.'

2023: A Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. Several rail cars caught fire, and three days later, nearby residents were ordered to evacuate.

Monday, Feb. 2 (Happy Groundhog day!):

1653: New Amsterdam became a city. It was later renamed New York City.

1848: The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed by the United States and Mexico, ending the Mexican-American War. As part of the agreement, the United States paid $15million to gain 525,000 square miles of territory, extending westward to the Pacific Ocean.

1887: The town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, celebrated the first Groundhog Day at Gobbler’s Knob.

1954: President Dwight Eisenhower announced the detonation of the world’s first hydrogen bomb, which had been tested in 1952.

Sunday, Feb. 1:

1790: Chief Justice John Jay presided over the first session of the U.S. Supreme Court.

1960: Four Black college students who became known as the 'Greensboro Four' (Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil and David Richmond) staged the first of their sit-in protests at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they were denied service. Six months into the protests, Woolworth integrated the lunch counter.

1978: Harriet Tubman became the first Black woman to appear on a U.S. postage stamp.

2003: The space shuttle Columbia exploded upon takeoff, killing its seven crew members. The disaster prompted NASA to ground the space shuttle program until 2005.

Saturday, Jan. 31:

1606 : Guy Fawkes, one of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators who sought to blow up Parliament and assassinate King James I, was executed in London alongside three others: Thomas Wintour, Ambrose Rookwood and Robert Keyes.

1971 : The Winter Soldier Investigation first convened in Detroit. Organized by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the three-day event was meant to expose the public to the atrocities and war crimes perpetuated by the United States during the Vietnam War.

2020 : In a move dubbed Brexit, the United Kingdom formally left the European Union in accordance with a referendum held in June 2016.

Friday, Jan. 30:

1649 : King Charles I of England was executed by beheading in London. Charles ignited a bitter civil war after he dissolved Parliament and declared that he would rule the country without their input, in violation of guidelines set down in the Magna Carta in 1215.

1948 : Mahatma Gandhi, the political and peaceful leader of the Indian independence movement, was assassinated at age 78 in in central New Delhi by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu extremist.

1972 : In Londonderry, Northern Ireland, British Army paratroopers killed 13 unarmed Roman Catholic civil rights demonstrators and injured 14 others in what has become known as 'Bloody Sunday.'

Thursday, Jan. 29:

1845 : Edgar Allan Poe’s narrative poem 'The Raven' was first published in the New York Evening Mirror.

1886 : German engineer Karl Benz filed a patent for his 'vehicle powered by a gas engine' in Germany. It was the first practical automobile powered by an internal-combustion engine and was the first car put into production.

1936 : The National Baseball Hall of Fame announced its first inductees in Cooperstown, New York: Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Matthewson and Walter Johnson.

Wednesday, Jan. 28:

1813 : Jane Austen’s 'Pride and Prejudice' was published anonymously by, and attributed to 'the author of Sense and Sensibility.'

1896 : Walter Arnold of East Peckham, England, became the first person to be officially ticketed for speeding at 8mph, more than four times the speed limit. He was fined the equivalent of about $325 in today’s currency.

1958 : Godtfred Kirk Christiansen filed a patent in Denmark for a toy building block with interlocking features, the Lego.

1986 : The space shuttle Challenger lifted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida; 73 seconds later, the shuttle exploded, killing all seven onboard.

Tuesday, Jan. 27:

1302 : Poet Dante Alighieri was condemned in absentia and exiled from Florence by a citizens’ tribunal, who declared him guilty of corruption and extortion.

1825 : The U.S. Congress approved Indian Territory in modern day Oklahoma, which cleared the way for President Andrew Jackson to enact the Indian Removal Act of 1830. As a result, 60,000 Native Americans from at least 18 tribes were forcibly relocated to that region.

1945 : The Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the 322nd Rifle Division of the Soviet Red Army.

Monday, Jan. 26:

1788 : Captain Arthur Phillip guided an 11-ship strong fleet carrying convicts and colonists into Port Jackson in what is now Sydney Cove, establishing the first permanent European settlement on Australia.

1950 : India declared its full independence from Great Britain.

1988 : Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 'The Phantom of the Opera' made its U.S. debut in New York City. The musical was the longest-running show on Broadway when it closed in 2023.

Sunday, Jan. 25:

1533 : King Henry VIII of England married his second wife, Anne Boleyn, in a secret ceremony.

1945 : The Battle of the Bulge, considered the deadliest and largest battle fought by the United States during World War II with an estimated 75,482 casualties, officially ended.

1971 : Cult leader Charles Manson, along with followers Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkle, were convicted of the Tate-LaBianca murders.