Category: Today

On Leap Year Day 1796, the Jay Treaty between the United States and Great Britain came into force, facilitating ten years of peaceful trade between the two countries.

On February 28, 1646, Roger Scott, of Lynn, Massachusetts, was tried for sleeping in church. Awakened in church by a tithingman’s long, knobbed staff hitting him on the head, he struck back at the man, and garnered a whipping as punishment, as well as the dark designation as “a common sleeper at the publick exercise.”

The Twenty-second Amendment (Amendment XXII) of the United States Constitution, which sets a term limit for election and overall time of service to the office of President of the United States, was ratified by the requisite 36 of the then-48 states of the union on February 27, 1951.

Congress had passed the amendment on March 21, 1947.

February 26th marks the Dominican Republic’s Independence Day.

On February 25, 1870, the first African-American entered Congress to serve in the U. S. Senate.

Hiram Rhodes Revels (Sep 27, 1827 – Jan 16, 1901) was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a Republican politician, and college administrator. Born free in North Carolina, he later lived and worked in Ohio, where he voted before the Civil War. Revels (pictured above) was elected as the first African American to serve in the United States Senate, and was the first African American to serve in the U.S. Congress. He represented Mississippi in the Senate in 1870 and 1871 during the Reconstruction era.

On February 24, 1803, the Supreme Court, in Marbury v. Madison, established the principle of judicial review. William Marbury was a businessman appointed as a “midnight judge” by lame duck president John Adams. He became the plaintiff in Marbury v. Madison.

On February 24, 1917, United States ambassador to the United Kingdom, Walter Hines Page, was shown the intercepted Zimmermann Telegram, in which Germany offered to give the American Southwest back to Mexico were Mexico to declare war on the United States.

On February 22, 1632, Ferdinando II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, received the first printed copy of Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i Due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo). The Grand Duke was the dedicatee.

Galileo’s Dialogo is a witty and entertaining defense of the Copernican system, where the Sun is at the center of “the universe.” This was opposed to the traditional view — held by Aristotle and Ptolemy — of an Earth-centered system, as represented by an armillary sphere.

Only two systems appear in the Dialogo; Galileo pitting what we now call the Ptolemaic system with the Copernican, nowhere mentioning the Tychonic system then favored by most astronomers, one in which the Sun and Moon and stars revolve around Earth, but the planets revolve around the Sun.

Once published, Pope Urban VIII gave orders for the Dialogo to be recalled and summoned Galileo to Rome for trial.

On Feb. 21, 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto.

On Feb. 21, 1916, the Battle of Verdun began with German bombardment of the city of Verdun, France.  For ten months, the longest single engagement of the First World War, German forces attacked the French along a 20-kilometer front crossing the Meuse River. When the battle ended, with no change in the strategic position of either army, the combined death toll was over 300,000 (out of over 700,000 casualties).

On Feb. 21, 1965, Malcolm X was gunned down by rival Black Muslims while addressing his Organization of Afro-American Unity in New York City.

On February 20, 1991, in the Albanian capital Tirana, a gigantic statue of Albania’s long-time leader, Enver Hoxha, was brought down by mobs of angry protesters.

February 19, 1942, was a sad day for constitutional rights, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt signing Executive Order 9066, authorizing the Secretary of War to prescribe certain areas of the country as military zones. These zones were used to incarcerate Japanese Americans in internment camps.