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 26 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 (pictured) 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.
February 19, 1455, is the traditional date of the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed with movable type. Thus began a new era in human civilization, eventually bringing literacy, information, and entertainment to the masses.