Today in History

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Today in History

By Correspondent

999Feb 18Gregory V, [Bruno] 1st German Pope, died.
1217Feb 18Alexander Neckum de Sancto Albano (59), English encyclopedist, died.
1404Feb 18Leon Battista Alberti (d.1472), Italian humanist, architect (Della Pittura), was born in Genoa, the illegitimate son of a Florentine merchant.
1478Feb 18George, the Duke of Clarence, who had opposed his brother Edward IV, was murdered in the Tower of London. George underwent forced drowning in a wine barrel (“A butt of Malmssey”).
1493Feb 18Columbus landed on the island of Santa Maria, the southernmost island of the Portuguese-controlled Azores.
1516Feb 18Mary Tudor, later Queen Mary I of England (1553-1558) and popularly known as “Bloody Mary,” was born in Greenwich Palace.
1546Feb 18Martin Luther (b.1483), leader of the Protestant Reformation in Germany, died in Eisleben. In 1989 Harvard professor Heiko A. Oberman (1930-2001) authored “Luther.”
1563Feb 18Huguenot Jean Poltrot de Merde shot French Gen. Francois De Guise (44).
1564Feb 18Michelangelo (b.1475), painter and sculptor, died in Rome. In 1996 George Bull wrote a biography and in 1999 James H. Beck published “Three Worlds of Michelangelo.” In 2003 Ross King authored “Michelangelo & the Pope’s Ceiling.” In 2005 James Hall authored “Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body.”
1632Feb 18Giovanni Battista Vitali, composer, was born.
1634Feb 18Ferdinand II ordered General Albrecht von Wallenstein’s execution.
1678Feb 18John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” was published. [see Sep 28]
1688Feb 18At a Quaker meeting in Germantown, Pa, German Mennonites penned a memorandum stating a profound opposition to Negro slavery. Quakers in Germantown, Pa., adopted the first formal antislavery resolution in America.
1735Feb 18The 1st opera performed in America, “Flora,” in Charleston, SC.
1745Feb 18Count Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (d.1827), Italian physicist, inventor (battery), was born.
1787Feb 18Austrian emperor Josef II banned children under 8 from labor.
1795Feb 18George Peabody, U.S. merchant and philanthropist, was born in South Danvers, Mass.
1805Feb 18Louis Malesherbes Goldsborough, Rear Admiral (Union Navy), was born.
1813Feb 18Czar Alexander entered Warsaw at the head of his Army.
1817Feb 18Lewis Addison Armistead (d.1863), Brig General (Confederate Army), was born. He died leading “Pickett’s Charge” on the final day of the Gettysburg battle.
1828Feb 18More than 100 vessels were destroyed in a storm at Gibraltar.
1836Feb 18Swami Ramakrishna [Gadadhar Chatterji], Indian mystic, Hindu leader, was born.
1841Feb 18The 1st continuous filibuster in US Senate began and lasting until March 11.
1845Feb 18John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, died in Allen County, Indiana.
1848Feb 18Louis Comfort Tiffany (d.1933), American painter, stained-glass artist, and glass manufacturer, was born. He was the son of Charles Lewis Tiffany (1812-1902), founder of the Tiffany & Co. jewelry business (1837).
1850Feb 18The California state legislature created the original 18 counties including the city of San Francisco.
1856Feb 18The American (Know-Nothing) Party abolished secrecy.
1857Feb 18Max Klinger, German graphic artist, painter, sculptor, was born.
1859Feb 18Shalom Aleichem (Solomon Rabinowitz, d.1916), Russian-Yiddish playwright,  author and humorist, was born in the Ukraine. “To want to be the cleverest of all is the biggest folly.”
1861Feb 18Jefferson F. Davis was inaugurated as the Confederacy’s provisional president at a ceremony held in Montgomery, Ala., where the Confederate constitutional convention was held. Davis was sworn in on Feb 22 in Virginia.
1862Feb 18Charles M. Schwab, “Boy Wonder” of the steel industry, was born. He became president of both U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel.
1865Feb 18Union troops forced the Confederates to abandon Fort Anderson, N.C.
1865Feb 18Columbia, SC, was evacuated and  Sherman’s troops burned the city.
1876Feb 18A direct telegraph link was established between Britain & New Zealand.
1878Feb 18The bitter and bloody Lincoln County War began with the murder of Billy the Kid’s mentor, Englishman rancher John Tunstall.
1884Feb 18Police seized all copies of Tolstoy’s “What I Believe In.”
1884Feb 18General Charles Gordon arrived in Khartoum to battle the Mahdi and his terrorists.
   
1887Feb 18Nikos Kazantzakis, Greek writer, was born
1890Feb 18Boris L. Pasternak, Russian poet, writer (Dr. Zhivago), was born.
1892Feb 18Wendell Wilke was born. He was a presidential candidate against President Franklin Roosevelt.
1895Feb 18Semjon Timoshenko, Russian marshal, inspector-general (WW II), was born.
1896Feb 18Andre Breton (d.1966), French writer, founder and principal provocateur of the surrealist movement, was born. An exhaustive biography was published in 1995 by Mark Polizzotti titled: Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andre Breton.
1898Feb 18Enzo Ferrari (d.1988), Italian sports car manufacturer, was born.
1899Feb 18Sir Arthur Bryant, English historian, was born.
1900Feb 18Battle at Paardeberg (Boer War), 1,270 British killed or injured.
1902Feb 18The opera “Hunchback of Notre Dame” premiered in Monte Carlo.
1907Feb 18600,000 tons of grain were sent to Russia to relieve the famine there.
1908Feb 18The 1st US postage stamps in rolls were issued.
1909Feb 18Wallace Stegner, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (Angle of Repose), was born.
1913Feb 18Artur Axmann, Nazi youth leader, was born.
1915Feb 18Germany began a blockade of England.
1919Feb 18Jack Palance (d.2006), later film and TV star, was born as Volodymir Ivanovich Palahniuk in Latimer Mines, Pa.
1920Feb 18Vuillemin and Chalus completed their first flight over the Sahara Desert.
1921Feb 18British troops occupied Dublin.
1922Feb 18Helen Gurley Brown, editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, was born.
1927Feb 18The U.S. and Canada established diplomatic relations independently of Great Britain.
1929Feb 18Leonard Cyril Deighton, English spy author (Ipcress File, Fighter), was born.
1930Feb 18Luigi Pirandello’s “Come Tu Mi Vuoi,” premiered in Milan.
1931Feb 18Toni Morrison, Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author (The Bluest Eye, Beloved), was born.
1932Feb 18In SF federal prohibition agents seized the offices and storehouses of two wholesale liquor setups: The Chicago Specialty Company at 724 Montgomery St. and J.C. Millet at 241 Clay St. The raids were aimed at breaking up a major bootlegging ring said to be headed by Johnny Marino.
1933Feb 18James Corbett (b.1866), American heavyweight boxing champ, died. He is best known as the man who defeated the great John L. Sullivan in 1892. Corbett’s 1926 memoir was titled “The roar of the Crowd: the True Tale of the Rise and Fall of a Champion.”
1934Feb 18Audre Lord, poet, was born.
1935Feb 18Rome reported sending troops to Italian Somalia.
1938Feb 18San Quentin prison held its first double hanging in two years as convicted murderers Lee Grant Goodwin and Roy Leon Righthouse were executed before 51 witnesses.
1939Feb 18The Golden Gate International Exposition opened on Treasure Island in the SF Bay.
1942Feb 18Japanese troop landed on Bali.
1943Feb 18Rommel took three towns in Tunisia, North Africa. The intercepted communications of an American in Cairo provided a secret ear for the Desert Fox.
1944Feb 18The Army, Navy and Marines invaded Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific
1945Feb 18-19U.S. Marines stormed ashore at Iwo Jima. About 60,000 US marines went ashore at Iwo Jima, an 8-sq. mile island of rock, volcanic ash and black sand. The 36-day battle took the lives of 7,000 Americans and about 20,000 of 22,000 Japanese defenders.
1947Feb 18Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera “Telephone,” premiered in NYC.
1950Feb 18John Hughes, director (Breakfast Club, 16 Candles, Weird Science), was born in Lansing, Mich.
1952Feb 18Two tanker ships broke apart off Cape Cod. 14 men died in the wrecks, 9 of 41 on the Pendleton and 5 of 43 on the Fort Mercer.
1953Feb 18“Bwana Devil,” the movie that heralded the 3D fad of the 1950s, opened in New York City.
1954Feb 18East and West Berlin dropped thousands of propaganda leaflets on each other after the end of a month long truce.
1956Feb 18Gustave Charpentier (95), French opera composer (Louise), died.
1960Feb 18The Eighth Winter Olympic Games were formally opened in Squaw Valley, Calif., by Vice President Nixon. A drought of snow ended 2 days before the start of the games.
1962Feb 18Robert F. Kennedy said that U.S. troops would stay in Vietnam until Communism was defeated.
1964Feb 18The U.S. cut military aid to five nations in reprisal for having trade relations with Cuba.
1965Feb 18Gambia gained independence from Britain.
1967Feb 18The National Art Gallery in Washington agreed to buy a Da Vinci for a record $5 million.
1968Feb 18Three US pilots, who had been held by the Vietnamese, arrived in Washington. The Vietnamese people later pressured Hanoi to account for their own 300,000 MIAs.
1969Feb 18The PLO (PFLP-GC) machine-gunned an Israeli El-Al plane in Zurich, Switzerland.  One Palestinian was killed and 4 were arrested.
1970Feb 18The Chicago Seven defendants were found innocent of conspiring to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic national convention; five were convicted of violating the Anti-Riot Act of 1968, but those convictions were later reversed. In January reporter J. Anthony Lukas published “The Barnyard Epithet and Other Obscenities: Notes on the Chicago Conspiracy Trial.”
1972Feb 18The California Supreme Court declared the death penalty cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the state constitution. 107 inmates were taken off death row and resentenced. A similar decision was rendered in 1976 and 68 inmates were resentenced.
1973Feb 18Frank Costello (b.1891), Italian-born US gangster, died in NYC.
1974Feb 18Randolph Hearst was to give $2 million in free food for the poor in order to open talks for his daughter Patty.
1975Feb 18Italy broadened its abortion law.
1976Feb 18The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) issued a manifesto to secede from Ethiopia.
1977Feb 18The space shuttle Enterprise, sitting atop a Boeing 747, went on its maiden “flight” above the Mojave Desert.
1979Feb 18The miniseries “Roots: Next Generations” premiered on ABC TV.
1980Feb 18Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s Liberal Party won Canada’s elections. Trudeau again served as the 15th Prime Minister of Canada.
1982Feb 18Edith Ngaio Marsh (b.1895), New Zealand detective writer, producer, died.
1983Feb 18-1983Feb 20, In India Hindu attacks against Moslems in Assam state left over 1500 dead.
   
1988Feb 18Soviet Communist Party leaders dropped former Moscow party chief Boris N. Yeltsin from the ruling Politburo.
1989Feb 18Author Salman Rushdie, under a death sentence from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini for his book “The Satanic Verses,” expressed regret for any distress he’d caused Muslims.
1990Feb 18In general elections, Japan’s conservative governing party held onto its 34-year-old majority in the Parliament’s lower house.
1991Feb 18The Irish Republican Army claimed responsibility for a bomb that exploded in a London rail station, killing a commuter.
1992Feb 18John Frohnmayer announced his resignation as US chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.
1993Feb 18President Clinton hosted a campaign-style rally at St. Louis’ Union Station to enlist citizen support for his economic plan.
1994Feb 18At the Winter Olympic Games in Norway, speedskater Dan Jansen finally won a gold medal, breaking the world record in the 1,000 meters.
1995Feb 18The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People replaced veteran chairman William Gibson with Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, after the rank-and-file declared no confidence in Gibson’s leadership.
1996Feb 18A member of the Irish Republican Army blew himself up and wounded nine other people when the briefcase bomb he was carrying detonated accidentally on a double-decker bus in London’s West End. It was the third IRA bombing in 10 days.
1997Feb 18Bill Richardson began work as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
1988Feb 18The American hockey team in Nagano lost to the Czechs. Members of the team that night trashed their quarters in the Olympic Village, drained a fire extinguisher and tossed it out their 5th story window.
1998Feb 18President Clinton’s foreign policy team encountered jeers during a town meeting at Ohio State University while trying to defend the administration’s threat to bomb Iraq into compliance with UN weapons edicts.
1999Feb 18Scientists reported a way to slow down the speed of light by a factor of 20 million using a cluster of “Bose-Einstein” atoms chilled to 50 billionths of a degree above absolute zero.
2000Feb 18In South Africa the telephone company, Telkom, announced that it would buy and distribute 5 million condoms to its employees in an effort to fight AIDS which had infected some 13% of the adult population.
2001Feb 18Balthus (b.1908), painter aka Count Balthazar Klossowski de Rola, died at age 92 in Switzerland. In 2002 His memoir “Vanished Splendors,” as told by Alain Vircondolet, was published.
2002Feb 18Addressing Japan’s national legislature, President George Bush said the country’s recession-ravaged economy was “on the path to reform,” and he urged the Diet to help curb the spread of terrorism in the region.
2003Feb 18Declaring that America’s security should not be dictated by protesters, President Bush said he would not be swayed from compelling Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to disarm.
2004Feb 18The US federal debt passed the $7 trillion mark.
2005Feb 18President Bush declared American Samoa a major disaster area following Hurricane Olaf, which wiped out nearly all homes in at least one village in the Manua Islands.
2006Feb 18Character actor Richard Bright (“The Godfather”) was struck and killed by a bus in New York; he was 68.
2007Feb 18The United States sent eight more US F-22 stealth fighter planes to the southern Japanese island of Okinawa in their first full deployment overseas.
2008Feb 18President Bush handed out hugs and bed nets in Tanzania’s rural north, saying the US is part of a new international effort to provide enough mosquito netting to protect every child between one and five from contracting malaria in this east African nation.
2009Feb 18President Barack Obama unveiled the next step in his multi-pronged efforts to lift the United States out of recession, pledging up to $275 billion to help stem a wave of home foreclosures that sparked the US financial meltdown. Obama advisors said he has settled on Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as top choice for secretary of health and human services.
   
2010Feb 18President Barack Obama met the Dalai Lama at the White House, brushing aside China’s warning that talks with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader could further damage strained Sino-US ties.
2011Feb 18The Obama administration vetoed a UN Arab-backed Security Council resolution that would have condemned Israel for continuing to build Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank.
2012Feb 18In Arizona Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu resigned as a volunteer co-chair of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s campaign in Arizona after he was accused of threatening a former male lover with deportation to Mexico if he talked about their relationship.
2013Feb 18US Attorney General Eric Holder discussed regional crime with Caribbean leaders during a summit in Haiti.
2014Feb 18Pres. Obama announced his intention to nominate Jane Chu (56), a pianist and arts administrator from Kansas City, Mo., to lead the National Endowment for the Arts.
Credit: Timelines of History  

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