Straight Dope Message Board

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February 3, 1959: Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson are killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa.

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February 4, 2004: Facebook is founded by Mark Zuckerberg.

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February 7, 1812: The largest of the New Madrid earthquakes causes the Mississippi River to run backwards.

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February 7, 2013: The U.S. state of Mississippi officially certifies the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last state to approve the abolition of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment was formally ratified by Mississippi in 1995.

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February 8, 1952: Elizabeth II is proclaimed Queen of the United Kingdom.

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February 9, 1964: The Beatles make their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, performing before a "record-busting" audience of 73 million viewers across the USA.

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February 10, 1940: Tom and Jerry make their debut with Puss Gets the Boot.

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February 11, 1963: Sylvia Plath commits suicide.

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February 13, 1961: An allegedly 500,000-year-old rock is discovered near Olancha, California, that appears to anachronistically encase a "1920s-style spark plug".

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February 14, 1779: Captain James Cook is killed by Native Hawaiians near Kealakekua on the Island of Hawaii.

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February 15, 1909: Over 250 die in a theater fire in Acapulco, Mexico.

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February 16, 1923: Howard Carter unseals the burial chamber of Pharaoh Tutankhamun.

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February 18, 1930: Elm Farm Ollie becomes the first cow to fly in a fixed-wing aircraft, and also the first cow to be milked in an aircraft.

[Northern Piper]

February 18, 1980: Canadian federal election. Prime Minister Joe Clark, who had defeated Pierre Trudeau just eight months earlier in the election of 1979, is in turn defeated by a resurgent Trudeau.

Trudeau, whose political career had appeared to be dead, earned a majority, and began his victory speech: "Well, welcome to the 1980s!"

In retrospect, the election was one of the most significant in Canadian history. Trudeau led the opposition to the Parti québécois in the 1980 sovereignty referendum, winning a majority for the "No" side of around 60%. He then led the push to patriate the Constitution and entrench the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, succeeding in 1982.

Without Clark's misstep in Parliament in 1979, losing a budget vote and triggering the 1980 election, Canada's history could have turned out very differently indeed.

[Darkon]

19 February 2015: My wife returns from an out-of-town meeting and I still haven't bought her a Valentines gift.

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Originally Posted by Darkon

19 February 2015: My wife returns from an out-of-town meeting and I still haven't bought her a Valentines gift.

That's not history, that's her story.

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February 19, 1913: Pedro Lascuráin (Pedro José Domingo de la Calzada Manuel María Lascuráin Paredes) becomes President of Mexico for 45 minutes; this is the shortest term to date of any person as president of any country.

[Biotop]

February 19, 1884: The Enigma Tornado Outbreak kills hundreds in the Southeast United States. No one knows for sure how many died. Upper estimates put the fatalities at around 1200, which would make this the single deadliest such outbreak in U.S. history.

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February 20, 1998: At the age of 14 years, 9 months and 10 days, American figure skater Tara Lipinski becomes the youngest gold-medalist at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.

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February 21, 1918: The last Carolina parakeet dies in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo.

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February 22, 1997: British scientists announce that an adult sheep named Dolly has been successfully cloned.