February 15, 1909: Over 250 die in a theater fire in Acapulco, Mexico.
February 16, 1923: Howard Carter unseals the burial chamber of Pharaoh Tutankhamun.
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.
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.
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.
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.
February 19, 1884: The Enigma Tornado Outbreak kills hundredsin 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.
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.
February 21, 1918: The last Carolina parakeet dies in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo.
February 22, 1997: British scientists announce that an adult sheep named Dolly has been successfully cloned.
February 23, 1927: German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg writes a letter to fellow physicist Wolfgang Pauli, in which he describes his uncertainty principle for the first time.
February 23, 1821: Poet John Keats dies at age 25 from tuberculosis.
February 24, 1989: United Airlines Flight 811, bound for New Zealand from Honolulu, rips open during flight, blowing nine passengers out of the business-class section. The aircraft returns to Honolulu, where it lands safely.
February 25, 1968: 135 unarmed citizens of Hà My village in South Vietnam’s Quảng Nam Province are killed and buried en masse by South Korean troops in what would come to be known as the Hà My massacre.
February 26, 1616: Galileo Galilei is formally banned by the Roman Catholic Church for teaching or defending the view that the earth orbits the sun.
February 27, 1964: The Government of Italy asks for help in keeping the Leaning Tower of Pisa from toppling over.
February 27, 1943: The Smith Mine Disaster kills 74. This explosion is Montana’s deadliest mining accident.
February 28, 1939: The erroneous word “dord” is discovered in the Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, prompting an investigation. “D or d” is given as an abbreviation for density; it was misread as “dord”.
**February 28, 1844 **: An explosion on the USS Princeton on the Potomac River kills Secretary of State Abel Upshur, Secretary of the Navy Thomas Gilmer and six others. President John Tyler, who was aboard at the time, is uninjured.