But his delight is in the law of the LORD, And in His law he meditates day and night.


Psalm 1:2

0270: Martyrdom of Valentine

0433: Death of St. Maro

0842: Oaths of Strasbourg

1009: Massacre of St. Bruno of Querfurt and his party, by Lithuanians

1014: Coronation of Henry II, "the Saint" as Holy Roman Emperor

1130: Election of Innocent II as Pope

1349: 2,000 Jews are burned at the stake in Strasbourg, Germany.

1400: Murder of Richard II, King of England

1432: Entrance of Henry VI, King of England and France, into London

1489: Treaty of Dordrecht

1549: Death of Giovanni Bazzi

1549: Maximillian II is recognized as the future King of Bohemia

1564: Michelangelo falls ill

1571: Death of Benevenuto Cellini

1613: Marriage of Fredrick V Elector Palantine and Princess Elizabeth of England

1613: William Shakespeare's "The Tempest" first performed

1778: The American ship "Ranger" carried the recently adopted Star and Stripes to a foreign port for the first time as it arrived in France.

1779: American Loyalists are defeated by Patriots at Kettle Creek, Georgia.

1803: Moses Coast received a patent on the apple parer.

1848: President Polk became the first chief executive to be photographed while in office as he posed for Matthew Brady in New York.

1859: Oregon was admitted to the Union as the 33rd state.

1876: Inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray applied separately for patents related to the telephone. (The US Supreme Court eventually ruled Bell the rightful inventor.)

1886: The West Coast citrus industry was born. The first trainload of oranges left Los Angeles for eastern markets.

1870: Esther Morris becomes the world’s first female justice of the peace.

1895: Oscar Wilde's final play, "The Importance of Being Earnest," opened at the St. James's Theatre in London.

1899: Voting machines for use in federal elections were approved by the U.S. Congress.

1900: General Roberts invades South Africa’s Orange Free State with 20,000 British troops.

1903: President Theodore Roosevelt signed a law creating a Department of Commerce and Labor.

1904: The "Missouri Kid" is captured in Kansas.

1908: Russia and Britain threaten action in Macedonia if peace is not reached soon.

1912: Arizona became the 48th state of the Union.

1915: The Kaiser invites the U.S. Ambassador Gerard to Berlin in order to confer on the war.

1918: Warsaw demonstrators protest the transfer of Polish territory to the Ukraine.

1918: The motion picture, "Tarzan of the Apes", was released. The film was based on a series of stories written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The movie focused on 10-year-old Gordon Griffith who played Tarzan as a boy. An older Tarzan was played by Elmo Lincoln.

1919: The United Parcel Service is incorporated in Oakland, California.

1920: The League of Women Voters was founded in Chicago; its first president was Maude Wood Park.

1924: Thomas Watson founds International Business Machines Corp.

1929: The "St. Valentine's Day Massacre" took place in a Chicago garage as seven rivals of Al Capone's gang were gunned down.

1932: The U.S. won the first bobsled competition at the Winter Olympic Games at Lake Placid, New York.

1933: An eight-day bank holiday was declared in Michigan in a Depression-era move to avert a financial panic. $50 million was rushed to Detroit to bolster bank assets.

1939: The Reich launches the battleship Bismark.

1940: Britain announces that all merchant ships will be armed.

1940: The first porpoise born in captivity arrived at Marineland in Florida.

1941:"Reflections in a Golden Eye" by Carson McCullers was first published.

1945: Peru, Paraguay, Chile and Ecuador joined the United Nations.

1949: The United States charges the U.S.S.R. with interning up to 14 million in labor camps.

1955: A Jewish couple loses their fight to adopt Catholic twins as the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to rule on state law.

1956: The 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party opened, during which Nikita Khruschev denounced the policies of Joseph Stalin.

1957: Georgia Senate outlaws interracial athletics.

1962: First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy conducted a televised tour of the White House. It was the first public peek into the Presidential back rooms and bedrooms and drew a record audience of 80 million.

1965: Malcolm X’s home is firebombed. No injuries are reported.

1966: Rick Mount of Lebanon, Indiana, became the first, high school, male athlete to be pictured on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

1971: Moscow publicizes a new five-year plan geared to expanding consumer production.

1972: The musical, "Grease," opened at the Eden Theater on Broadway. The play later moved to the Broadhurst Theater where it became the longest-running musical (at that time - CATS has since passed this record) ever with a run of 3,388 performances.

1979: Adolph Dubs, the US ambassador to Afghanistan, was kidnapped in Kabul by Muslim extremists and killed in a shootout between his abductors and police.

1980: CBS announced that Dan Rather had been chosen to succeed Walter Cronkite as anchorman and managing editor of The CBS Evening News the following year.

1983: Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin appointed Moshe Arens, Israel's ambassador to the United States, to be defense minister, replacing Ariel Sharon.

1984: Six-year-old Stormie Jones became the world's first heart-liver transplant recipient at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh (she lived until November 1990).

1984: British rocker Elton John married Renata Blauel in Sydney, Australia.

1985: Cable News Network reporter Jeremy Levin, who was being held hostage by extremists in Lebanon, was freed.

1986: The government reported that collapsing world oil prices sent U.S. wholesale prices plunging seven-tenths of one percent in January 1986.

1987: Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov addressed a closed-door session of a Kremlin-sponsored peace forum. Participants quoted Sakharov as calling for more democracy in the Soviet Union.

1988: Hours after learning that his sister had died of leukemia, American David Jansen lost his bid for a gold medal at the Winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada, when he fell during the 500-meter speed-skating event.

1988: Broadway composer Frederick Loewe, who wrote the scores for "My Fair Lady" and "Camelot," died in Palm Springs, California, at age 86.

1989: Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini called on Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie author of the novel "The Satanic Verses," a work condemned as blasphemous throughout the Islamic world.

1989: Union Carbide Corporation of the U.S. accepted an Indian Supreme Court ruling that it pay $470 million in compensation for the 1984 Bhopal poison gas disaster.

1990: 94 people were killed when an Indian Airlines passenger jet crashed while landing at a southern Indian airport.

1991: Iraq charged the bombing of an underground facility the day before, which killed hundreds of civilians, was a deliberate attack on an air raid shelter, a charge denied by the United States.

1991: Two San Francisco men became the first couple to register as "domestic partners" under a new city ordinance.

1992: The former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Moldova and Azerbaijan rejected a proposal for a unified army, handing a sharp rebuff to Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin.

1992: American speed skater Bonnie Blair won her second gold medal of the Albertville Olympics, in the one-thousand meters event.

1993: Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Elliott Carter finished composing a 20-minute piece called "Partita" for the Chicago Symphony. Carter says "Partita" aims to depict the sense of motion in a floating bubble.

1993: The body of James Bulger, a two-year-old boy who had been lured away from his mother in a Liverpool, England, shopping mall two days earlier, was found along a stretch of railroad track. (Two boys who were ten years old at the time were later convicted of murdering James.)

1994: President Clinton used his first annual economic report to proclaim his policies had put the country on track for rising prosperity for years to come, effectively claiming credit for economic plans initiated 8 or more years earlier.

1994: At the Winter Olympics in Norway, speedskater Dan Jansen slipped and fell during the 500 meters race.

1995: A federal judge rejected the Justice Department's proposed antitrust settlement with Microsoft Corporation; U.S. District Judge Stanley Sporkin was later overruled.

1995: The House passed the centerpiece of the Republican anti-crime package, voting to create block grants for local governments while eliminating President Clinton's program to hire more police.

1996: Texas Senator Phil Gramm bowed out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination following his poor showing in the Louisiana and Iowa caucuses.

1996: An armed North Korean demanding political asylum shot his way into the Russian embassy compound in Pyongyang, killing three people.

1997: American Airlines and its pilots union continued contract talks as the clock ticked down to a midnight strike deadline. (The pilots did strike, but President Clinton immediately intervened, ordering a 60-day "cooling off" period.)

1998: Authorities officially declared Eric Rudolph a suspect in the bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama, abortion clinic and offered a $100,000 reward.

1998: Russia's Ilya Kulik won the men's figure skating gold medal at the Nagano Olympics.

1999: John D. Ehrlichman, President Nixon's domestic affairs adviser imprisoned for his role in the Watergate cover-up that ultimately led to Nixon's resignation, died in Atlanta at age 73.

1999: President Clinton, accompanied by his wife, Hillary, began a quick visit to Mexico to encourage its struggle against narcotics and government corruption, and grow its markets for U.S. products.

2000: Three tornadoes tore across rural southwest Georgia, killing 20 people and destroying homes, businesses and farms. 

2000: Two sophomores at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, were found shot to death in a fast-food restaurant just two blocks from the school, which was still reeling from the April 1999 massacre.