May the LORD answer you in the day of trouble! May the name of the God of Jacob set you securely on high!


Psalm 20:1

0449: Death of St. Flavian of Constantinople

0676: Death of St. Colman of Lindisfarne

1229: Frederick II Hohenstaufen, Emperor of Germany and excommunicate, gains Jerusalem by treaty

1386: Marriage of King Wladislaus II of Poland to Jadwiga of Hungary

1397: Death of Enguerrand VII, Sire de Coucy, Count of Soissons

1405: Death of the Emir al Kebir Timur "i-Leng" (Tamerlane), while leading an expedition to China

1455: Death of Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro), Painter of many angels.

1478: George, Duke of Clarence, drowned in a barrel of malmsey wine

1493: Columbus reaches the Azores

1546: Martin Luther, leader of the Protestant Reformation in Germany, died.

1562: Huguenot colonists leave France for Florida

1564: Artist, painter, sculptor and architect Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni died in Rome.

1678: John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress" is published

1735: The first opera performed in America, known either as "Flora" or "Hob in the Well" was presented in Charleston, South Carolina.

1743: Handel's oratorio "Samson" was a great success at Covent Garden. Handel was to specialize in oratorios after that. With no stage action, they were cheaper to put on than operas.

1841: The first continuous filibuster in the U.S. Senate began this day. It lasted until March 11th.

1861: Victor Emmanuel II becomes the first King of Italy.

1861: Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederate States of America in Montgomery, Alabama.

1855: Tsar Nicholas I, died.

1865: After a long siege, Union naval forces captured Charleston, South Carolina.

1885: Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was published in the US for the first time.

1904: An angry Puccini withdrew the new opera that had been booed at La Scala, vowing not to change a note of a work that he felt had merit, "Madame Butterfly."

1907: 600,000 tons of grain are sent to Russia to relieve the famine there.

1908: U.S. postage stamps were sold for the first time. The cost was one cent.

1915: Germany began its World War I blockade of England with submarines.

1922: Keneshaw Mountain Landis resigned his post as U.S. District Judge in Illinois. Judge Landis had been commissioner of baseball since 1920 and decided to devote all of his time to "America's pastime."

1930: Pluto, the outermost planet of the solar system, was discovered by astronomer Clyde Tombaugh.

1932: Sonja Henie won her 6th world women's figure skating title in Montreal, Canada.

1938: The motion picture "The Big Broadcast of 1938" was released to movie houses. The film featured Bob Hope and his version of what would become his theme song, "Thanks for the Memory." The song received an Academy Award for Best Song. Dorothy Lamour and W.C. Fields also had starring roles in the film.

1943: Rommel takes three towns in Tunisia, North Africa. The intercepted communications of an American in Cairo provided a secret ear for the Desert Fox.

1944: The Army, Navy and Marines invade Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific.

1945: U.S. Marines storm ashore at Iwo Jima.

1951: Howard Hanson's "Fantasy Variations on a Theme of Youth" premiered at Chicago's Northwestern University.

1953: The new fad in America on this night was 3-D, as demonstrated in the movie, "Bwana Devil". The three-dimensional feature opened at Loew's State Theatre in New York City. Arch Oboler directed the movie which starred Robert Stack and the Barbara Britton.

1953: Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz signed a contract worth $8,000,000 to continue the "I Love Lucy" TV show through 1955. The deal was the richest contract in television at the time.

1954: East and West Berlin drop thousands of propaganda leaflets on each other after the end of a month long truce.

1960: The Eighth Winter Olympic Games were formally opened in Squaw Valley, California, by Vice President Nixon.

1960: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay agreed to set up a Latin American Free Trade Association.

1962: Robert F. Kennedy says that U.S. troops will stay in Vietnam until Communism is defeated.

1964: The U.S. cuts military aid to five nations in reprisal for having trade relations with Cuba.

1964: "Any Wednesday" opened at the Music Box Theatre in New York City. The play established Gene Hackman as an actor.

1967: The National Art Gallery in Washington agrees to buy a Da Vinci for a record $5 million.

1967: Father of the 'A-Bomb' American physicist, Robert Oppenheimer, dies.

1970: The Chicago Seven defendants were found innocent of conspiring to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic national convention.

1972: The California Supreme Court struck down the state's death penalty.

1974: Randolph Hearst is to give $2 million in free food for the poor in order to open talks for his daughter Patty.

1977: The space shuttle "Enterprise," sitting atop a Boeing 747, went on its maiden "flight" above the Mojave Desert.

1981: President Reagan's first budget proposed the largest tax cuts and spending curbs ever for an administration, but also a $90 billion increase in defense spending over four years.

1982: Mexico devalues the peso by 30 percent to fight an economic slide.

1983: The White House and congressional negotiators reached a compromise enabling investigators for the U.S. House of Representatives to see withheld Environmental Protection Agency documents.

1983: About 1,000 Muslim villagers in Nellie, India, were massacred by Assamese Hindus.

1984: Italy and the Vatican signed a revised concordat under which Roman Catholicism ceased to be the state religion of Italy.

1985: Gen. William C. Westmoreland and CBS reached an out-of-court settlement in Westmoreland's $120 million libel suit that resulted from a CBS News documentary, "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception."

1985: Diver Greg Louganis was recognized as the top amateur athlete in the United States, as he received the James E. Sullivan Award of the AAU in Indianapolis, Indiana. Louganis had won double gold at the 1984 Olympics.

1986: A bomb placed in the car of a U.S. Embassy Marine exploded in the embassy compound in Lisbon, Portugal, but caused no injuries.

1987: President Reagan, responding to questions that his chief of staff, Donald T. Regan, might be on the way out, said, "That is up to him." (Regan did resign, nine days later.)

1987: The executives of the Girl Scout movement decided, because the older girls wanted a change, that it was time to change the color of the scout uniform from the traditional Girl Scout green to the newer Girl Scout blue.

1988: Soviet Communist Party leaders dropped former Moscow party chief Boris N. Yeltsin from the ruling Politburo.

1988: Anthony M. Kennedy was sworn in as the 104th justice of the US Supreme Court.

1989: Author 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.

1990: In general elections, Japan's conservative governing party held onto it's 34-year-old majority in the Parliament's lower house.

1991: Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz held talks in Moscow with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who presented a proposal for ending the Persian Gulf War.

1991: The Irish republican Army claimed responsibility for a bomb that exploded in a London rail station, killing a commuter. (One person was killed and 40 injured)

1991: Two American warships struck mines while patrolling the northern Persian Gulf.

1992: In the New Hampshire primary, President Bush won the Republican contest while challenger Patrick Buchanan placed a considerably strong second; among Democrats, Paul Tsongas came in first.

1993: James Mann became the new general manager of the St. Louis Symphony. Mann was promoted from within, something that has become fairly uncommon in orchestras as big as the St. Louis.

1993: President Clinton hosted a campaign-style rally at St. Louis' Union Station to enlist citizen support for his economic plan.

1994: President Clinton notified Congress he was prepared to order bombing by U.S. warplanes in Bosnia.

1994: At the Winter Olympic Games in Norway, speedskater Dan Jansen finally won a gold medal, breaking the world record in the 1,000 meters.

1994: Delegates from 130 countries agreed at a United Nations conference that there must be new cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to halt global warming.

1995: The NAACP 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.

1996: A 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.

1997: Astronauts on the space shuttle "Discovery" completed their tuneup of the Hubble Space Telescope after 33 hours of spacewalking; the Hubble was then released using the shuttle's crane.

1997: Bill Richardson began work as US ambassador to the United Nations.

1998: President 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.  "One, two, three, four, we don't want your racist war," shouted some of the handful of hecklers at The Ohio State University in Columbus, catching Secretary of State Madeleine Albright off guard and drowning out what she was trying to say.

1988: One of President Clinton's closest advisors, Bruce Lindsey, testified  before the grand jury investigating allegations of illicit White House sex and coverup.

1988: Vice President Gore visited California to look at the damage caused by a series of El Nino-driven storms. He took a helicopter tour of the flood-damaged area around San Francisco and in Rio Nido where the threat of a mudslide forced some 150 people from their homes.

1988: Alabama National Guardsmen laid sandbags in Hunstville in an effort to block a slow-moving landslide which threatened to bury dozens of mountainside homes in mud. Officials advised residents of 37 houses below the slide and 10 more on the slope to evacuate.

1998: Sportscaster Harry Caray died in Rancho Mirage, California, at age 83.

1999: The Clinton administration warned Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to choose peace with ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, or face a devastating military strike.

2000: Iranians voted in an election that gave reformers a majority in the parliament, long a bastion of hard-liners. 

2000: Announcer Bob Hite Sr., whose rich voice introduced "The Lone Ranger" on radio, died in West Palm Beach, Florida, at age 86.