Also on this day
Lead Story
1633
On this day in 1633, Italian philosopher, astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei arrives in Rometo face charges of heresy for advocating Copernican theory, which holds that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Galileo officially faced the Roman Inquisition in April of that same year and agreed to plead guilty in...
American Revolution
1776
On this day in 1776, Patrick Henry becomes colonel of the First Virginia battalion in defense of the state’s supply of gunpowder.
A Virginia lawyer, Henry gained fame as a member of the House of Burgesses with his passionate speeches against British rule and what he saw as their unfair taxation...
Automotive
2008
On February 13, 2008, a California judge rules that the actor Mel Gibson, star of such movies as the Academy Award-winning “Braveheart” and the “Mad Max” and “Lethal Weapon” series, has successfully completed the terms of his no-contest plea to misdemeanor drunk driving.
The 50-year-old Gibson made headlines after he was...
Civil War
1831
On this day in 1831, Union General John Rawlins is born in Galena, Illinois. Rawlins was a close personal aide to General Ulysses S. Grant and was reported to have kept Grant from drinking heavily during the war. Rawlins’ family was originally from Virginia but had settled in Illinois shortly...
Cold War
1984
Following the death of Yuri Andropov four days earlier, Konstantin Chernenko takes over as the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the ruling position in the Soviet Union. Chernenko was the last of the Russian communist “hard-liners” prior to the ascension to power of the reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev...
Crime
1982
A 21-year-old woman named Mary accepts a ride from a man in the ski town of Breckenridge, Colorado, and is raped and severely beaten with a claw hammer. The attacker, Tom Luther, was traced through his truck and apprehended.
Luther told a psychiatrist thatMary reminded him of his mother. The psychiatrist...
Disaster
1983
On this day in 1983, 74 people are killed when a fire blazes through a cinema in Turin, Italy.
The Statuto Cinema in Turin had a capacity of just over 1,000 people on two levels, though the show on Sunday, February 13, was not nearly full. A fire began on the...
General Interest
1689
Following Britain’s bloodless Glorious Revolution, Mary, the daughter of the deposed king, and William of Orange, her husband, are proclaimed joint sovereigns of Great Britain under Britain’s new Bill of Rights.William, a Dutch prince, married Mary, the daughter of the future King James II, in 1677. After James’ succession to...
1861
The earliest military action to be revered with a Medal of Honor award is performed by Colonel Bernard J.D. Irwin, an assistant army surgeon serving in the first major U.S.-Apache conflict. Near Apache Pass, in southeastern Arizona, Irwin, an Irish-born doctor, volunteered to go to the rescue of Second Lieutenant...
1945
On the evening of February 13, 1945, the most controversial episode in the Allied air war against Germany begins as hundreds of British bombers loaded with incendiaries and high-explosive bombs descend on Dresden, a historic city located in eastern Germany. Dresden was neither a war production city nor a major...
Hollywood
2001
After marking his arrival in Hollywood with a string of English-language films, including Sense and Sensibility (1995), The Ice Storm (1997) and Ride with the Devil (1999), the Taiwanese film director Ang Lee decided to return to his roots for his next picture, which he intended largely for Chinese-language audiences....
Literary
1991
On this day, Sotheby’s announced the discovery of a long-lost manuscript of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
The manuscript was the first half of Twain’s original version, heavily corrected in his own handwriting, which had been missing for more than a century. The manuscript surfaced when a 62-year-old Los Angeles librarian...
Music
1915
“If music did not pay, it would be given up.” So wrote Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1917. Holmes wasn’t referring to musicians themselves in that statement, but to places of business in which copyrighted musical works could be heard, whether such music...
Old West
1822
Missouri Lieutenant Governor William Ashley places an advertisement in the Missouri Gazette and Public Advisor seeking 100 “enterprising young men” to engage in fur trading on the Upper Missouri.
A Virginia native, Ashley had moved to Missouri just after President Thomas Jefferson concluded the Louisiana Purchase from France, which made the...
Presidential
1905
On this day in 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt delivers a stirring speech to the New York City Republican Club.
Roosevelt had just won his second reelection, and in this speech, he discussed the country’s current state of race relations and his plan for improving them. In 1905, many white Americans’ attitude...
Sports
1998
Austrian ski racer Hermann Maier” makes one of the most dramatic crashes in skiing history when he catapults 30 feet in the air, lands on his helmet and rams through two safety fences at an estimated 80 miles per hour on February 13, 1998. Amazingly, Maier suffered just minor injuries...
Vietnam War
1968
As an emergency measure in response to the 1968 communist Tet Offensive, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara approves the deployment of 10,500 troops to cope with threats of a second offensive. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had argued against dispatching any reinforcements at the time because it would...
World War I
1920
The League of Nations, the international organization formed at the peace conference at Versailles in the wake of World War I, recognizes the perpetual neutrality of Switzerland on this day in 1920. Switzerland was a loose confederation of German-, French-, and Italian-speaking communities until 1878, when the French, under Napoleon...
World War II
1945
On the evening of February 13, 1945, a series of Allied firebombing raids begins against the German city of Dresden, reducing the “Florence of the Elbe” to rubble and flames, and killing as many as 135,000 people. It was the single most destructive bombing of the war—including Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and...
