St. Valentine beheaded

On February 14, 1779, Captain James Cook, the great English explorer and navigator, is killed by Native Hawaiians during his third visit to the Pacific island group. In 1768, Cook, a surveyor in the Royal Navy, was commissioned a lieutenant in command of the HMS Endeavour and led an expedition that took scientists to Tahiti […]

Frederick Douglass, a towering figure of American history, is born enslaved as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in 1818 in Talbot County, Maryland. He would go on to make a daring escape North and become one of the most famous people in 19th-century America. As a celebrated orator, author and activist, he became a powerful and eloquent […]

Destined to become one of the state’s major exports, the first trainload of oranges grown by Southern California farmers leaves Los Angeles via the transcontinental railroad. The Spanish had established Los Angeles, one of the oldest cities in the Far West, in 1781 to help colonize the region. For several decades, the city was the […]

On this day, German General Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps launch an offensive against an Allied defensive line in Tunisia, North Africa. The Kasserine Pass was the site of the United States’ first major battle defeat of the war. General Erwin Rommel was dispatched to North Africa in February 1941, along with the new […]

Noam Chomsky presents his groundbreaking theory about human speech with the publishing of Syntactic Structures on February 14, 1957 (although some scholars debate the exact date). The book launches his career as the father of modern linguistics and helps to trigger the “cognitive revolution” in psychology and other fields.  Syntactic Structures was Noam Chomsky’s first […]

In one of the most caustic literary feuds of the 20th century, playwright Lillian Hellman sues novelist and critic Mary McCarthy for libel, demanding $2.25 million in damages. The case poses the question of where the legal line stands between a critic’s free speech and malicious libel. The two writers didn’t personally know each other […]

On February 14, 1989, Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini decrees a death sentence for author Salman Rushdie after publication of his novel The Satanic Verses ignited a storm of outrage among Muslims, many of whom consider the book blasphemous. The controversy would test the limits of free speech in a multicultural, multifaith world. […]

On Valentine’s Day, 1990, 3.7 billion miles away from the sun, the Voyager 1 spacecraft takes a photograph of Earth. The picture, known as Pale Blue Dot, depicts our planet as a nearly indiscernible speck roughly the size of a pixel. Launched on September 5, 1977, Voyagers 1 and 2 were charged with exploring the […]