February 28
Today is the last day of February.
Today is marked as
Rare Disease Day, raising awareness of rare diseases on an international level.
Today is
Shrove Tuesday.
Mardi Gras!!!
Events
202 BC – Coronation ceremony of Liu Bang as
Emperor Gaozu of Han takes place thus initiating four centuries of
Han dynasty rule over China.
1525 – Aztec king
Cuauhtémoc is executed on the order of conquistador
Hernán Cortés.
1784 –
John Wesley charters the
Methodist Church.
1827 – The
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) is incorporated, becoming the first railroad in America offering commercial transportation of both people and freight.
1849 – Regular steamboat service from the west to the east coast of the United States begins with the arrival of the
SS California in San Francisco Bay, four months 22 days after leaving New York Harbor.
1867 – Seventy years of
Holy See–United States relations are ended by a Congressional ban on federal funding of diplomatic envoys to the Vatican and are not restored until January 10, 1984.
1885 – The
American Telephone and Telegraph Company is incorporated in New York as the subsidiary of American Bell Telephone. (American Bell would later merge with its subsidiary.)
1900 – The Second Boer War: The 118-day "
Siege of Ladysmith" is lifted.
1935 – DuPont scientist
Wallace Carothers invents
nylon.
1939 – The erroneous word "
dord" is discovered in the
Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition, prompting an investigation.
1940 –
Basketball is televised for the first time.
1947 –
February 28 Incident: In Taiwan, civil disorder is put down with the loss of an estimated 30,000 civilians.
1953 –
James Watson and
Francis Crick announce to friends that they have determined the chemical structure of
DNA; the formal announcement takes place on April 25 following publication in April's Nature (pub. April 2).
1954 – The first
color television sets using the
NTSC standard are offered for sale to the general public.
1958 – A school bus in Floyd County, Kentucky
hits a wrecker truck and plunges down an embankment into the rain-swollen Levisa Fork river. The driver and 26 children die in what remains one of the worst school bus accidents in U.S. history.
1968 - 25 year old
Frankie Lymon, lead singer of
The Teenagers, died of a heroin overdose in his grandmother's New York home. Lymon was on leave from a Georgia Army post at the time and was scheduled to record for Roulette Records the next day. He first hit the national charts in 1956 when he was just 13 with '
Why Do Fools Fall in Love'.
1975 – In London, an underground train
fails to stop at Moorgate terminus station and crashes into the end of the tunnel, killing 43 people.
1977 -
Ray Charles was attacked onstage by a man who tried to strangle him with a microphone cord. The man was a member of a group called Project Heavy, a community program for disadvantaged youths. They promised that the matter would be handled within the organization and no charges were filed.
1983 – The
final episode of M*A*S*H airs, with almost 106 million viewers. It still holds the record for the highest viewership of a season finale.
1985 – The Provisional Irish Republican Army
carries out a mortar attack on the Royal Ulster Constabulary police station at Newry, killing nine officers in the highest loss of life for the RUC on a single day.
1985 -
David Byron, singer with
Uriah Heep, died from an epileptic fit and liver disease, aged 38. Uriah Heep had a hit with '
Easy Livin' from the 1972 album
Demons and Wizards.
1986 –
Olof Palme, 26th Prime Minister of Sweden,
is assassinated in Stockholm.
1991 – The first
Gulf War ends.
1993 – The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents
raid the Branch Davidian church in Waco, Texas with a warrant to arrest the group's leader
David Koresh. Four ATF agents and five Davidians die in the initial raid, starting a 51-day standoff.
1997 –
GRB 970228, a highly luminous flash of
gamma rays, strikes the Earth for 80 seconds, providing early evidence that
gamma-ray bursts occur well beyond the Milky Way.
1998 – First flight of the
RQ-4 Global Hawk, the first unmanned aerial vehicle certified to file its own flight plans and fly regularly in U.S. civilian airspace.
2013 –
Pope Benedict XVI resigns as the pope of the Catholic Church, becoming the first pope to do so since 1415.
Births
1882 – Geraldine Farrar♪ ♫, 1901 – Linus Pauling, 1906 – Bugsy Siegel, 1915 – Zero Mostel, 1919 – Alfred Marshall (founded Marshall's dept stores), 1923 – Charles Durning, 1929 – Frank Gehry, 1931 – Gavin MacLeod, 1939 – John Fahey
, 1939 – Tommy Tune♪ ♫, 1940 – Aldo & Mario Andretti
, 1940 – Joe South♪ ♫, 1942 – Brian Jones♪ ♫(The Rolling Stones), 1945 – Bubba Smith, 1948 – Mike Figgis, 1948 – Bernadette Peters
, 1948 – Mercedes Ruehl, 1955 – Gilbert Gottfried, 1957 – John Turturro, 1957 – Cindy Wilson♪ ♫(The B-52s), 1958 – Jack Abramoff, 1961 – Rae Dawn Chong, 1969 – Robert Sean Leonard ('Dr. James Wilson' on
House), 1969 – Patrick Monahan♪ ♫(Train), 1976 – Ali Larter (
Final Destination and Final Destination 2), 1977 – Jason Aldean♪ ♫, 1994 – Jake Bugg♪ ♫
Deaths
468 – Pope Hilarius
, 1916 – Henry James, 1967 – Henry Luce (co-founded Time Magazine), 1977 – Eddie "Rochester" Anderson (The Jack Benny Program), 1993 – Ruby Keeler, 2005 – Chris Curtis
(The Searchers), 2007 – Billy Thorpe♪ ♫,
2009 – Paul Harvey
, 2011 – Jane Russell
, 2016 – George Kennedy (
The Blue Knight, The Sons Of Katie Elder, Cool Hand Luke)