Feb. 20
1792: President George Washington signed an act creating the United States Post Office Department, the predecessor of the U.S. Postal Service.
1907: President Theodore Roosevelt signed an immigration act which excluded “idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, insane persons,” among others, from being admitted to the United States.
1962: Astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth.
Feb. 21
1911: Composer Gustav Mahler, despite a fever, conducted the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in what turned out to be his final concert.
1916: The Battle of Verdun, the longest battle of World War I, began in northeastern France.
1965: Civil rights activist Malcolm X was shot to death in Harlem by three men identified as members of the Nation of Islam. He was 39.
Feb. 22
1732: George Washington was born in Westmoreland County in the Virginia Colony.
1980: The “Miracle on Ice” took place at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, as the United States Olympic hockey team upset the Soviet Union, 4-3.
1997: Scientists in Scotland cloned an adult mammal for the first time, a sheep they named “Dolly.”
Feb. 23
1945: During World War II, U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima captured Mount Suribachi, where they raised two American flags (the second flag-raising was captured in the iconic Associated Press photograph.)
1954: The first mass inoculation of schoolchildren against polio using the Salk vaccine began.
1836: The siege of the Alamo began in San Antonio, Texas.
1861: President-elect Abraham Lincoln arrived secretly in Washington to take office, following word of a possible assassination plot in Baltimore.
Feb. 24
1942: The SS Struma, a charter ship attempting to carry nearly 800 Jewish refugees from Romania to British-mandated Palestine, was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine in the Black Sea; all but one of the refugees perished.
1988: In a ruling that expanded legal protections for parody and satire, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned a $150,000 award that the Rev. Jerry Falwell had won against Hustler magazine and its publisher, Larry Flynt.
2020: Former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was convicted in New York on charges of rape and sexual assault involving two women.
Feb. 25
1901: United States Steel Corp. was incorporated by J.P. Morgan.
1957: The Supreme Court, in Butler v. Michigan, overturned a Michigan statute making it a misdemeanor to sell books containing obscene language that would tend to corrupt “the morals of youth.”
1964: Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) became world heavyweight boxing champion as he defeated Sonny Liston in Miami Beach.
Feb. 26
1815: Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from exile on the Island of Elba, sailing back to France in a bid to regain power.
1919: President Woodrow Wilson signed an act making the Grand Canyon a national park.
1952: Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced that Britain had developed its own atomic bomb.
1993: A truck bomb built by Islamic extremists exploded in the parking garage of the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000 others.
