February 28 - Events

Events

• 202 BC – coronation ceremony of Liu Bang as Emperor Gaozu of Han takes place, initiating four centuries of the Han Dynasty's rule over China.
• 870 – The Fourth Council of Constantinople closes.
• 1525 – The Aztec king Cuauhtémoc is executed by Hernán Cortés's forces.
• 1638 – The Scottish National Covenant is signed in Edinburgh.
• 1700 – Today is followed by March 1 in Sweden, thus creating the Swedish calendar.
• 1710 – In the Battle of Helsingborg, 14,000 Danish invaders under Jørgen Rantzau are decisively defeated by an equally sized Swedish force under Magnus Stenbock. This is the last time Swedish and Danish troops meet on Swedish soil.
• 1784 – John Wesley charters the Methodist Church.
• 1811 – Cry of Asencio, beginning of the Uruguayan War of Independence
• 1827 – The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad is incorporated, becoming the first railroad in America offering commercial transportation of both people and freight.
• 1838 – Robert Nelson, leader of the Patriotes, proclaims the independence of Lower Canada (today Quebec)
• 1844 – A gun on USS Princeton explodes while the boat is on a Potomac River cruise, killing eight people, including two United States Cabinet members.
• 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, 4 months 22 days after leaving New York Harbor.
• 1854 – The Republican Party of the United States is organized in Ripon, Wisconsin.
• 1870 – The Bulgarian Exarchate is established by decree of Sultan Abd-ul-Aziz of the Ottoman Empire.
• 1883 – The first vaudeville theater opens in Boston, Massachusetts.
• 1885 – The American Telephone and Telegraph Company is incorporated in New York State as the subsidiary of American Bell Telephone. (American Bell would later merge with its subsidiary.)
• 1893 – The USS Indiana, the lead ship of her class and the first battleship in the United States Navy comparable to foreign battleships of the time, is launched.
• 1897 – Queen Ranavalona III, the last monarch of Madagascar, is deposed by a French military force.
• 1900 – The Second Boer War: The 118-day "Siege of Ladysmith" is lifted.
• 1914 – The Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus is proclaimed in Gjirokastër, by the Greeks living in southern Albania.
• 1922 – The United Kingdom ends its protectorate over Egypt through a Unilateral Declaration of Independence.
• 1928 – C.V. Raman discovers Raman effect.
• 1933 – Gleichschaltung: The Reichstag Fire Decree is passed in Germany a day after the Reichstag fire.
• 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 (Fordham University vs. the University of Pittsburgh in Madison Square Garden).
• 1942 – The heavy cruiser USS Houston is sunk in the Battle of Sunda Strait with 693 crew members killed, along with HMAS Perth which lost 375 men.
• 1947 – 228 massacre: In Taiwan, civil disorder is put down with the loss of estimated 30,000 civilians.
• 1953 – James D. 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 on of the worst school bus accidents in U.S. history.
• 1959 – Discoverer 1, an American spy satellite that is the first object intended to achieve a polar orbit, is launched. It failed to achieve orbit.
• 1972 – Sino-American relations: The United States and People's Republic of China sign the Shanghai Communiqué.
• 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 – Elizabeth II opens the New Zealand Parliament.
• 1980 – Andalusia approves its statute of autonomy through a referendum.
• 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.
• 1986 – Olof Palme, Prime Minister of Sweden, is assassinated in Stockholm.
• 1991 – The first Gulf War ends.
• 1993 – 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 BATF agents and five Davidians die in the initial raid, starting a 51-day standoff.
• 1997 – An earthquake of magnitude 6.1 in Armenia and Azerbaijan kills around 1,100 people
• 1997 – An earthquake in northern Iran is responsible for about 3,000 deaths.
• 1997 – The North Hollywood shootout takes place, resulting in the injury of 19 people and the deaths of both perpetrators.
• 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 RQ-4 Global Hawk, the first unmanned aerial vehicle certified to file its own flight plans and fly regularly in U.S. civilian airspace.
• 1998 – Kosovo War: Serbian police begin the offensive against the Kosovo Liberation Army in Kosovo.
• 2001 – The Nisqually Earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter Scale hits the Nisqually Valley and the Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia area of the U.S. state of Washington.
• 2001 – Six passengers and four railway staff are killed and a further 82 people suffer serious injuries in the Selby rail crash.
• 2002 – During the religious violence in Gujarat, the 97 people killed in the Naroda Patiya massacre and 69 in Gulbarg Society massacre.
• 2004 – Over 1 million Taiwanese participating in the 228 Hand-in-Hand Rally form a 500-kilometre (310 mi) long human chain to commemorate the 228 Incident in 1947
• 2005 – A suicide bombing at a police recruiting centre in Al Hillah, Iraq kills 127.