Tidbits of History

February 28 is the 59th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar.

National Chocolate Souffle Day

The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was incorporated on February 28, 1827, becoming the first railroad in America offering commercial transportation of both people and freight.

1849 – Regular steamboat service from the east to the west coast of the United States began with the arrival of the SS California in San Francisco Bay, 4 months 22 days after leaving New York Harbor. Left New York on October 6, 1848; arrived at Rio de Janerio on November 2nd; navigated the Straits of Magellan December 7–12, 1848. The SS California wrecked and sank in the Pacific Ocean near Pacasmayo Province, Peru in 1895. There were no deaths. At the time, she had been reconstructed as a bark and engaged in hauling coal and lumber. On her last run, she had left Port Hadlock in Washington state with a cargo of lumber valued at $3,000.

1861 The Territory of Colorado was organized in the wake of the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush of 1858–1861 which brought the first large concentration of white settlement to the region. It existed between February 28, 1861, and August 1, 1876. Its boundaries were identical to the current State of Colorado. The territory ceased to exist when Colorado was admitted into the Union as the 38th U.S. state on August 1, 1876.

The first vaudeville theater opened in Boston on February 28, 1883.

1953 Scientists James D. Watson and Francis H.C. Crick announced they had discovered the double-helix structure of DNA, the molecule that contains the human genes, at Cambridge University.

The first color television sets using the NTSC standard (analog television system), are offered for sale to the general public in 1954.
They cost about $1000 each. Only 5000 were sold. In 1954 the average Annual Salary was $3,960. By comparison, one could buy a car for $1,750; a house for $8,650. Gasoline was 21 cents per gallon, bread was 17 cents a loaf; milk was 92 cents a gallon, and a postage stamp cost 3 cents. You could go to a movie for 70 cents.
See more at Pop History for 1954

1993 – Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents raided the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas with a warrant to arrest the group’s leader David Koresh. Four BATF agents and five Davidians died in the initial raid, starting a 51-day standoff.

February 27 is:

National Chili Day
National Strawberry Day
National Kahlua Day

Publication of Federalist Paper #62: The Senate written by James Madison in 1788.
Madison names five areas to be considered in regards to the Senate: Qualifications, Selection, Equality of Representation, Number of Senators and Term of office, and the powers of the Senate.
In Federalist #62 he addresses the first four of these concerns.

Quotes from Federalist #62:

“It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow.”
“No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable; nor be truly respectable, without possessing a certain portion of order and stability.”
“Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue; or in any manner affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change and can trace its consequences; a harvest reared not by themselves but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the few not for the many.”

1801 The District of Columbia Organic Act was placed under the jurisdiction of Congress. Article One, Section Eight, of the Constitution permits the establishment of a “District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States”. However, the Constitution does not specify a location for the capital. In what is now known as the Compromise of 1790, Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson came to an agreement that the federal government would pay each state’s remaining Revolutionary War debts in exchange for establishing the new national capital in the southern United States. Formed from land donated by the states of Maryland and Virginia, Congress passed the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1801 that officially organized the District and placed the entire territory under the exclusive control of the federal government. Further, the unincorporated area within the District was organized into two counties: the County of Washington to the east of the Potomac and the County of Alexandria to the west. After the passage of this Act, citizens living in the District were no longer considered residents of Maryland or Virginia, which therefore ended their representation in Congress. The portion of the District of Columbia ceded by Virginia was returned to that state in 1846-47.

Birthday of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807), American poet, author of Paul Revere’s Ride, The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

On February 27, 1864, American Civil War: The first Northern prisoners arrive at the Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia.

Birthday of John Steinbeck , (February 27, 1902), author of Tortilla Flat (1935), Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Red Pony (1937) as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939),

1951 – The Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution, limiting Presidents to two terms, is ratified.

Section 1. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.

Section 2. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission to the States by the Congress.

In 1991 U.S. President George H. W. Bush announced that “Kuwait is liberated”.

February 26 is the 57th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar.

National Pistachio Day

Publication of Federalist Paper #61: Concerning the Power of Congress to Regulate the Election of Members written by Alexander Hamilton in 1788. This is the last of three papers discussing the power of Congress over the election of its own members. The Anti-Federalists claimed that the Congress could hold elections in remote areas, thereby controlling who would be elected to the House. Hamilton cites the example of New York State Constitution not having a clause to define the location of elections and that they had not yet had a problem of the kind described. Additionally, elections are to be held every two years.

Birthday of Victor Hugo (February 26, 1802) , French novelist, author of Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

February 26, 1815 – Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from exile on the island of Elba.

Birthday of William Frederick Cody ( Buffalo Bill) (February 26, 1846), American soldier, bison hunter and showman.

1907 – The U.S. Congress raised their own pay to $7500. As of 2019, the base salary for all rank-and-file members of the U.S. House and Senate was $174,000 per year, plus benefits. The Speaker of the House “earned” $174,000 per year. Lawmakers can take a full pension at the age of 62 if they’ve served for at least five years – and even sooner if they have served longer (age 50 for those who have completed 20 years and any age after 25 years).

President Woodrow Wilson signed an act of the U.S. Congress establishing most of the Grand Canyon as a United States National Park in 1919.

President Calvin Coolidge signed an Executive Order establishing the 96,000 acre Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming in 1929.

1993 – World Trade Center bombing: In New York City, a truck bomb parked below the North Tower of the World Trade Center exploded, killing six and injuring over a thousand. The attack was planned by a group of terrorists including Ramzi Yousef (and others). They received financing from Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, Yousef’s uncle. In March 1994, four men were convicted of carrying out the bombing. Each was sentenced to 240 years in prison. The charges included conspiracy, explosive destruction of property, and interstate transportation of explosives. In November 1997, two more were convicted: Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the bombings, and Eyad Ismoil, who drove the truck carrying the bomb.

• Mahmud Abouhalima: Born in Egypt. He came to the U. S. under a tourist Visa. When it expired, he applied for amnesty claiming to be an agricultural worker and was accepted as a permanent resident under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.
  He worked as a New York City cabdriver for five years from 1986–1991, though he saw his license suspended ten times during that period, for failing to attend traffic court for cab violations including traffic violations and an attempt to overcharge a customer. He was seen by several witnesses with Mohammed A. Salameh at the Jersey City storage facility allegedly used to prepare the explosives. He is currently an inmate at ADX Florence in Florence, Colorado.
• Mohammad Salameh: Born in the West Bank. He entered the U. S. on a tourist visa in 1988.
  Despite failing his driving test four times, Salameh had been the driver for the group. On January 24, 1993, he jumped a curb and tore the undercarriage from his car, injuring himself and Ramzi Yousef. He was checked out of Rahway Hospital the following day and went to the garage to clean his car while Yousef remained in the hospital for four more days. With his Nova in for repairs, Salameh got Nidal Ayyad to use his corporate account with Allied Signal to rent him a new car. However, he got in a car accident again on February 16 and collided with a car. Salameh’s 1978 Chevy Nova was used to ferry the nitric acid and urea used to construct the bomb used in the past 1993 bombing.He is currently an inmate at ADX Florence in Florence, Colorado.
• Ahmad Ajaj: Born in the West Bank. He attended a bomb-building course in Pakistan in 1992. He is currently serving a 240-year sentence at USP Terre Haute in Terre Haute, Indiana
• Nidal A. Ayyad: He is serving his life sentence in a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind.

The attack had been financed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, uncle of Ramzi Yousef. Yousef (born in Pakistan) is serving his life sentences at ADX Florence, located near Florence, Colorado. He shares a cell block that is commonly referred to as “Bombers Row” with Terry Nichols, Eric Rudolph, and Ted Kaczynski. He is also implicated in the bombing of Philippine Airlines Flight 434, and was a co-conspirator in the Bojinka plot which involved assassinating Pope John Paul II, blowing up 11 airliners in flight from Asia to the United States with the goal of killing approximately 4,000 passengers and shutting down air travel around the world, and crashing a plane into the headquarters of the CIA in Fairfax County, Virginia.

Abdul Rahman Yasin was born in Indiana (his father was Iraqi) and helped make the bombs used in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing attack. He was last seen in an Iraqi prison in 2002.

Eyad Ismoil born in Jordan, admitted to the U. S. on a student visa in 1989. On February 26, 1993, Ismoil, accompanied by Yousef, drove a van packed with explosives into the parking garage below the World Trade Center in Manhattan, New York. Ismoil fled the United States that night. In August 1995, Ismoil was captured by Jordanian authorities in Amman and extradited to the United States to stand trial in New York for his role in the bombing. On April 3, 1998, Ismoil was sentenced to 240 years in prison, fined $250,000, and ordered to pay $10,000,000 in restitution. He is an inmate in Florence, Colorado.

Feb 25 is National Chocolate-Covered Peanuts Day
National Clam Chowder Day In his epic Moby Dick, Herman Melville wrote an ode to clam chowder that is so delectable, simply reading the words gets us craving a bowl.

“Oh, sweet friends! hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazelnuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.”

The two most prevalent types of Clam Chowder are New England or “white” clam chowder and Rhode Island / Manhattan or “red” clam chowder. In 1939 a bill was introduced into legislature in the state of Maine that would make the use of tomatoes in clam chowder against the law.

138 – The Roman emperor Hadrian adopted Antoninus Pius, effectively making Pius his successor.

February 25, 1947 – Prussia no longer exists from this date.

1836 – Samuel Colt was granted a United States patent for the Colt revolver.

1841 – Birthday of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, (February 25, 1841), French painter and sculptor, leader in the development of the Impressionist style. Photo: Luncheon of the Boating Party. More examples of his art can be found at Wikiart

1866 – Miners in Calaveras County, California, discover what is now called the Calaveras Skull – human remains that supposedly indicated that man, mastodons, and elephants had co-existed. It was later revealed to be a hoax.

1913 The 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving Congress the power to levy and collect income taxes, was declared in effect.

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census of enumeration.

Because of a generous $3,000 exemption, plus an additional $1,000 exemption for married couples, the tax applied to fewer than four percent of the population.

1919 – Oregon placed a 1 cent per U.S. gallon tax on gasoline, becoming the first U.S. state to levy a gasoline tax.

1932 – Adolf Hitler obtained German citizenship by naturalization, which allowed him to run in the 1932 election for Reichspräsident.

1956 – In his speech “On the Personality Cult and its Consequences“, Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union denounced the cult of personality of Joseph Stalin.