There are 319 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Feb. 15, 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes signed a bill allowing female attorneys to argue cases before the Supreme Court.
On this date:
In 1764, the site of present-day St. Louis was established by Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau.
In 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine mysteriously blew up in Havana Harbor, killing more than 260 crew members and bringing the United States closer to war with Spain.
In 1933, President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt escaped an assassination attempt in Miami that mortally wounded Chicago Mayor Anton J. Cermak; gunman Giuseppe Zangara was executed more than four weeks later.
In 1944, Allied bombers destroyed the monastery atop Monte Cassino (MAWN’-tay kah-SEE’-noh) in Italy.
In 1961, 73 people, including an 18-member U.S. figure skating team en route to the World Championships in Czechoslovakia, were killed in the crash of a Sabena Airlines Boeing 707 in Belgium.
In 1965, singer Nat King Cole, 45, died in Santa Monica, California.
In 1967, the rock band Chicago was founded by Walter Parazaider, Terry Kath, Danny Seraphine, Lee Loughnane (LAHK’-nayn), James Pankow and Robert Lamm; the group originally called itself The Big Thing.
In 1989, the Soviet Union announced that the last of its troops had left Afghanistan, after more than nine years of military intervention.
In 1992, a Milwaukee jury found that Jeffrey Dahmer was sane when he killed and mutilated 15 men and boys. (The decision meant that Dahmer, who had already pleaded guilty to the murders, would receive a mandatory life sentence for each count; Dahmer was beaten to death in prison in 1994.)
In 2003, millions of protesters around the world demonstrated against the prospect of a U.S. attack on Iraq.
In 2005, defrocked priest Paul Shanley was sentenced in Boston to 12 to 15 years in prison on child rape charges.
In 2020, the U.S. government said Americans who were on board a cruise ship under quarantine in Japan because of the coronavirus would be flown back home on a chartered flight, but that they would face another two-week quarantine; about 380 Americans were aboard the Diamond Princess.
There is a glaring omission in this list. On this day in 1946, the first general purpose programmable computer - ENIAC - was unveiled to the public. It was originally conceived to calculate ballistics tables, but its first actual accomplishment was a feasibility study for the hydrogen bomb.
It was notorious for buring out vacuum tubes. Initially, it was down about every other day. Eventually, engineers managed to get it to remain functional for up to five days in a row.
