History Thread...

[CMRivdogs]

February 22

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/february-22?cmpid=email-hist-tdih-2026-0222-02222026&om_rid=

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In one of the most dramatic upsets in Olympic history, on February 22, 1980, the underdog U.S. hockey team, made up of college players, defeats the four-time defending gold-medal winning Soviet team at the XIII Olympic Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York. The Soviet squad, previously regarded as the finest in the world, fell to the youthful American team 4-3 before a frenzied crowd of 10,000 spectators. Two days later, the Americans defeated Finland 4-2 to clinch the hockey gold.

The Soviet team had captured the previous four Olympic hockey golds, going back to 1964, and had not lost an Olympic hockey game since 1968. Three days before the Lake Placid Games began, the Soviets routed the U.S. team 10-3 in an exhibition game at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The Americans looked scrappy, but few blamed them for it—their average age, after all, was only 22, and their team captain, Mike Eruzione, was recruited from the obscurity of the Toledo Blades of the International League.

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On February 22, 1732, George Washington is born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, the first of six children of Augustine and Mary Ball Washington. (Augustine had three additional children from his first marriage.) An initially loyal British subject, Washington eventually led the Continental Army in the American Revolutionand became the new nation's first president. He is often referred to as the father of the United States.

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1819 

Spanish minister Do Luis de Onis and U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams sign the Florida Purchase Treaty, in which Spain agrees to cede the remainder of its province of Florida to the United States.

Spanish colonization of the Florida peninsula began at St. Augustine in 1565. By the 17th century, the Spanish began coming under attack from Native Americans defending their ancestral homelands and English colonists encroaching from the north. Spain’s last-minute entry into the French and Indian War on the side of France cost it Florida, which the British acquired through the first Treaty of Paris in 1763. After 20 years of British rule, however, Florida was returned to Spain as part of the second Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolution in 1783.

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On February 22, 1959, Lee Petty defeats Johnny Beauchamp in a photo finish at the just-opened Daytona International Speedway in Florida to win the first-ever Daytona 500. The race was so close that Beauchamp was initially named the winner by William France, the owner of the track and head of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR). However, Petty, who was driving a hardtop Oldsmobile 88, challenged the results and three days later, with the assistance of news photographs, he was officially named the champ.

Some speculated that track owner France declared Beauchamp the winner in order to intentionally stir up controversy and generate publicity for his new race track.

 

[LaceyLou]

Sophie and Hans Scholl, of the White Rose resistance, were executed by guillotine 83 years ago today in Munich.

[Screwball]

46 years to the day the USA Men's Hockey Team wins the Gold Metal. Congrats to them.

The 1980 story has to be one of the best sports stories in history. If you were alive at that time, it was one of those "I remember exactly where I was" kind of things. A truly magical and incredible story.

I thought the movie was really good, and there is a Netflix documentary that is excellent as well.  

[Tiger337]

2 minutes ago, Screwball said:

46 years to the day the USA Men's Hockey Team wins the Gold Metal. Congrats to them.

The 1980 story has to be one of the best sports stories in history. If you were alive at that time, it was one of those "I remember exactly where I was" kind of things. A truly magical and incredible story.

I thought the movie was really good, and there is a Netflix documentary that is excellent as well.  

I wasn't even a hockey fan, but it was still one of the best stories ever.  

Jim Craig's brother was a student in my class several years later.  

[oblong]

In Detroit the game was on delay and Bill Bonds ruined it during a promo commercial for the news later on. 

[Screwball]

I didn't realize it was on delay until I read that today.  It looks like both games were, both Russia and Finland.

I was working the counter in the bowling alley the night against Russia. Apparently not many knew the results, including me. We had a 24 lane house and when people came in they said to make sure to keep them up to date on the score. I had a TV at the counter. People were running back to the bar between their turn bowling to watch, and at the counter, what little they could.

I would run a streamer across the scoreboards as the game went on. Finally, I got to put: USA 4, Russia 3 - FINAL. The place went nuts. It was really amazing. 

We had 4 or 5 guys from there who rented a motor home and went to Lake Placid. They couldn't get in the arena, but was there. They said the town went bonkers. That had to be a memory of a lifetime.

[Screwball]

1 hour ago, Tiger337 said:

I wasn't even a hockey fan, but it was still one of the best stories ever.  

Jim Craig's brother was a student in my class several years later.  

That's pretty cool. You never know who you might get in your class.

 

[Tiger337]

16 minutes ago, Screwball said:

That's pretty cool. You never know who you might get in your class.

 

I got lots of Divsion I hockey players in my classes at UMass Lowell.  Most of them weren't there to be students.  It was interesting experience!

[Sports_Freak]

Today is also a day that shall go down in history; February 22nd. 2026...The United States defeats Canada to win an Olympic gold medal..

[CMRivdogs]

February 23

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/february-23?cmpid=email-hist-tdih-2026-0223-02232026&om_rid=

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February 23, 1945: During the bloody Battle for Iwo Jima, U.S. Marines from the 3rd Platoon, E Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Regiment of the 5th Division take the crest of Mount Suribachi—the island’s highest peak and most strategic position—and raise the U.S. flag. Marine photographer Louis Lowery, who was with them, recorded the event. Americans fighting for control of Suribachi’s slopes cheered the raising of the flag.

Several hours later, more Marines headed up to the crest with a larger flag. Joe Rosenthal, a photographer with the Associated Press, met them along the way and recorded the raising of the second flag along with a Marine still photographer and a motion-picture cameraman.

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Friedrich Wilhelm Rudolf Gerhard August, Freiherr von Steuben, a Prussian military officer, arrivesat General George Washington’s encampment at Valley Forge on February 23, 1778 and commences training soldiers in close-order drill, instilling new confidence and discipline in the demoralized Continental Army.

Von Steuben, who did not speak English, drafted a drill manual in French, which Alexander Hamilton and Nathanael Greene then translated into English. The Prussian drill techniques he shared were far more advanced than those of other European armies, let alone those of the ragtag Patriots. The ego-crushing methods of modern boot camp were practiced among the shoeless soldiers of Valley Forge with remarkable efficacy. Most important for 18th-century battle was an efficient method of firing and reloading weapons, which von Steuben forced the Patriots to practice until it became second nature.

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1940 Folk singer Woody Guthrie writes one of his best-known songs, “This Land is Your Land.” It would become one of America's most famous folk songs.

“This Land Is Your Land,” which Guthrie wrote while living in New York City, reflected not only Guthrie’s support for the common folk, but also his deep love for his country. The verse celebrated the beauty and grandeur of America while the chorus drove home the populist sentiment that the nation belonged to all the people, not merely the rich and powerful. Probably the most famous of his more than 1,000 songs, “This Land Is Your Land” was also one of his last. Later that year Guthrie moved to New York where his career was soon interrupted by World War II. After serving in the Merchant Marines, he returned to New York, where he continued to perform and record his old material, but he never matched his earlier prolific output.

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On February 23, 1954, a group of children from Arsenal Elementary School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, receive the first injections of the new polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk. Thanks to the vaccine, by the 21st century polio cases were reduced by 99 percent worldwide.

 

 

[CMRivdogs]

 

[CMRivdogs]

February 24

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/february-24?cmpid=email-hist-tdih-2026-0224-02242026&om_rid=

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On February 24, 1836, in San Antonio, Texas, Colonel William Travis issues a call for help on behalf of the Texan troops defending the Alamo, an old Spanish mission and fortress under siege by the Mexican army.

A native of South Carolina, Travis moved to the Mexican state of Texas in 1831. He soon became a leader of the growing movement to overthrow the Mexican government and establish an independent Texan republic. When the Texas revolution began in 1835, Travis became a lieutenant-colonel in the revolutionary army and was given command of troops in the recently captured city of San Antonio de Bexar (now San Antonio). On February 23, 1836, a large Mexican force commanded by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana arrived suddenly in San Antonio. Travis and his troops took shelter in the Alamo, where they were soon joined by a volunteer force led by Colonel James Bowie.

Only 32 men from the nearby town of Gonzales responded to Travis’ call for help, and beginning at 5:30 a.m. on March 6, Mexican forces stormed the Alamo through a gap in the fort’s outer wall, killing Travis, Bowie, Davy Crockett and 190 of their men. Despite the loss of the fort, the Texan troops managed to inflict huge losses on their enemy, killing at least 600 of Santa Ana’s men.

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On February 24, 1803, the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Marshall, decides the landmark case of William Marbury v. James Madison, Secretary of State of the United States and confirms the legal principle of judicial review—the ability of the Supreme Court to limit Congressional power by declaring legislation unconstitutional—in the new nation.

The court ruled that the new president, Thomas Jefferson, via his secretary of state, James Madison, was wrong to prevent William Marbury from taking office as justice of the peace for Washington County in the District of Columbia. However, it also ruled that the court had no jurisdiction in the case and could not force Jefferson and Madison to seat Marbury. The Judiciary Act of 1789 gave the Supreme Court jurisdiction, but the Marshall court ruled the Act of 1789 to be an unconstitutional extension of judiciary power into the realm of the executive.

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On February 24, 1841, former President John Quincy Adams begins to argue the Amistad case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

A practicing lawyer and member of the House of Representatives, John Quincy Adams was the son of America’s second president, founding father and avowed abolitionist John Adams. Although John Quincy Adams publicly downplayed his abolitionist stance, he too viewed the practice as contrary to the nation’s core principles of freedom and equality. After serving one term as president between 1825 and 1829, Adams was elected to the House of Representatives, in which he served until his death in 1848. During his tenure, he succeeded in repealing a rule that prevented any debate about slavery on the House floor.

In 1839, a Spanish slave ship named La Amistad appeared off the coast of New York. The captives aboard it, who were free Africans kidnapped in Africa and originally bound for sale in Cuba, had rebelled, killing the Spanish ship’s captain and cook. The African mutineers then promised to spare the lives of the ship’s crew and their captors if they took them back to Africa. The crew agreed, but then duped the slaves by sailing up the coast to New York, where they were taken into custody by the U.S. Navy

In a seven-hour argument that lasted two days, Adams attacked Van Buren’s abuse of executive power. His case deflated the U.S. attorney’s argument that the treaty with Spain should override U.S. principles of individual rights. In appeasing a foreign nation, Adams argued that the president committed the “utter injustice [of interfering] in a suit between parties for their individual rights.” In a dramatic moment, Adams faced the judges, pointed to a copy of the Declaration of Independence hanging on the courtroom wall, and said “[I know] no law, statute or constitution, no code, no treaty, except that law…which [is] forever before the eyes of your Honors.”

 

[CMRivdogs]

Sounds like this may have have been an indentured servant. 

[CMRivdogs]

 

[CMRivdogs]

February 26

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/february-26?cmpid=email-hist-tdih-2026-0226-02262026&om_rid=

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1993 

At 12:18 p.m., a terrorist bomb explodes in a parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York City, leaving a massive, multi-story crater and causing the collapse of several steel-reinforced concrete floors in the vicinity of the blast.

Although the terrorist bomb failed to critically damage the main structure of the skyscrapers, six people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured. The World Trade Center itself suffered more than $500 million in damage. After the attack, authorities evacuated 50,000 people from the buildings, hundreds of whom were suffering from smoke inhalation. The evacuation lasted the whole afternoon.

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On this day in 1919, President Woodrow Wilson officially designated the Grand Canyon as a national park. The geological wonder would go on to become one of America's most popular tourist attractions.

In 1540, members of an expedition sent by the Spanish explorer Coronado became the first Europeans to discover the canyon—though because of its remoteness, the area was not further explored until 300 years later. American geologist John Wesley Powell, who popularized the term “Grand Canyon” in the 1870s, became the first person to lead a journey across the entire length of the gorge in 1869. The harrowing voyage was made in four rowboats.

In January 1908, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt designated more than 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon a national monument. It took more than a decade for it to gain full national park status.

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1929 

In a controversial move that inspires charges of eastern domination of the West, Congress establishes Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.

Home to some of the most stunning alpine scenery in the United States, the territory in and around Grand Teton National Park also has a colorful human history. The first Anglo-American to see the saw-edged Teton peaks is believed to be John Colter. After traveling with Lewis and Clark to the Pacific, Colter left the expedition during its return trip down the Missouri in 1807 to join two fur trappers headed back into the wilderness. He spent the next three years wandering through the northern Rocky Mountains, eventually finding his way into the valley at the base of the Tetons, which would later be called Jackson Hole.

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On February 26, 1935, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler signs a secret decree authorizing the founding of the Reich Luftwaffe as a third German military service to join the Reich army and navy. In the same decree, Hitler appointed Hermann Goering, a German air hero from World War I and high-ranking Nazi, as commander in chief of the new German air force.

The Versailles Treaty that ended World War I prohibited military aviation in Germany, but a German civilian airline—Lufthansa—was founded in 1926 and provided flight training for the men who would later become Luftwaffe pilots. After coming to power in 1933, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler began to secretly develop a state-of-the-art military air force and appointed Goering as German air minister. (During World War I, Goering commanded the celebrated air squadron in which the great German ace Manfred von Richthofen–“The Red Baron”–served.) In February 1935, Hitler formally organized the Luftwaffe as a major step in his program of German rearmament.

 

[CMRivdogs]

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In a crucial step toward U.S. entry into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson learns of the so-called Zimmermann Telegram, a message from German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann to the German ambassador to Mexicoproposing a Mexican-German alliance in the event of a war between the U.S. and Germany.

On February 24, 1917, British authorities gave Walter Hines Page, the U.S. ambassador to Britain, a copy of the Zimmermann Telegram, a coded message from Zimmermann to Count Johann von Bernstorff, the German ambassador to Mexico. In the telegram, intercepted and deciphered by British intelligence in late January, Zimmermann instructed his ambassador, in the event of a German war with the United States, to offer significant financial aid to Mexico if it agreed to enter the conflict as a German ally. Germany also promised to restore to Mexico the lost territories of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

The State Department promptly sent a copy of the Zimmermann Telegram to President Wilson, who was shocked by the note’s content and the next day proposed to Congress that the U.S. should start arming its ships against possible German attacks. Wilson also authorized the State Department to publish the telegram; it appeared on the front pages of American newspapers on March 1. Many Americans were horrified and declared the note a forgery; two days later, however, Zimmermann himself announced that it was genuine.

 

[CMRivdogs]

February 27

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/february-27?cmpid=email-hist-tdih-2026-0227-02272026&om_rid=

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1973 On the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, some 200 members of the Oglala Lakota tribe, led by members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), occupy Wounded Knee, the site of the infamous 1890 massacre of 300 Sioux by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry. The AIM members, some of them armed, took 11 residents of the historic Oglala Sioux settlement hostage as local authorities and federal agents descended on the reservation.

AIM was founded in 1968 by Russell Means, Dennis Banks, and other Native leaders as a militant political and civil rights organization. From November 1969 to June 1971, AIM members occupied Alcatraz Island off San Francisco, saying they had the right to it under a treaty provision granting them unused federal land. In November 1972, AIM members briefly occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., to protest programs controlling reservation development. Then, in early 1973, AIM prepared for its dramatic occupation of Wounded Knee. In addition to its historical significance, Wounded Knee was one of the poorest communities in the United States and shared with the other Pine Ridge settlements some of the country’s lowest rates of life expectancy.

The Wounded Knee occupation lasted for a total of 71 days, during which time two Sioux men were shot to death by federal agents and several more were wounded. On May 8, the AIM leaders and their supporters surrendered after officials promised to investigate their complaints. Russell Means and Dennis Banks were arrested, but on September 16, 1973, the charges against them were dismissed by a federal judge because of the U.S. government’s unlawful handling of witnesses and evidence.

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On February 27, 1844, revolutionary fervor boils over on the eastern side of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. Finally coming into the open after years of covert planning, a group known as La Trinitaria seizes the fortress of Puerta del Conde in the city of Santo Domingo, beginning the Dominican War of Independence.

Much of what is now the Dominican Republic had been, for all intents and purposes, politically autonomous in the early 1800s, with the ruling Spanish preoccupied by Napoleon's invasion and the Haitians on the western portion of the island fighting off their French colonizers. Heavily influenced and encouraged by Haiti, which had achieved independence in 1804, Dominicans declared independence as the Republic of Spanish Haiti in 1821. Despite being nominally free, however, the less-wealthy and less-densely populated half of the island came under the control of Haiti and entered into formal union with its neighbor in 1822.

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February 27, 1827, a group of masked and costumed students dance through the streets of New Orleans, Louisiana, marking the beginning of the city’s famous Mardi Gras celebrations.

The celebration of Carnival—or the weeks between Twelfth Night on January 6 and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Christian period of Lent—spread from Rome across Europe and later to the Americas. Nowhere in the United States is Carnival celebrated as grandly as in New Orleans, famous for its over-the-top parades and parties for Mardi Gras (or Fat Tuesday), the last day of the Carnival season.

Early French settlers brought the tradition of Mardi Gras to the U.S. Gulf Coast at the end of the 17th century. In fact, Mobile, Alabama celebrated its first carnival in 1703. However, Spanish governors later banned the celebrations. After Louisiana Territory became part of the United States in 1803, New Orleanians managed to convince the city council to lift the ban on wearing masks and partying in the streets. The city’s new Mardi Gras tradition began in 1827 when the group of students, inspired by their experiences studying in Paris, donned masks and jester costumes and staged their own Fat Tuesday festivities.

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1922 In deciding the case Leser v. Garnett, the U.S. Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of the 19th Amendment—which, when ratified two years earlier, provided American women with the right to vote. The justices were unanimous in their decision to dismiss the challenge.

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Two decades before the famed "Miracle on Ice," another underdog U.S. Olympic hockey team defeats the Soviet Union team in the semifinals at the Winter Games in Squaw Valley, California on February 27, 1960. The next day, the U.S. beats Czechoslovakia to win its first-ever Olympic gold medal in hockey.

The 1960 U.S. team was led by Jack Riley, the head hockey coach at West Point and himself a member of the 1948 U.S. Olympic hockey squad. His players were college students and amateurs and included two pairs of brothers, Bill and Bob Cleary and Bill and Roger Christian. Interestingly, Bill Christian’s son David was a member of the “Miracle on Ice” Olympic squad in 1980 that defeated the heavily favored Soviet Union in the semifinals and two days later beat Finland to capture the gold medal. The last player cut from the 1960 U.S. squad was Herb Brooks, who went on to coach the “Miracle on Ice” team two decades later.