TODAY in HISTORY

Today is Tuesday, February 20, the 51st day of 2018. There are 314 days left in the year.

1872 The Metropolitan Museum of Art opens in New York City.

1877 Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake receives its premiere at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. 1909 Publication of the Futurist Manifesto in the French journal Le Figaro.

1933 Adolf Hitler secretly meets with German industrialists to arrange for financing of the Nazi Party’s upcoming election campaign. 1935 Caroline Mikkelsen becomes the first woman to set foot in Antarctica.

1942 Lieutenant Edward O’Hare becomes America’s first World War II flying ace.

1943 The Saturday Evening Post publishes the first of Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms in support of United States President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address theme of Four Freedoms. 1952 Emmett Ashford becomes the first African- American umpire in organised baseball by being authorized to be a substitute umpire in the Southwestern International League.

1956 The United States Merchant Marine Academy becomes a permanent Service Academy.

1959 The Avro Arrow programme to design and manufacture supersonic jet fighters in Canada is cancelled by the Diefenbaker government amid much political debate. 1962 Mercury programme: While aboard Friendship 7, John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit the earth, making three orbits in four hours, 55 minutes. 1965 Ranger 8 crashes into the Moon after a successful mission of photographing possible landing sites for the Apollo program astronauts.

1971 The United States Emergency Broadcast System is accidentally activated in an erroneous national alert.

1986 1986 – The Soviet Union launches its Mir spacecraft. Remaining in orbit for 15 years, it is occupied for ten of those years. 1998 American figure skater Tara Lipinski becomes the youngest gold- medalist at the

1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.

2003 During a Great White concert in West Warwick, Rhode Island, a pyrotechnics display sets the Station nightclub ablaze, killing 100 and injuring over 200 others.

2005 Spain becomes the first country to vote in a referendum on ratification of the proposed Constitution of the European Union, passing it by a substantial margin, but on a low turnout.