THIS WEEK IN HISTORY

Sunday, Feb. 25

1901: United States Steel Corp. was incorporated by J.P. Morgan.

1913: The 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving Congress the power to levy and collect income taxes, was declared in effect by Secretary of State Philander Chase Knox.

1957: The Supreme Court, in Butler v. Michigan, overturned a Michigan statute making it a misdemeanor to sell books containing obscene language that would tend to corrupt “the morals of youth.”

1964: Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) became world heavyweight boxing champion as he defeated Sonny Liston in Miami Beach.

1991: During the Persian Gulf War, 28 Americans were killed when an Iraqi Scud missile hit a U.S. barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

1997: A jury in Media, Pennsylvania, convicted chemical fortune heir John E. du Pont of third-degree murder, deciding he was mentally ill when he shot and killed world-class wrestler David Schultz. (Du Pont died in prison in December 2010 while serving a 13to 30-year sentence; he was 72.)

2020: U.S. health officials warned that the coronavirus was certain to spread more widely in the United States; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged Americans to be prepared. President Donald Trump, speaking in India, said the virus was “very well under control” in the U.S.

Monday, Feb. 26

1815: Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from exile on the Island of Elba and headed back to France in a bid to regain power.

1904: The United States and Panama proclaimed a treaty under which the U.S. agreed to undertake efforts to build a ship canal across the Panama isthmus.

1952: Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced that Britain had developed its own atomic bomb.

1966: South Korean troops sent to fight in the Vietnam War massacred at least 380 civilians in Go Dai hamlet. 1993: A truck bomb built by Islamic extremists exploded in the parking garage of the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000 others. (The bomb failed to topple the

North Tower into the South Tower, as the terrorists had hoped; both structures were destroyed in the 9/11 attack eight years later.)

2012: Trayvon Martin, 17, was shot to death in Sanford, Florida, during an altercation with neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, who said he acted in self-defense. (Zimmerman was later acquitted of seconddegree murder.)

Tuesday, Feb. 27

1807: Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine. 1922: The Supreme Court, in Leser v. Garnett, unanimously upheld the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed the right of women to vote.

1933: Germany’s parliament building, the Reichstag, was gutted by fire; Chancellor Adolf Hitler, blaming the Communists, used the fire to justify suspending civil liberties.

1973: Members of the American Indian Movement occupied the hamlet of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, the site of the 1890 massacre of Sioux men, women and children. (The occupation lasted until the following May.) 1991: Operation Desert Storm came to a conclusion as President George H.W. Bush declared that “Kuwait is liberated, Iraq’s army is defeated,” and announced that the allies would suspend combat operations at midnight, Eastern time.

1997: Divorce became legal in Ireland. 2006: Former Newark Eagles co-owner Effa Manley became the first woman elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. 2010: In Chile, an 8.8 magnitude earthquake and tsunami killed 524 people, caused $30 billion in damage and left more than 200,000 homeless.

Wednesday, Feb. 28

1844: A 12-inch gun aboard the USS Princeton exploded as the ship was sailing on the Potomac River, killing Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur, Navy Secretary Thomas W. Gilmer and several others.

1849: The California gold rush began in earnest as regular steamship service started bringing gold-seekers to San Francisco.

1911: President William Howard Taft nominated William H. Lewis to be the first Black Assistant Attorney General of the United States. 1953: Scientists James D. Watson and Francis H.C. Crick announced they had discovered the double-helix structure of DNA.

1993: A gun battle erupted at a religious compound near Waco, Texas, when Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents tried to arrest Branch Davidian leader David Koresh on weapons charges; four agents and six Davidians were killed as a 51-day standoff began.

2013: Benedict XVI became the first pope in 600 years to resign, ending an eight-year pontificate. (Benedict was succeeded the following month by Pope Francis.)

2018: Students and teachers returned under police guard to Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School as classes resumed for the first time since a shooting that killed 17 people.

2020: The number of countries touched by the coronavirus climbed to nearly 60. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished the week 12.4% lower in the market’s worst weekly performance since the 2008 financial crisis.

Thursday, Feb. 29

1504: Christopher Columbus, stranded in Jamaica during his fourth voyage to the West, used a correctly predicted lunar eclipse to frighten hostile natives into providing food for his crew.

1940: Hattie McDaniel became the first Black actor to win an Academy Award when she took best supporting actress for “Gone With the Wind,” which won eight Oscars overall including best picture.

1956: President Dwight D. Eisenhower announced he would seek a second term of office.

1960: The first Playboy Club, featuring waitresses clad in “bunny” outfits, opened in Chicago. Serial killer Richard Ramirez was born in El Paso, Texas (he died in 2013 while awaiting execution in California).

2016: Justice Clarence Thomas broke 10 years of courtroom silence and posed questions during a Supreme Court oral argument dealing with gun rights, provoking gasps from the audience.

Friday, March 1

1893: Inventor Nikola Tesla first publicly demonstrated radio during a meeting of the National Electric Light Association in St. Louis by transmitting electromagnetic energy without wires.

1932: Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., the 20-month-old son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh, was kidnapped from the family home near Hopewell, New Jersey.

1954: Four Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire from the spectators’ gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives, wounding five members of Congress.

1974: Seven people, including former Nixon White House aides H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman, former Attorney General John Mitchell and former assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian, were indicted on charges of conspiring to obstruct justice in connection with the Watergate break-in. (These four defendants were convicted in January 1975, though Mardian’s conviction was later reversed.)

2005: Dennis Rader, the churchgoing family man accused of leading a double life as the BTK serial killer, was charged in Wichita, Kansas, with 10 counts of first-degree murder. (Rader later pleaded guilty and received multiple life sentences.)

2020: State officials said New York City had its first confirmed case of the coronavirus, a woman in her late 30s who had contracted the virus while traveling in Iran.

Saturday, March 2

1861: The state of Texas, having seceded from the Union, was admitted to the Confederacy.

1955: Nine months before Rosa Parks’ famous act of defiance, Claudette Colvin, a Black high school student in Montgomery, Alabama, was arrested after refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white passenger.

1962: Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points for the Philadelphia Warriors in a game against the New York Knicks, an NBA record that still stands. Philadelphia won the game, 169-147.

1985: The government approved a screening test for AIDS that detected antibodies to the virus, allowing possibly contaminated blood to be excluded from the blood supply.

1995: The internet search engine website Yahoo! was incorporated by founders Jerry Yang and David Filo.

2012: Some 40 people were killed by tornadoes that struck Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio.