TODAY IN HISTORY
1587: Mary, Queen of Scots, was beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle in England after she was implicated in a plot to murder her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I.
1693: A charter was granted for the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg in the Virginia Colony.
1910: The Boy Scouts of America was
incorporated.
1922: President Warren G. Harding had a radio
installed in the White House.
1924: The first execution by gas in the United States took place at the Nevada State Prison in Carson City as Gee Jon, a Chinese immigrant convicted of murder, was put to death.
1952: Queen Elizabeth II proclaimed her accession to the British throne following the death of her father, King George VI.
1960: Work began on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, located on Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street in Los Angeles.
1965: Eastern Air Lines Flight 663, a DC-7, crashed shortly after takeoff from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport; all 84 people on board were killed. The Supremes’ record “Stop! In the Name of Love!” was released by Motown.
1968: Three Black students were killed in a confrontation between demonstrators and highway patrol officers at South Carolina State in Orangeburg in the wake of protests over a whites-only bowling alley.
1971: Nasdaq, the world’s first electronic stock
exchange, held its first trading day.
1973: Senate leaders named seven members of a select committee to investigate the Watergate scandal, including its chairman, Democrat Sam J. Ervin of North Carolina.
2007: Model, actor and tabloid sensation Anna Nicole Smith died in Hollywood, Fla., at age 39 of an accidental drug overdose.
2013: A massive storm packing hurricane-force winds and blizzard conditions began sweeping through the Northeast, dumping nearly 2 feet of snow on New England and knocking out power to more than half a million customers.
2020: The U.S. Embassy in Beijing said a 60-year-old U.S. citizen who’d been diagnosed with the coronavirus had died on Feb. 5 in Wuhan; it was apparently the first American fatality from the virus.