TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Sunday, Feb. 14, the 45th day of 2021. There are 320 days left in the year. This is Valentine’s Day.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Feb. 14, 2018, a gunman identified as a former student opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, killing 17 people in the nation’s deadliest school shooting since the attack in Newtown, Connecticut, more than five years earlier.
On this date:
In 1778, the American ship Ranger carried the recently adopted Stars and Stripes to a foreign port for the first time as it arrived in France.
In 1876, inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray applied separately for patents related to the telephone. (The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled Bell the rightful inventor.)
In 1912, Arizona became the 48th state of the Union as President William Howard Taft signed a proclamation.
In 1920, the League of Women Voters was founded in Chicago; its first president was Maud Wood Park.
In 1929, the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” took place in a Chicago garage as seven rivals of Al Capone’s gang were gunned down.
In 1945, during World War II, British and Canadian forces reached the Rhine River in Germany.
In 1967, Aretha Franklin recorded her cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect” at Atlantic Records in New York.
In 1979, Adolph Dubs, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, was kidnapped in Kabul by Muslim extremists and killed in a shootout between his abductors and police.
In 1984, 6-year-old Stormie Jones became the world’s first heart-liver transplant recipient when the surgery was performed at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh (she lived until November, 1990).
In 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini called on Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie, author of “The Satanic Verses,” a novel condemned as blasphemous.
In 2013, American Airlines and US Airways announced an $11 billion merger that turned American into the world’s biggest airline.
In 2019, William Barr was sworn in for his second stint as the nation’s attorney general; he succeeded Jeff Sessions, who’d been pushed out of office by President Donald Trump after Trump denounced Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation.