This Week in History – February 14-20
February 14, 270 – Celebrated as St. Valentine’s Day around the world, now one of the most widely observed unofficial holidays in which romantic greeting cards and gifts are exchanged. The explanation for Valentine’s subsequent relationship to the holiday is martyrdom: Claudius, seeking to more easily recruit soldiers, removed family ties by forbidding marriage. Valentine ignored the order and performed secret marriages—an act that led to his arrest and execution.
February 14, 1564 – Astronomer, physicist, and devout Christian Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, Italy. He was the first astronomer to use a telescope and advanced the theory that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system. He was compelled by Rome during the Inquisition to recant the view, and was placed under house arrest until his death in 1642.
February 14, 1803 – Chief Justice John Marshall declares that any act of U.S. Congress that conflicts with the Constitution is void.
February 14, 1809 – Inventor Cyrus McCormick was born in Rockbridge County, VA. He invented the horse-drawn mechanical reaper, a machine that freed farmers from hard labor and contributed to the development and cultivation of vast areas of the American Great Plains.
February 14, 1989 – The first of 24 satellites of the Global Positioning System (GPS) are placed into orbit.
February 15, 1870 – A groundbreaking ceremony for the Northern Pacific Railroad line is held at Northern Pacific Junction, later called Carlton MN. The line to the Pacific Ocean, completed on September 8, 1883, is the first single-company transcontinental line.
February 15, 1905 – Christian author Lew Wallace dies at age 77. Wallace’s famous Ben Hur (1880) was conceived on a train ride while arguing about Christ’s divinity with famous agnostic Robert Ingersoll. It sold more than 300,000 copies in a decade, making him one of the best-selling authors of the 1800s.
February 16, 1937 – DuPont Corp patents nylon, developed by employee Wallace Carothers.
February 17, 1815 – The Treaty of Ghent goes into effect, formally ending the War of 1812. The treaty dictates that the British must vacate posts located on U.S. soil, including those in present-day Minnesota.
February 17, 1889 – Former White Stockings baseball player Billy Sunday preaches his first evangelistic sermon in Chicago. A strong fundamentalist, Sunday preached temperance and opposed “scientific” evolution. By the time he died in 1935, he had preached to an estimated 100 million people, and at least 1 million “walked the sawdust trail” to become Christians at his invitation.
February 17, 1909 – Apache Chief Geronimo died while in captivity at Fort Sill, OK. He had led a small group of warriors on raids throughout Arizona and New Mexico. Caught once, he escaped. The U.S. Army then sent 5,000 men to recapture him.
February 18, 1564 – Michelangelo Buonarroti, the Italian Renaissance artist whose works include the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, dies. At the end, he asks his friends only to remember the death of Christ.
February 18, 1678 – Puritan preacher John Bunyan publishes The Pilgrim’s Progress in Holborn, London, the best selling book (apart from the Bible) in history. Bunyan penned the allegorical tale while in prison between 1660-72 (for preaching without a license) which describes Bunyan’s own conversion process. It begins, “I saw a man clothed with rags…a book in his hand and a great burden upon his back.”
February 18, 1874 – Death in London of William Sandys, English lawyer and the composer of “The First Noel.”
February 18, 1948 – Father Butrus Sowmy of St. Mark’s Syrian Orthodox Monastery in Jerusalem phones John Trever, asking that he examine an old manuscript. It turned out to be the first discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
February 19, 1473 – Astronomer and cleric Nicolaus Copernicus, whose “heliocentric” concept of the solar system became the foundation of modern astronomy, is born in Poland. The Roman Catholic hierarchy condemned the theory (his revolutionary book was banned until 1758), but Copernicus remained a faithful member of the Catholic Church.
February 19, 1569 – Miles Coverdale, translator and publisher of the first complete English Bible (1535), dies. Parts of his Bible were revisions of Tyndale’s, but unlike his predecessor (with whom he once worked), he included no contentious prefaces or notes; instead, he penned an obsequious dedication to the king.
February 19, 1878 – Thomas Edison is granted a patent for his gramophone (phonograph).
February 19, 1942 – The Other Day Which Will Live in Infamy—the internment of Japanese Americans (two-thirds were American-born citizens). Democrat President Franklin Roosevelt issued an Executive Order requiring those living on the Pacific coast to report for relocation. Some 120,000 individuals of Japanese descent were forcibly removed from and lost their homes, stripped of their businesses, and imprisoned behind armed barbed-wire surroundings, without due process, in concentration camps. The House Democrat majority sent a letter of consent to FDR’s order and it was also backed by the Democrat supermajority in the Senate. Republicans Senator Robert Taft of Ohio and Governor Ralph Carr of Ohio led the opposition to the order, calling for racial tolerance.
February 20, 1962 – Astronaut John Glenn became the first American launched into orbit.