February 13
1542
Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of King Henry VIII of England, was beheaded for adultery.
1866
The gang that included Jesse James and Cole Younger committed their first bank robbery in Liberty, Mo.
1867
Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz premiered in Vienna.
1935
Bruno Hauptmann was found guilty of murder in the Lindbergh kidnapping case.
1960
France exploded its first atomic bomb.
1974
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who won the 1970 Nobel Prize for literature, was deported from the Soviet Union.
2002
The French judge was accused of throwing the pairs skating decision to the Russians at the Olympics.
Birthdays
Chuck Yeager
1923–, American Aviator.
Sir Joseph Banks
naturalist (1743)
Elizabeth “Bess” Truman
First Lady (1885)
Grant Wood
painter (1891)
Georges Simenon
mystery writer (1903)
William Shockley
physicist (1910)
Kim Novak
actress (1933)
Stockard Channing
actress (1944)