February 01
1790
The Supreme Court of the United States convened for the first time, in New York City.
1862
Julia Ward Howe’s poem “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was published in the Atlantic Monthly.
1884
The first volume of the Oxford English Dictionary A–Ant, was published.
1946
A press conference announced the first electronic digital computer, ENIAC, was held at the University of Pennsylvania.
1960
Four black college students began a series of sit-ins at a white-only lunch counter in Woolworth’s, Greensboro, N.C.
1968
During the Vietnam War, a Viet Cong officer was executed with a pistol shot to the head by Saigon’s police chief and the image captured in a famous news photograph.
1979
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Tehran after 15 years of exile.
2003
The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it tried to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere after a sixteen-day mission in space. All seven members of the crew were lost.
2004
Janet Jackson’s famous “wardrobe malfunction” occurred at Super Bowl XXXVIII.
2009
Johanna Sigurdardottir takes office as Iceland’s first female prime minister.
Birthdays
Langston Hughes
1902–1967, American poet and central figure of the Harlem Renaissance.
Edward Coke
jurist (1552)
Hattie Wyatt Caraway
U.S. senator (1878)
John Ford
film director (1894)
Clark Gable
actor (1901)
S.J. Perelman
comic writer (1904)
Dame Muriel Spark
novelist (1918)
Boris Yeltsin
Russian president (1931)