February 1

1327 – Edward III is crowned King of England

1552 – English judge, Sir Edward Coke, who helped the development of English law, is born

1587 – Elizabeth I, Queen of England, signs an execution warrant for her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots

1633 – In Virginia, the tobacco laws are codified, limiting its production to reduce dependence on a single-crop economy

1781 – American Brigadier General William Lee Davidson dies in combat at Mecklenburg County, North Carolina

1790 – The Supreme Court of the US meets for the first time

1793 – France declares ware on Britain and the Netherlands

1814 – Lord Byron’s “The Corsair” is published

1851 – English author Mary Shelley dies

1861 – Upon learning that Texas has voted to secede from the Union, Governor Sam Houston storms out of a legislative session-Texas became the 7^th state to secede from the Union

1862 – Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was published in the Atlantic Monthly

1878 – First woman elected to the US Senate, Hattie Caraway is born

1884 – The Oxford Dictionary is first published

1885 – John Taylor, president of the Mormon Church, goes underground to avoid arrest for polygamy

1887 – Harvey Wilcox officially registers Hollywood with the Los Angeles County recorder’s office

1894 – American director John Ford is born

1896 – Giacomo Puccini’s La boheme premiers in Turin, Italy

1901 – Film actor Clark Gable is born

1902 – Poet Langston Hughes is born

1902 – US Secretary of State John Hay protests Russian privileges in China as a violation of the “open door policy”

1905 – Germany contests French rule in Morocco

1908 – King Carlos I of Portugal and his son Luis Filipe are assassinated by revolutionaries in Lisbon

1909 – US troops leave Cuba after Jose Gomez becomes president

1917 – Germany resumes unrestricted submarine warfare after a hiatus caused by US and other neutral countries

1931 – The first president of the Republic of Russian and prime minister of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, is born

1942 – US Pacific fleet planes attack Japanese bases in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands

1943 – Japanese forces begin to withdraw from the Guadalcanal Island

1943 – American tanks and infantry are battered at German positions at Faid Pass in North Africa

1944 – US Army troops invade two Kwajalein Islands in the Pacific

1945 – US Rangers and Filipino guerrillas rescue 513 American survivors of the Bataan Death March

1946 – At the University of Pennsylvania, a press conference announces the first electronic digital computer, ENIAC

1946 – English actress Elisabeth Sladen is born

1951 – In the Nevada desert, three A-bomb tests are completed

1951 – The UN General Assembly condemns the communist government of the People’s Republic of China for acts of aggression in Korea

1960 – Four black students stage a sit-in at a segregated Greensboro, NC lunch counter

1964 – Charles de Gaulle’s plan for a neutral Vietnam is rejected by President Johnson

1964 – Operation Plan 34A goes underway, and South Vietnamese forces under American orders, attack North Vietnamese coastal and island installations

1965 – Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and 770 others are arrested in protest against voter discrimination in Alabama

1966 – Actor, producer and director Buster Keaton dies

1968 – US troops drive the North Vietnamese out of Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon

1968 – Richard Nixon announces his candidacy for the presidency

1968 – South Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu declares martial law

1968 – Eddie Adams takes one of the most famous pictures of Vietnam, when he captured a Vietcong officer being executed by pistol to the head in Saigon

1970 – NHL goaltender Terry Sawchuk has his 103^rd shutout, a NHL record

1974 – Lynda Ann Healy is killed by Ted Bundy.  Bundy will eventually confess to 36 murders and will be executed in 1989

1976 – Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg dies

1979 – The Ayatollah Khomeini returns to Iran after 15 years in exile

1981 – Norwegian composer Geirr Tveitt dies

1986 – Two days of anti-government riots in Port-au-Prince result in 14 dead

2002 – German actress Hildegard Knef dies

2003 – The space shuttle Columbia breaks apart while entering the atmosphere over Texas, killing all seven crew members on board

2004 – The first TV commercial airs for the Ford GT, during the Super Bowl

2004 – Janet Jackson suffers a famous “wardrobe malfunction” during the Super Bowl

2009 – Johanna Sigurdardottir takes office as Iceland’s first female Prime Minister