February 13

February 13 is the 44th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 321 days remaining, 322 in leap years.

Events

1130 - Innocent II is voted Pope.

1542 - Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII of England, is executed for adultery.

1575 - Henry III of France is crowned at Reims

1633 - Galileo Galilei arrives in Rome for his trial before the Inquisition.

1635 - The first public school in the U.S, Boston Latin Public School, is founded.

1668 - Spain recognizes Portugal as an independent nation.

1689 - William and Mary are proclaimed co-rulers of England.

1692 - Massacre of Glencoe : About 78 Macdonalds at Glen Coe, Scotland are killed early in the morning for not promptly pledging allegiance to the new king, William of Orange.

1815 - The Cambridge Union Society founded.

1866 - Jesse James robs his first bank.

1880 - Thomas Edison observes the Edison effect.

1881 - The feminist newspaper La Citoyenne is first published in Paris by activist Hubertine Auclert.

1894 - Auguste and Louis Lumière patent the Cinematographe, a combination movie camera and projector.

1914 - Copyright: In New York City the ASCAP (for American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) is established to protect the copyrighted musical compositions of its members.

1920 - The Negro National League is formed.

1934 - The Soviet steamship Cheliuskin sinks in the Arctic Ocean.

1935 - A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh.

1945 - World War II: Soviet Union forces capture Budapest, Hungary from the Nazis.

1945 - World War II: The Royal Air Force bombers were dispatched to Dresden, Germany (see Bombing of Dresden in World War II).

1955 - Israel obtains 4 of the 7 Dead Sea scrolls.

1960 - Nuclear testing: France tests its first atomic bomb.

1971 - Vietnam War: Backed by American air and artillery support, South Vietnamese troops invade Laos.

1974 - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1970, is exiled from the Soviet Union.

1978 - Hilton bombing: a bomb explodes in a refuse truck outside the Hilton Hotel in Sydney, Australia, killing two refuse collectors and a policeman.

1979 - The intense February 13, 1979 Windstorm strikes western Washington and sinks a 1/2-mile-long section of the Hood Canal Bridge

1984 - Konstantin Chernenko succeeds the late Yuri Andropov as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

1988 - 1988 Winter Olympic Games open in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

1990 - German reunification: An agreement is reached for a two-stage plan to reunite Germany.

1991 - Gulf War: Two laser-guided "smart bombs" destroy an underground bunker in Baghdad killing hundreds of Iraqis civilians.

1996 - The Nepalese People's War began.

1997 - Tune-up and repair work on the Hubble Space Telescope is started by astronauts from the Space Shuttle Discovery.

2000 - The last original Peanuts comic strip appears in newspapers a day after Charles M. Schulz died.

2001 - An earthquake measuring 6.6 on the Richter Scale hits El Salvador, killing at least 400.

2002 - Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom gives former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani an honorary knighthood.

2004 - Travis Metcalfe from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics discovers the universe's largest known diamond, white dwarf star BPM 37093.