Events, Births and Deaths Happening on this Date

1778

The American ship Ranger carried the recently adopted Star and Stripes to a foreign port for the first time as it arrived in France.

1859

Oregon was admitted to the Union as the 33rd state.

1895

Oscar Wilde's final play, "The Importance of Being Earnest," opened at the St. James' Theatre in London.

1899

Congress approved, and President McKinley signed, legislation authorizing states to use voting machines for federal elections.

1903

The U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor was established.

1912

Arizona became the 48th state of the Union.

1920

The League of Women Voters was founded in Chicago; its first president was Maude Wood Park.

1929

The St. Valentine's Day Massacre took place in a Chicago garage as seven rivals of Al Capone's gang were gunned down.

1945

Peru, Paraguay, Chile and Ecuador joined the United Nations.

1962

First lady Jacqueline Kennedy conducted a televised tour of the White House.

1979

Adolph Dubs, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, was kidnapped in Kabul by Muslim extremists and killed in a shootout between his abductors and police.

1985

Cable News Network reporter Jeremy Levin, who was being held hostage by extremists in Lebanon, was freed.

1989

Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini called on Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie, author of '"The Satanic Verses," a novel condemned as blasphemous.

1989

Union Carbide agreed to pay $470 million to the government of India in a court-ordered settlement of the 1984 Bhopal gas leak disaster.

1993

The body of James Bulger, a 2-year-old boy who had been lured away from his mother in a Liverpool, England, shopping mall two days earlier, was found along a stretch of railroad track. Two 10-year-old boys were later convicted of murder.

1998

Authorities officially declared Eric Rudolph a suspect in the bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., abortion clinic.

1999

John D. Ehrlichman, President Nixon's domestic affairs adviser imprisoned for his role in the Watergate cover-up that ultimately led to Nixon's resignation, died in Atlanta at age 73.