This Day in History
13 Feb 1130
Gregorio de Papareschi elected as Pope Innocent II
13 Feb 1258
Baghdad falls to the Mongols as the Abbasid Caliphate is destroyed
13 Feb 1502
Nicols de Ovando y Cceres new Governor of the Indies sets sail for the Indies with fleet of 30 ships largest-ever fleet to the New World
13 Feb 1503
Disfida di Barletta - Famous challenge between 13 Italian and 13 French knights near Barletta Southern Italy
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First Medal of Honor action
The earliest military action to be revered with a Medal of Honor award is performed by Colonel Bernard J.D. Irwin an assistant army surgeon serving in the firs...
Dresden devastated
On the evening of February 13 1945 the most controversial episode in the Allied air war against Germany begins as hundreds of British bombers loaded with ince...
Galileo in Rome for Inquisition
On this day in 1633 Italian philosopher astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei arrives in Rometo face charges of heresy for advocating Copernican theory...
League of Nations recognizes perpetual Swiss neutrality
The League of Nations the international organization formed at the peace conference at Versailles in the wake of World War I recognizes the perpetual neutrali...
Johnson approves Operation Rolling Thunder
President Lyndon B. Johnson decides to undertake the sustained bombing of North Vietnam that he and his advisers have been contemplating for a year.Called Opera...
Additional troops ordered to South Vietnam
As an emergency measure in response to the 1968 communist Tet Offensive Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara approves the deployment of 10500 troops to cope w...
Downhill skier Hermann Maier crashes in Olympics
Austrian ski racer Hermann Maier makes one of the most dramatic crashes in skiing history when he catapults 30 feet in the air lands on his helmet and r...
Teddy Roosevelt discusses America’s race problem
On this day in 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt delivers a stirring speech to the New York City Republican Club.Roosevelt had just won his second reelection...
Ashley advertises for western fur trappers
Missouri Lieutenant Governor William Ashley places an advertisement in the Missouri Gazette and Public Advisor seeking 100 enterprising young men ...
Long-lost Twain manuscript authenticated
On this day Sothebys announced the discovery of a long-lost manuscript of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.The manuscript was the first half of Twain...
ASCAP is founded
If music did not pay it would be given up. So wrote Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1917. Holmes wasn...
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon gets 10 Oscar nominations
After marking his arrival in Hollywood with a string of English-language films including Sense and Sensibility (1995) The Ice Storm (1997) and Ride with the D...
Cinema burns in Turin
On this day in 1983 74 people are killed when a fire blazes through a cinema in Turin Italy.The Statuto Cinema in Turin had a capacity of just over 1000 peop...
Serial killer strikes in Colorado
A 21-year-old woman named Mary accepts a ride from a man in the ski town of Breckenridge Colorado and is raped and severely beaten with a claw hammer. The att...
Chernenko becomes general secretary
Following the death of Yuri Andropov four days earlier Konstantin Chernenko takes over as the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party the ruling posit...
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