February 23 ...

In 1574 France began the 5th holy war against the Huguenots. In 1685 Baroque composer George Frideric Handel was born in Halle in Saxony. In 1822 Boston was granted a charter to incorporate as a city. In 1836 the siege of the Alamo began in San Antonio. In 1847 US troops commanded by Gen. Zachary Taylor defeated Mexican General Santa Anna at the Battle of Buena Vista in Mexico. In 1848 former president John Quincy Adams died of a stroke at age 80; he was stricken on the floor of the US House. In 1861 President-elect Lincoln arrived secretly in Washington to take office after an assassination plot was foiled in Baltimore. In 1868 civil rights activist and scholar W.E.B. DuBois was born in Great Barrington, MA. In 1870 Mississippi was readmitted to the Union. In 1903 Cuba leased Guantanamo Bay to the United States "in perpetuity." In 1945 US Marines captured Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima, where they famously raised the American flag. In 1965 Stan Laurel -- of Laurel and Hardy -- died in Santa Monica, CA. In 1996 the Iraqi News Agency reported that Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel al-Majid and his brother Saddam Kamel al-Majid, a pair of defectors who were also the sons-in-law of Saddam Hussein, were killed by clan members after returning to their homeland. In 1997 scientists in Scotland announced they had succeeded in cloning a lamb named "Dolly."