February 14 ...

In 270 AD St. Valentine was martyred by Roman Emperor Claudius II. In 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. In 1817 Frederick Douglass was born near Easton, MD (this was the date Douglass adopted as his birth date, as there was no definitive record). In 1849 President James Polk had his photograph taken by Matthew Brady in New York City, becoming the first US president to have his picture taken. In 1859 Oregon was admitted to the Union as the 33rd state. In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell applied for his patent for the telephone. In 1891 Union Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman died at age 70. In 1894 comedian Jack Benny was born Benjamin Kubelsky in Waukegan, IL. In 1895 Oscar Wilde's final play, The Importance of Being Earnest, opened at the St. James' Theatre in London. In 1903 the Department of Commerce and Labor was established. (It was divided into separate departments of Commerce and Labor in 1913.) In 1912 Arizona became the 48th state in the Union. In 1920 the League of Women Voters was founded in Chicago. The first president of the organization was Maude Wood Park. In 1929 Al Capone's hit men lured the members of the Moran gang to a Chicago garage on North Clark Street and murdered them in what is known as "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre." In 1949 Chaim Weizmann was elected as the first president of modern Israel. In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev denounced the policies of Joseph Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. In 1979 Adolph Dubs, the US ambassador to Afghanistan, was kidnapped in Kabul by Muslim extremists and killed in a shootout between his abductors and police. In 1989 the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa edict calling on Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses; also on this day, the first of the 24 satellites of the Global Positioning System was placed into orbit. In 2005 former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated.