February 21 ...

In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels first published The Communist Manifesto. In 1878 the first telephone directory was issued by the District Telephone Company of New Haven, CT. In 1885 the Washington Monument was dedicated. In 1907 writer and poet W. H. Auden was born in York, England. In 1916 the Battle of Verdun in France began; it was the longest and bloodiest battle of WWI, with more than 200,000 killed and 700,000 wounded. In 1925 The New Yorker magazine made its debut. In 1947 Edwin H. Land publicly demonstrated his Polaroid Land camera, which could produce a black-and-white photograph in 60 seconds. In 1965 Malcolm X was murdered in New York City as he was about to address a meeting of his Afro-American Unity Organization. In 1972 President Richard Nixon arrived in Beijing for a week-long visit that paved the road for normalized US-China relations. In 1975 former Attorney General John N. Mitchell and former White House aides H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman were sentenced to two and a half to eight years in prison for their roles in the Watergate cover-up. In 1989 Czech dissident playwright Vaclav Havel was jailed in Prague for incitement and obstruction. In 1992 for the first time since the Communist revolution of 1949, China welcomed foreigners back to its Shanghai stock market. In 1996 the Space Telescope Science Institute announced that photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope confirmed the existence of a "black hole" equal to the mass of 2 billion suns in a galaxy some 30 million light years away. In 2000 consumer advocate Ralph Nader announced his entry into the presidential race, bidding for the nomination of the Green Party. In 2005 former Presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush wrapped up their tour of tsunami-ravaged nations with a visit to the Maldives.