February21
Today is
International Mother Language Day, promoting awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism. PFFT. You want linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism go to Wal-Mart.
Events
1613 Mikhail I is unanimously elected Tsar by a national assembly, beginning the Romanov dynasty of Imperial Russia.
1804 The first self-propelling steam locomotive makes its outing at the Pen-y-Darren Ironworks in Wales.
1828 Initial issue of the Cherokee Phoenix is the first periodical to use the Cherokee syllabary invented by Sequoyah.
1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish The Communist Manifesto.
1878 The first telephone directory is issued in New Haven, Connecticut.
1885 The newly completed Washington Monument is dedicated.
1896 An Englishman raised in Australia, Bob Fitzsimmons, fought an Irishman, Peter Maher, in an American promoted event which technically took place in Mexico, winning the 1896 World Heavyweight Championship in boxing.
1916 World War I: In France, the Battle of Verdun begins.
1925 The New Yorker publishes its first issue.
1947 In New York City, Edwin Land demonstrates the first "instant camera", the Polaroid Land Camera, to a meeting of the Optical Society of America.
1948 NASCAR is incorporated.
1958 The CND symbol, aka peace symbol, commissioned by the Direct Action Committee in protest against the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, is designed and completed by Gerald Holtom.
1965 Malcolm X is assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City.
1971 The Convention on Psychotropic Substances is signed at Vienna.
1972 United States President Richard Nixon visits the People's Republic of China to normalize Sino-American relations.
1975 Watergate scandal: Former United States Attorney General John N. Mitchell and former White House aides H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman are sentenced to prison.
1995 Steve Fossett lands in Leader, Saskatchewan, Canada becoming the first person to make a solo flight across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon.
Births
1794 Antonio Lσpez de Santa Anna; 1893 Andrιs Segovia; 1903 Anaοs Nin; 1915 Ann Sheridan; 1924 Robert Mugabe; 1925 Sam Peckinpah; 1927 Erma Bombeck; 1933 Nina Simone; 1934 Rue McClanahan; 1943 David Geffen; 1946 Tyne Daly; 1946 Alan Rickman; 1949 Larry Drake; 1955 Kelsey Grammer; 1958 Mary Chapin Carpenter; 1961 Christopher Atkins; 1963 William Baldwin; 1964 Mark Kelly, Scott Kelly; 1977 Kevin Rose; 1979 Jennifer Love Hewitt; 1986 Charlotte Church; 1987 Ellen Page; 1996 Sophie Turner
Deaths
1965 Malcolm X; 1974 Tim Horton; 2008 Ben Chapman (The Creature in The Creature From The Black Lagoon)