On This Day in History - February 28th - Almanac

Today is Wednesday, Feb. 28, the 59th day of 2024 with 307 to follow.

The moon is waning. Morning stars are Mars and Venus. Evening stars are Jupiter and Uranus.

Those born on this date are under the sign of Pisces. They include French essayist Michel de Montaigne in 1533; chemist/physicist Linus Pauling, twice winner of the Nobel Prize (peace and chemistry), in 1901; movie director Vincente Minnelli in 1903; actor Billie Bird in 1908; actor Charles Durning in 1923; Svetlana Alliluyeva, daughter of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, in 1926; architect Frank Gehry in 1929 (age 95); actor Gavin MacLeod in 1931; dancer Tommy Tune in 1939 (age 85); former race car driver Mario Andretti in 1940 (age 84); musician Brian Jones in 1942; actor Kelly Bishop in 1944 (age 80); former U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu in 1948 (age 76); actor Bernadette Peters in 1948 (age 76); actor Mercedes Ruehl in 1948 (age 76); newspaper columnist/Nobel laureate Paul Krugman in 1953 (age 71); comedian Gilbert Gottfried in 1955; actor John Turturro in 1957 (age 67); celebrity chef Ainsley Harriott in 1957 (age 67); actor Rae Dawn Chong in 1961 (age 63); singer Patrick Monahan in 1969 (age 55); actor Robert Sean Leonard in 1969 (age 55); actor Tasha Smith in 1971 (age 53); hockey Hall of Fame member Eric Lindros in 1973 (age 51); actor Ali Larter in 1976 (age 48); country singer Jason Aldean in 1977 (age 47); actor Kingsley Ben-Adir in 1986 (age 38); actor Sarah Bolger in 1991 (age 33).

On this date in history:

In 1784, the Methodist Church was chartered by John Wesley.

In 1844, an explosion rocked the "war steamer" USS Princeton after it test-fired one of its guns. The blast killed or injured a number of top U.S. government officials who were aboard.

In 1885, the American Telephone and Telegraph Co. was incorporated in New York as a subsidiary of American Bell Telephone.

In 1935, nylon was invented by DuPont researcher Wallace Carothers.

In 1942, Japanese forces landed in Java, the last Allied bastion in the Dutch East Indies.

In 1983, the concluding episode of the long-running television series M*A*S*H drew what was then the largest TV audience in U.S. history.

In 1986, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated on a street in Stockholm.

In 1992, a bomb blast blamed on the IRA ripped through a London railway station, injuring at least 30 people and shutting down the British capital's rail and subway system.

In 1993, federal agents attempting to serve warrants on the Branch Davidian religious cult's compound near Waco, Texas, were met with gunfire that left at least five people dead and 15 injured, and marked the start of a month-and-a-half-long standoff.

In 1994, NATO was involved in combat for the first time in its 45-year history when four U.S. fighter planes operating under NATO auspices shot down four Serb planes that had violated the U.N. no-fly zone in central Bosnia. The action came to be known as the Banja Luka incident.

In 2008, Prince Harry, third in line for the British throne, was pulled from the front lines in Afghanistan immediately after word got out that he was on army duty. He had spent 10 weeks in the war zone.

In 2023, a head-on collision between a passenger train and a freight train between the towns of Tempi and Evangelismos, Greece, killed 57 people and injured another 85.

A thought for the day: "I won't be happy until we have every boy in America between the ages of 6 and 16 wearing a glove and swinging a bat." -- American baseball great Babe Ruth