On this day …
February 19, 2015
- In 1674, England and the Netherlands signed the Treaty of Westminster, ending the Third Anglo-Dutch War; part of the agreement gave New Amsterdam to England and it was renamed New York.
- In 1807, former Vice President Aaron Burr was arrested for treason in Wakefield, Ala.
- In 1847, the first group of rescuers reached the stranded Donner Party.
- In 1859, Daniel E. Sickles, a New York Congressman, became the first person acquitted of murder on the grounds of temporary insanity; he had shot and killed the son of Francis Scott Key.
- In 1878, Thomas Edison patented the phonograph.
- In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed executive order 9066, which allowed the military to relocate Japanese Americans to internment camps.
- In 1963, the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique reawakened the feminist movement in the United States.
- In 1985, William J. Schroeder became the first recipient of an artificial heart to be discharged from a hospital.
- In 2002, NASA’s Mars Odyssey space probe began mapping the surface of the Red Planet using a thermal emission imaging system.
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