February 20
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Featured Event
© North Wind Picture Archives
Congress bans dueling in Washington, D.C.
On this day in 1839, U.S. Congress made dueling in Washington, D.C., a felony punishable by up to 10 years of hard labor. The tipping point for the bill had come in 1838: Kentucky Rep. William Graves and Maine Rep. Jonathan Cilley had dueled, which had led to Cilley’s death by Grave’s hand. [Read today’s edition of Today in History > >]
Featured Biography
Featured Biography
Famous Birthdays
More on February 20
© Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response (NASA),Visible Earth
2016
Cyclone Winston made a second landfall on Fiji’s principal island of Viti Levu, causing widespread damage. The storm, which killed 44 people, is the most powerful tropical cyclone on record in the Southern Hemisphere and the most costly natural disaster to have ever affected the country.
Frank Martin/AP Images
2005
Hunter S. Thompson—who created the genre known as gonzo journalism, a highly personal style of reporting that made him a counterculture icon—died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. [Read about Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and eight other countercultural books.]
© Sovfoto/Eastfoto
1986
The Soviet Union launched the core module of the space station Mir, which remained active as a space laboratory for more than 14 years. [Take our astronomy and space quiz.]
Frank Wolfe/Lyndon B. Johnson Library Photo
1976
The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization held its final exercise in Manila. Primarily designed by the U.S. in the name of halting communist expansion, the organization also helped the U.S. justify its operations in Vietnam. (The organization formally ended on June 30, 1977). [Sort fact from fiction in our quiz about Southeast Asia.]
NASA
1962
John H. Glenn, Jr. became the first American to orbit Earth, doing so three times. He was the oldest of seven astronauts selected by NASA for Project Mercury spaceflight training and later served as a U.S. senator.
W.F. Foshag/U.S. Geological Survey ( Foshag, W.F. 5 fwf00005)
1943
After several weeks of earthquakes, the volcano Paricutín in Michoacán state, Mexico, began erupting. It would continue erupting for nine years, burying villages and destroying farmland. No deaths, however, were recorded as a direct result of the eruption. [Watch footage of Paricutín’s volcanic eruption.]
Kip Evans/Alamy
1929
U.S. Congress formally accepted the deeds of cession of eastern Samoa, forming American Samoa. [Sort fact from fiction in our islands of the world quiz.]
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
1909
Italian author Filippo Tommaso Marinetti coined the term Futurism in the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro. The term captured the vitality and restlessness of modern life. [Test your knowledge of Futurism.]
Ansel Adams
1902
Ansel Adams, one of the foremost landscape photographers of the 20th century, was born in San Francisco. [Read Ansel Adams’s Britannica essay on “Photographic Art”]
Physicistjedi
1872
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City opened to the public.