February 23: What Happened on This Day in History (High_school Level)?

(Page last edited 10/12/2017)

1. 1836 - The Battle of the Alamo begins in San Antonio, Texas.
2. 1886 - Charles Martin Hall produced the first samples of man-made aluminum, after several years of intensive work. He was assisted in this project by his older sister Julia Brainerd Hall.
3. 1903 - Cuba leases Guantánamo Bay to the United States "in perpetuity".
4. 1905 - Chicago attorney Paul Harris and three other businessmen meet for lunch to form the Rotary Club, the world's first service club.
5. 1927 - German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg writes a letter to fellow physicist Wolfgang Pauli, in which he describes his uncertainty principle for the first time.
6. 1941 - Plutonium is first produced and isolated by Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg.
7. 1945 - World War II: During the Battle of Iwo Jima, a group of United States Marines and a commonly forgotten U.S. Navy Corpsman, reach the top of Mount Suribachi on the island and are photographed raising the American flag.
8. 1954 - The first mass inoculation of children against polio with the Salk vaccine begins inPittsburgh.
9. 1987 - Supernova 1987a is seen in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
10. 1998 - Osama bin Laden publishes a fatwa declaring jihad against all Jews and "Crusaders"; the latter term is commonly interpreted to refer to the people of Europe and the United States.
11. Famous Birthdays: Jean-Baptiste Morin (French mathematician, astrologer, and astronomer), George Frideric Handel (German-English composer), Frederick Wicks (English author and inventor), Allan McLeod Cormackc(South-African-American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate), Michael Dell (American businessman, founded Dell)

For famous birthdays and other daily events in history, visit our Daily Dose Activities.

Click Here for Yesterday in History: February 22

Click Here for Tomorrow in History: February 24

For more history resources on Internet 4 Classrooms, visit our Social Studies and History index. For Pre K-8th Grade Level History and Social Studies Resources, visit our Grade Level Index.