February 5: What Happened on This Day in History (High_school Level)?

(Page last edited 10/12/2017)

1. 1778 - South Carolina becomes the second state to ratify the Articles of Confederation.
2. 1852 - The Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia, one of the largest and oldest museums in the world, opens to the public.
3. 1869 - The largest alluvial gold nugget in history, called the "Welcome Stranger", is found in Moliagul, Victoria, Australia.
4. 1900 - The United States and the United Kingdom sign a treaty for the Panama Canal.
5. 1909 - Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland announces the creation of Bakelite, the world's first synthetic plastic.
6. 1917 - The Congress of the United States passes the Immigration Act of 1917 over President Woodrow Wilson's veto. Also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, it forbade immigration from nearly all of south and southeast Asia.
7. 1924 - The Royal Greenwich Observatory begins broadcasting the hourly time signals known as the Greenwich Time Signal or the "BBC pips".
8. 1937 - President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposes a plan to enlarge the Supreme Court of the United States.
9. 1971 - Astronauts land on the moon in the Apollo 14 mission.
10. 1997 - The so-called Big Three banks in Switzerland announce the creation of a $71 million fund to aid Holocaust survivors and their families.
11. Famous Birthdays: John Jeffries (physician and surgeon), André Citroën (French engineer and businessman, founded Citroën), Alan Lloyd Hodgkin (English physiologist, Nobel Prize laureate), Robert Hofstadter (American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate), Nolan Bushnell (American businessman, founded Atari, Inc.)

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

Click Here for Yesterday in History: February 4

Click Here for Tomorrow in History: February 6

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.