On this day in 1700, Sweden adopted the Swedish calendar, which skipped February 29 and went straight to March 1.
In 1704, a raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts resulted in 40 people being killed and 100 others being captured by Indigenous forces.
In 1832, Charles Darwin arrived in Salvador, a city in the Brazilian state of Bahia, aboard the HMS Beagle.
In 1878, the U.S. Congress overrode President Rutherford B. Hayes’s veto of the Bland-Allison Act, which ordered the treasury to purchase and put into circulation a specified amount of silver in the form of silver dollars.
In 1878, the U.S. Congress approved the issuance of larger sizes of silver certificates, making it easier to circulate silver-based currency.
In 1893, Stephen Crane’s first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, was published under the pseudonym “Johnston Smith”.
In 1903, Barney Dreyfuss and James Potter struck a deal to purchase the Philadelphia Phillies for $170,000.
On this day in 1909, the United States celebrated its first National Women’s Day, organized by the Socialist Party of America to commemorate the 1908 garment workers’ strike in New York, where women advocated for better working conditions.
In 1922, Great Britain issued the Unilateral Declaration of Egyptian Independence, formally ending its protectorate over Egypt, while retaining authority over military and diplomatic matters, granting the country only nominal independence.
In 1933, on the advice of Adolf Hitler, German President Paul von Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree after a fire in Berlin destroyed the Reichstag building. This decree substantially restricted civil liberties throughout Germany.
In 1947, the February 28 Massacre in Taiwan was the violent suppression of an anti-government uprising by Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang-led government, resulting in the deaths of 18,000 to 28,000 people and marking the beginning of the White Terror.
In 1953 Francis Crick and James Watson identified the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule based on X-ray diffraction research conducted by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins.
In 1960, the United States captured its first Olympic ice hockey gold medal with a decisive 9–4 victory over Czechoslovakia at Squaw Valley.
In 1997, the North Hollywood shootout occurred as a violent confrontation between heavily armed bank robbers and law enforcement officers.
In 2010, the XXI Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, Canada officially ended, bringing an end to a historic international sporting event.
