On Feb. 15, 1564, astronomer Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, Italy.
In 1764 the city of St. Louis was established.
In 1820 suffragist Susan B. Anthony was born in Adams, Mass.
In 1842 a private mail service in New York introduced the first adhesive postage stamps.
In 1879 President Rutherford B. Hayes signed a bill allowing female lawyers to argue cases before the Supreme Court.
In 1898 the U.S. battleship Maine mysteriously blew up in Havana Harbor, bringing the United States closer to war with Spain.
In 1933 President-elect Franklin Roosevelt escaped an assassination attempt in Miami that killed Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak.
In 1942 the British colony Singapore surrendered to the Japanese during World War II.
In 1944 U.S. troops completed their reconquest of the Solomon Islands.
In 1954 cartoonist Matt Groening, creator of “The Simpsons,” was born in Portland, Ore.
In 1961, 73 people, including an 18-member U.S. figure skating team en route to Czechoslovakia, were killed in the crash of a Sabena Airlines Boeing 707 in Belgium.
In 1965 Canada’s new maple-leaf flag was unfurled in Ottawa.
In 1971 Britain and Ireland switched to a system of decimal currency.
In 1980 speed skater Eric Heiden won the first of five gold medals at the Winter Olympic Games in Lake Placid, N.Y.
In 1996 actor McLean Stevenson, who played Lt. Col. Henry Blake on the TV sitcom “M*A*S*H,” died in Los Angeles at 66.
In 2000 Fox aired “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?”–a television special that drew huge ratings and wide notoriety.
In 2002 broadcast journalist Howard K. Smith died at 87 in Bethesda, Md.
In 2004 Dale Earnhardt Jr. won the Daytona 500 on the same track where his father was killed three years earlier.
In 2005 defrocked priest Paul Shanley was sentenced in Boston to 12 to 15 years in prison on child rape charges.
In 2006 testifying before the Senate, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff acknowledged delayed aid and fumbled coordination in the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.
