On Feb. 22, 1732, the first president, George Washington, was born at his parents’ plantation in the Virginia colony.
In 1788 German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was born in present-day Gdansk, Poland.
In 1819 Spain ceded Florida to the United States.
In 1857 Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout movement, was born in London. Also, physicist Henrich Hertz, discoverer of radio waves, was born in Hamburg, Germany.
In 1879 Frank Woolworth opened a five-cent store in Utica, N.Y.
In 1889 President Grover Cleveland signed a bill to admit the Dakotas, Montana and Washington state to the Union.
In 1892 poet Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine.
In 1924 Calvin Coolidge delivered the first presidential radio from the White House.
In 1934 the romantic comedy “It Happened One Night,” starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, opened at New York’s Radio City Music Hall.
In 1974 Pakistan recognized the independence of its former eastern province, Bangladesh.
In 1976 UN troops handed over to the Egyptians the last 89 square miles of Sinai territory due them as the final phase of the Israeli-Egyptian troop disengagement agreement was implemented.
In 1980 the U.S. Olympic hockey team upset the Soviets at Lake Placid, N.Y., 4-3.
In 1983 Rep. Harold Washington won Chicago’s Democratic mayoral primary, edging out Mayor Jane Byrne and Cook County State’s Atty. Richard M. Daley, on his way to becoming the city’s first black mayor.
In 1984 a 12-year-old Houston boy known to the public only as “David,” who had spent most of his life in a plastic bubble because he had no immunity to disease, died 15 days after being removed from the bubble for a bone-marrow transplant.
In 1987 artist Andy Warhol died in New York at 58. Also, talk-show host David Susskind, 66, was found dead in his New York hotel suite.
In 1993 the UN Security Council unanimously approved creation of an international war crimes tribunal to punish those responsible for atrocities in the former Yugoslavia.
In 1994 the Justice Department charged 31-year CIA veteran Aldrich Ames and his wife, Rosario, with selling national security secrets to the Soviet Union. (Ames was later sentenced to life in prison; his wife received a 5-year prison term.)
In 2002 the Angolan army and government announced the killing of UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi.
In 2004 consumer advocate Ralph Nader entered the presidential race as an independent.
In 2006 insurgents destroyed the golden dome of one of Iraq’s holiest Shiite shrines, al-Askari mosque in Samarra.
