• 1138 - Cardinal Gregorio Conti is elected Antipope as Victor IV, succeeding Anacletus II.
• 1639 - Harvard College is named for clergyman John Harvard.
• 1781 - William Herschel discovers Uranus.
• 1845 - Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto is premièred in Leipzig with Ferdinand David as soloist.
• 1862 - American Civil War: The U.S. federal government forbids all Union army officers from returning fugitive slaves, thus effectively annulling the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and setting the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation.
• 1865 - American Civil War: The Confederate States of America agree to the use of African American troops.
• 1881 - Alexander II of Russia is killed near his palace when a bomb is thrown at him. (Gregorian date: it was March 1 in the Julian calendar then in use in Russia.)
• 1884 - The siege of Khartoum, Sudan begins, ending on January 26, 1885.
• 1897 - San Diego State University is founded.
• 1900 - Second Boer War: British forces occupy Bloemfontein, Orange Free State.
• 1900 - In France the length of the workday for women and children is limited to 11 hours by law.
• 1920 - The Kapp Putsch briefly oust the Weimar Republic government from Berlin.
• 1921 - Mongolia, under Baron Roman Ungern von Sternberg, declares its independence from China.
• 1925 - Scopes Trial: A law in Tennessee prohibits the teaching of evolution.
• 1930 - The news of the discovery of Pluto is telegraphed to the Harvard College Observatory.
• 1933 - Great Depression: Banks in the U.S. begin to re-open after President Franklin D. Roosevelt mandated a "bank holiday".
• 1938 - World News Roundup is broadcast for the first time on CBS Radio in the United States.
• 1940 - The Russo-Finnish Winter War ends.
• 1943 - World War II: In Bougainville, Japanese troops end their assault on American forces at Hill 700.
• 1943 - The Holocaust: German forces liquidate the Jewish ghetto in Kraków.
• 1954 - Battle of Điện Biên Phủ: Viet Minh forces attack the French.
• 1957 - Cuban student revolutionaries storm the presidential palace in Havana in a failed attempt on the life of President Fulgencio Batista.
• 1962 - Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, delivers a proposal, called Operation Northwoods, regarding performing terrorist attacks in Guantanamo Bay, to Secretary of Defense Robert Mcnamara. The proposal is scrapped and President John F. Kennedy removes Lemnitzer from his position.
• 1969 - Apollo program: Apollo 9 returns safely to Earth after testing the Lunar Module.
• 1979 - The New Jewel Movement, headed by Maurice Bishop, ousts Prime Minister Eric Gairy in a nearly bloodless coup d'etat in Grenada.
• 1986 - Microsoft has its Initial public offering.
• 1989 - A geomagnetic storm causes the collapse of the Hydro-Québec power grid. Six million people were left without power for nine hours.
• 1991 - The United States Justice Department announces that Exxon has agreed to pay $1 billion for the clean-up of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.
• 1992 - An earthquake registering 6.8 on the Richter scale kills over 500 in Erzincan, eastern Turkey.
• 1996 - Dunblane massacre: in Dunblane, Scotland, 16 children and 1 teacher are shot dead by a spree killer who then commits suicide.
• 1997 - India's Missionaries of Charity chooses Sister Nirmala to succeed Mother Teresa as its leader.
• 1997 - The Phoenix lights were seen over Phoenix, Arizona by hundreds of people, and by millions on television. They are now a hotly debated controversy.
• 2003 - Human evolution: The journal Nature reports that 350,000-year-old footprints of an upright-walking human have been found in Italy.
• 2005 - Terry Ratzmann shoots and kills six members of the Living Church of God and the minister at Sheraton Inn in Brookfield, Wisconsin before killing himself.
• 2008 - Gold prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange hit $1,000.00 an ounce for the first time.

Births