History of the Day for:
February 14
- 1859: Oregon was admitted to the Union as the 33rd state.
- 1872: The first state bird refuge was authorized in Lake Merritt, Calif.
- 1876: Inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray applied separately for patents related to the telephone. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled Bell the rightful inventor.
- 1895: Oscar Wilde's final play, "The Importance of Being Earnest," opened at the St. James Theatre in London.
- 1903: The Department of Commerce and Labor was established.
- 1912: Arizona was admitted to the Union as the 48th state.
- 1919: The United Parcel Service was founded.
- 1920: The League of Women Voters was founded in Chicago. Its first president was Maude Wood Park.
- 1924: The IBM Corporation was founded by Thomas Watson.
- 1929: The "St. Valentine's Day Massacre" took place in a Chicago garage as seven rivals of Al Capone's gang were gunned down.
- 1939: Victor Fleming replaced George Cukor as director for "Gone With The Wind."
- 1942: Battle of Pasir Panjang contributes to the fall of Singapore.
- 1943: World War II: Rostov-on-Don, Russia is liberated.
- 1943: World War II: Tunisia Campaign – General Hans-Jurgen von Arnim's Fifth Panzer Army launches a concerted attack against Allied positions in Tunisia. :
- 1944 World War II: Anti-Japanese revolt on Java.
- 1945: World War II: On the first day of the bombing of Dresden, the British Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Forces begin fire-bombing Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony.
- 1945: World War II: Prague is bombed probably due to a mistake in the orientation of the pilots bombing Dresden.
- 1945: President Franklin D. Roosevelt meets with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia aboard the USS Quincy, officially starting the U.S.-Saudi diplomatic relationship.
- 1945: World War II: Mostar is liberated by Yugoslav partisans.
- 1946: The Bank of England is nationalized.
- 1962: First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy hosted a televised tour of the White House that showcased the building's interior restoration.
- 1971: President Richard Nixon installed a secret taping system at the White House.
- 1978: The first "micro on a chip" was patented by Texas Instruments.
- 1988: At age 50, Bobby Allison became the oldest driver to win the Daytona 500.
- 1989: Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini called on Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie, author of the novel "The Satanic Verses," a work condemned as blasphemous throughout the Islamic world.
- 1989: Union Carbide agrees to pay $470 million to the Indian government for damages it caused in the 1984 Bhopal Disaster.
- 1989: The first of 24 satellites of the Global Positioning System are placed into orbit.
- 1990: 92 people are killed aboard Indian Airlines Flight 605 at Bangalore, India.
- 1996: China launches a Long March 3 rocket, carrying the Intelsat 708 satellite. The rocket flies off course 3 seconds after liftoff and crashes into a rural village.
- 1998: Authorities in the United States announce that Eric Robert Rudolph is a suspect in an Alabama abortion clinic bombing.
- 2000: The spacecraft NEAR Shoemaker enters orbit around asteroid 433 Eros, the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid.
- 2002: Tullaghmurray Lass sinks off the coast of Kilkeel, County Down, Northern Ireland killing three members of the same family on board.
- 2004: In a suburb of Moscow, Russia, the roof of the Transvaal water park collapses, killing more than 25 people, and wounding more than 100 others.
- 2005: Seven people are killed and 151 wounded in a series of bombings by suspected Al-Qaeda-linked militants that hit the Philippines' Makati financial district in Metro Manila, Davao City, and General Santos City.
- 2008: Northern Illinois University shooting: a gunman opened fire in a lecture hall of the DeKalb County, Illinois university resulting in 6 fatalities (including gunman) and 18 injuries.