February 1st
1861
Texas voted to secede from the Union.
1893
Inventor Thomas A. Edison completed his work on the world's first motion picture studio, his "Black Maria" in West Orange, New Jersey.
1920
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police came into existance.
1943
One of America's most highly decorated military units of World War II, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, made up of almost entirely Japanese Americans, was authorized.
1946
Norwegian statesman Trygve Lie was chosen to be the first Secretary General of the United Nations.
1958
The United Arab Republic, a union of Egypt and Syria, was established.
1959
Men in Switzerland rejected giving women the right to vote by more than a 2-1 margin.
(Swiss women gained the right to vote in 1971.)
1960
Four black college students began a sit-in protest at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they had been refused service.
1968
During the Vietnam War, Saigon's police chief, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, executed a Viet Cong officer with a pistol shot to the head in a scene captured in a famous news photograph.
1979
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini received a tumultuous welcome inTehran as he ended nearly 15 years of exile.
1979
Newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, whose prison sentence for bank robbery had been commuted by President Carter, left a federal prison near San Francisco, California.
1991
34 people were killed when a US Air jetliner crashed atop a commuter plane on a runway at Los Angeles International Airport.
2003
Rondal Eaton of Indiana and Watertown 34 of South Dakota won the Powerball and both took the cash option of $27,409,943.12.
2003
The space shuttle Columbia broke up during reentry killing all seven crew members; Commander Rick Husband, Pilot William McCool, Payload Commander Michael Anderson, Indian born Engineer Kalpana Chawla, David Clark, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli in space.