February 13 ...

In 1542 the fifth wife of England's King Henry VIII, Catherine Howard, was executed for adultery. In 1633 Galileo arrived in Rome for his trial before the inquisition for professing his belief that the Earth revolved around the sun. In 1635 the Boston Public Latin School was established. It was the first public school building in the United States. In 1741 Pennsylvanian Andrew Bradford published the first American magazine, called The American Magazine, or A Monthly View of the Political State of the British Colonies. Bradford introduced his American Magazine just days before Benjamin Franklin founded his periodical called General Magazine in Philadelphia. In 1795 the University of North Carolina became the first US state university to admit students with the arrival of Hinton James, who was the only student on campus for two weeks. In 1883 German composer Richard Wagner died of a heart attack in the Palazzo Vendramin on the Grand Canal, Venice, Italy. In 1892 painter Grant Wood was born in Anamosa, IA. In 1920 the League of Nations recognized the perpetual neutrality of Switzerland. In 1923 Chuck Yeager was born in Myra, WV. In 1935 a jury in Flemington, NJ, found Bruno Richard Hauptmann guilty of first-degree murder in the kidnap-death of the son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh. (Hauptmann was later executed.) In 1945 the Soviet Army captured Budapest, Hungary, from the Germans; also on this day, Allied planes began bombing the German city of Dresden. In 1960 France exploded its first atomic bomb. In 1974 dissident Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the USSR. In 1984 Konstantin Chernenko was chosen to be general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee, succeeding the late Yuri Andropov. In 1990 at a conference in Ottawa, the US and its European allies forged agreement with the Soviet Union and East Germany on a two-stage formula to reunite Germany. In 2000 Charles M. Schulz's last original Sunday Peanuts comic strip appeared in newspapers. Schulz had died the day before.