February 17 ...

In 1621 Myles Standish was appointed as the first commander of Plymouth colony. In 1801 the US House of Representatives broke an electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, electing Jefferson president; Burr became vice president. In 1817 a street in Baltimore became the first to be lighted with gas from America's first gas company. In 1843 Aaron Montgomery Ward, creator of the mail-order business, was born in Chatham, NJ. In 1864 the Confederate vessel H. L. Hunley became the first submarine to engage and sink a warship, the Union's USS Housatonic. In 1865 Columbia, SC, burned as the Confederates evacuated and Union forces moved in. (It's not known which side set the blaze.) In 1924 swimmer Johnny Weissmuller set a world record in the 100-yard freestyle, with a time of 52-2/5 seconds in Miami, FL. In 1933 the Blaine Act, which would repeal Prohibition, passed the US Senate, and was later ratified as the 21st Amendment in December of that same year; also on this day, Newsweek was first published. In 1944 the World War II Battle of Eniwetok Atoll began. US forces won the battle on February 22, 1944. In 1947 the Voice of America began broadcasting to the Soviet Union. In 1964 the Supreme Court ruled that congressional districts within each state had to be roughly equal in population. In 1972 President Nixon departed on his historic trip to China. In 2005 President Bush named John Negroponte, the US ambassador to Iraq, as the government's first national intelligence director; also on this day, Iraq's electoral commission certified the results of the Jan. 30 elections and allocated 140 of 275 National Assembly seats to the United Iraqi Alliance, giving the Shiite-dominated party a majority in the new parliament.