On This Day:
Saturday February 1, 2014 This is the 32nd day of the year, with 333 days remaining in 2014. Fact of the Day: beekeeping Beekeeping is one the oldest forms of food production and probably began around 5,000 years ago in Egypt. A stone relief discovered in Egypt, from around 2500 BC, shows all the stages of honey manufacturing. While honey has been enjoyed by humans for thousands of years, prior to beekeeping it was gathered from wild bees' nests. The oldest preserved records of humans enjoying wild honey are on Spanish rock paintings from around 6,500 BC showing wild honey being gathered from bees' nests.
Holidays Feast day of St. John of the Grating, St. Henry Morse, St. Pionius, St. Bride or Brigid of Kildare, St. Seiriol, and St. Sigebert III of Austria.
Ireland: St. Brigid's Day.
United States: National Freedom Day (commemorating Abraham Lincoln's signing of 13th Amendment).
Events 1587 - Elizabeth I, Queen of England, signed the Warrant of Execution for Mary Queen of Scots.
1788 - Isaac Briggs and William Longstreet patented the steamboat.
1790 - The Supreme Court of the United States met for the first time, with Chief Justice John Jay of New York presiding.
1793 - France declared war on Britain and Holland.
1862 - "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," by Julia Ward Howe, was first published in "Atlantic Monthly."
1884 - The first volume (A-Ant) of the Oxford English Dictionary was published.
1893 - Thomas Edison opened the first film studio, in New Jersey.
1908 - King Carlos I of Portugal and his eldest son, Luís Filipe, were assassinated by revolutionaries while riding in an open carriage through the streets of Lisbon.
1919 - The first Miss America was crowned, in New York City.
1946 - Norwegian statesman Trygve Lie was chosen to be the first secretary-general of the United Nations.
1953 - "General Electric Theater" premiered on TV.
1958 - The United Arab Republic was formed by a union of Egypt and Syria (only until 1961).
1960 - Four black college students began a sit-in protest at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they'd been refused service.
1979 - Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran in triumph after 15 years of exile.
1982 - "Late Night with David Letterman" premiered on television.
2003 - Human remains found in a field in Texas were believed to be those of at least one of the seven astronauts who perished about the space shuttle Columbia when it disintegrated nearly 40 miles above the Earth.
2004 - Janet Jackson exposes her breast on American television during the half-time show of the Super Bowl.
Births 1901 - Clark Gable, American film actor.
1902 - Langston Hughes, American author, poet.
1931 - Boris Yeltsin (President of Russia, 1990-1999).
1942 - Terry Jones, British comedian, screenwriter and actor, probably best known as a member of the Monty Python comedy team.
Deaths 1966 - Buster Keaton, American silent-film comedian.
1981 - Donald Wills Douglas, Sr., American aircraft manufacturer.
1999 - Paul Mellon, American philanthropist and art collector.
2003 - Mongo Santamaría, Afro-Cuban percussionist.
2003 - The crew of the STS-107 Mission (Space Shuttle Columbia disaster), astronauts: Michael P. Anderson; David Brown; Kalpana Chawla; Laurel Clark; Rick D. Husband; Willie McCool; Ilan Ramon.
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