@rh18bold:Today in History

TODAY is Wednesday, February 27, the 58th day of 2008. There are 308 days left in the year.

On this date

In 1801, the District of Columbia was placed under the jurisdiction of Congress.

In 1807, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine.

In 1933, Germany's parliament building, the Reichstag, was gutted by fire. Chancellor Adolf Hitler, blaming the Communists, used the fire as justification for suspending civil liberties.

In 1952, the United Nations held its first meetings in its new permanent headquarters in New York.

In 1973, members of the American Indian Movement occupied the hamlet of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, the site of the 1890 massacre of Sioux men, women and children. The occupation lasted until May.

In 1974, Sweden approved a new constitution that reduced the status of the king to a figurehead.

In 1991, Kuwaiti troops entered Kuwait City after Iraqi forces were expelled by a U.S.-led coalition. US president George H.W. Bush declared that "Kuwait is liberated, Iraq's army is defeated," and announced that the allies would suspend combat operations at midnight, Eastern time.

In 1998, with the approval of the Queen, Britain's House of Lords agreed to end 1,000 years of male preference by giving a monarch's first-born daughter the same claim to the throne as any first-born son.

Thought for Today

"All that is human must be retrograde if it does not advance." — Edward Gibbon, English historian (1737-1794).