This Day in History
In Alaska
• In 1916, the final blast was fired in the tunnel to tap Annex Lake for the Alaska Gastineau Power Plant.
• In 1928, the Lions Club of Juneau was organized.
• In 1931, the Federal & Territorial Building, now the Capitol, was dedicated in Juneau.
In the nation
• In 1779, Capt. James Cook was killed in Hawaii.
• In 1859, Oregon was admitted to the Union as the 33rd state.
• In 1899, Congress approved, and President McKinley signed, legislation authorizing states to use voting machines for federal elections.
• In 1903, the Department of Commerce and Labor was established. (It was divided into separate departments of Commerce and Labor in 1913.)
• In 1912, Arizona became the 48th state of the Union.
• In 1920, the League of Women Voters was founded in Chicago; its first president was Maude Wood Park.
• In 1929, the "St. Valentine's Day Massacre" took place in a Chicago garage as seven rivals of Al Capone's gang were gunned down.
• In 1962, first lady Jacqueline Kennedy conducted a televised tour of the White House.
• In 1993, the body of James Bulger, a 2-year-old boy who had been lured away from his mother in a Bootle, England, shopping mall two days earlier, was found along a stretch of railroad track. (Two boys who were 10 years old at the time, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, were later convicted of murdering James; they spent eight years in detention before being paroled.)
• In 1998, authorities officially declared Eric Rudolph a suspect in the bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., abortion clinic and offered a $100,000 reward.