1327 Edward III is coronated King of England.
1587 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, signs the Warrant of Execution for Mary Queen of Scots.
1633 The tobacco laws of Virginia are codified, limiting tobacco production to reduce dependence on a single-crop economy.
1793 France declares war on Britain and the Netherlands.
1861 A furious Governor Sam Houston storms out of a legislative session upon learning that Texas has voted 167-7 to secede from the Union.
1902 U.S. Secretary of State John Hay protests Russian privileges in China as a violation of the "open door policy."
1905 Germany contests French rule in Morocco.
1909 U.S. troops leave Cuba after installing Jose Miguel Gomez as president.
1930 A Loening Air Yacht of Air Ferries makes its first passenger run between San Francisco and Oakland, California..
1942 Planes of the U.S. Pacific fleet attack Japanese bases in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands.
1943 American tanks and infantry are battered at German positions at Faid Pass in North Africa.
1944 U.S. Army troops invade two Kwajalein Islands in the Pacific.
1945 U.S. Rangers and Filipino guerrillas rescue 513 American survivors of the Bataan Death March.
1951 Three A-bomb tests are completed in the desert of Nevada.
1960 Four black students stage a sit-in at a segregated Greensboro, N.C. lunch counter.
1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson rejects Charles de Gaulle's plan for a neutral Vietnam.
1965 Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and 770 others are arrested in protest against voter discrimination in Alabama.
1968 U.S. troops drive the North Vietnamese out of Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon.
1968 South Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu declares martial law.
1986 Two days of anti-government riots in Port-au-Prince result in 14 dead.
BORN ON FEBRUARY 1st
1552 Sir Edward Coke, English jurist who helped the development of English law with his arguments for the supremacy of common law over royal prerogative.
1878 Hattie Caraway, first woman elected to the U.S. Senate.
1901 Clark Gable, American film actor (Mutiny on the Bounty, Gone With the Wind).
1902 Langston Hughes, African-American poet
1931 Boris Yeltsin, The first president of the Republic of Russia and prime minister of the Russian Federation.