1567 Lord Darnley, the second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, is murdered in his sick-bed in a house in Edinburgh when the house blows up.
1799 The USS Constellation captures the French frigate Insurgente off the West Indies.
1825 The House of Representatives elects John Quincy Adams, sixth U.S. President.
1861 Jefferson F. Davis is elected president of the Confederate States of America.
1864 Union General George Armstrong Custer marries Elizabeth Bacon in their hometown of Monroe, Mich.
1904 Japanese troops land near Seoul, Korea, after disabling two Russian cruisers.
1909 France agrees to recognize German economic interests in Morocco in exchange for political supremacy.
1916 Conscription begins in Great Britain as the Military Service Act becomes effective.
1922 The U.S. Congress establishes the World War Foreign Debt Commission.
1942 Chiang Kai-shek meets with Sir Stafford Cripps, the British viceroy in India.
1943 The Red Army takes back Kursk 15 months after it fell to the Germans.
1946 Stalin announces the new five-year plan for the Soviet Union, calling for production boosts of 50 percent.
1951 Actress Greta Garbo gets U.S. citizenship.
1953 The French destroy six Viet Minh war factories hidden in the jungles of Vietnam.
1964 The U.S. embassy in Moscow is stoned by Chinese and Vietnamese students.
1978 Canada expels 11 Soviets in spying case.
1994 Nelson Mandela becomes the first black president of South Africa.
Born on February 9
1773 William Henry Harrison, ninth U.S. President and the first to die in office.
1814 Samuel Tilden, philanthropist.
1819 Lydia E. Pinkham, patent-medicine maker and entrepeneur.
1846 William Maybach, German engineer, designed the first Mercedes automobile.
1871 Howard T. Ricketts, pathologist.
1874 Amy Lowell, poet.
1880 James Stephens, Irish writer (The Charwoman's Daughter, The Crock of Gold).
1909 Dean Rusk, Secretary of State under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
1923 Brendan Behan, Irish playwright and poet (The Hostage, The Quare Fellow).
1944 Alice Walker, Pulitzer prize winning author (The Color Purple).