1587 Mary, Queen of Scots is beheaded in Fotheringhay Castle for her alleged part in the conspiracy to usurp Elizabeth I.
1807 At Eylau, Napoleon's Marshal Pierre Agureau attacks Russian forces in a heavy snowstorm.
1861 Delegates from seceded states adopt a provisional Confederate Constitution.
1862 Union troops under Gen. Ambrose Burnside defeat a Confederate defense force at the Battle of Roanoke Island, N.C.
1865 Confederate raider William Quantrill and men attack a group of Federal wagons at New Market, Kentucky.
1887 Congress passes the Dawes Act, which gives citizenship to Indians living apart from their tribe.
1900 British General Buller is beaten at Ladysmith, South Africa as the British flee over the Tugela River.
1904 In a surprise attack at Port Arthur, Korea, the Japanese disable seven Russian warships.
1910 The Boy Scouts of America is incorporated.
1924 The gas chamber is used for the first time to execute a murderer.
1942 The Japanese land on Singapore.
1943 British General Orde Wingate leads a guerrilla force of "Chindits" against the Japanese in Burma.
1952 Elizabeth becomes Queen of England after her father, King George VI, dies.
1962 The U.S. Defense Department reports the creation of the Military Assistance Command in South Vietnam.
1965 South Vietnamese bomb the North Vietnamese communications center at Vinh Linh.
1971 South Vietnamese ground forces, backed by American air power, begin Operation Lam Son 719, a 17,000 man incursion into Laos that ends three weeks later in a disaster.
1990 CBS television temporarily suspends Andy Rooney for his anti-gay and ant-black remarks in a magazine interview.
Born on February 8
412 St. Proclus, Patriarch of Constantinople
1820 William T. Sherman, Union general in the American Civil War.
1828 Jules Verne, French novelist, one of the first writers of science fiction (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea).
1834 Dmitri Ivanovich Medeleyev, Russian chemist, developed the periodic table of elements.
1851 Kate (O'Flaherty ) Chopin, novelist, short story writer (The Awakening).
1906 Chester F. Carlson, physicist, inventor of xerography, the electrostatic dry-copy process.
1906 Henry Roth, writer (Call it Sleep).
1911 Elizabeth Bishop, poet.
1926 Neal Cassaday, writer, counterculture proponent.
1931 James Dean, film actor and 1950s teenage icon (Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden, Giant).
1940 Ted Koppel, television journalist.