February 13
1633 – Galileo Galilei arrives in Rome for his trial before the Inquisition.
1689 – The Convention Parliament passes The Declaration of Right, declaring that the flight to France the previous year by James II constitutes his abdication from the throne, and that William and Mary are co-rulers, king and queen regnant, of England.
1880 – Thomas Edison observes Thermionic Emission, the liberation of electrons from an electrode by being heated.
1913 – Thubten Gyatso, the 13th Dalai Lama proclaims Tibetan independence from the Chinese Manchu Qing dynasty
1914 – In New York City the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers – ASCAP – is established to protect the copyrighted musical compositions of its members.
1935 – A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the baby, Charles Lindbergh Jr. and sentences him to death in the electric chair.
1960 – France becomes the fourth country to possess nuclear weapons, successfully detonating a 70 kiloton weapon in the Tanezrouft region of the Sahara desert.
1979 – An intense windstorm strikes western Washington and sinks a half mile long section of the Hood Canal Bridge.
1981 – A series of sewer explosions destroys more than 2 miles of streets in Louisville, Kentucky.
1991 – Allied forces bomb and destroy a bunker mistaken for a military communications outpost, but actually being used by over 400 Iraqi civilians for shelter, killing them.
2001 – An earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale hits along the southern coast of El Salvador, killing over 900 people.
2004 – The Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announces that white dwarf star BPM 37093, in the constellation Centaurus, with a calculated mass in excess of 500 Septillion – 1024 – Tons is almost totally composed of cubic crystal carbon, also known as diamond.
2011 – Under terms of an 1855 treaty, the Umatilla tribe are allowed to restart their traditional bison hunt on lands just outside Yellowstone National Park.
2021 – Former U.S. President Donald Trump is acquitted in his second impeachment trial, 22 days after already having left office.