February 21

1828 – The initial issue of the ᏣᎳᎩ ᏧᎴᎯᏌᏅᎯ Tsalagi Tsulehisanvhi  -Cherokee Phoenix – still in publication today, is published; the first periodical to use the Cherokee syllabary invented by Chief George Guess Sequoyah.

1848 – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish The Communist Manifesto.

1878 – The first telephone directory is issued in New Haven, Connecticut.

1885 – The newly completed Washington Monument is dedicated.

1918 – The last Carolina parakeet dies in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo.

1945 – During the Battle of Iwo Jima, Japanese kamikaze planes sink the escort carrier USS Bismarck Sea with the loss of 318 sailors of the 923 crew aboard, the last carrier lost in the war, and damage the fleet carrier USS Saratoga, killing 123 crew members and wounding another 192.

1947 – In New York City, Edwin Land demonstrates the first “instant camera”, the Polaroid Land Camera, to a meeting of the Optical Society of America.

1948 – NASCAR, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, is incorporated.

1965 – Malcolm X Little is assassinated while giving a talk at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.

1971 – Under terms of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, the observance of Washington’s Birthday (often called President’s Day) is moved to the third Monday in February, which can occur from February 15 to the 21st.

1972 – President Nixon visits the People’s Republic of China to normalize Sino-American relations.

1975 –Former United States Attorney General John N. Mitchell and former White House aides H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman are sentenced to prison for their parts in the Watergate burglary scandal.

1994 – CIA counter intelligence officer Aldrich Ames is arrested for selling national secrets to the Soviet Union.

1995 – Steve Fossett lands in Leader, Saskatchewan, becoming the first person to make a solo flight across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon.

2022 – Russian President Vladimir Putin declares the Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic as independent from Ukraine, and moves orders troops into the region starting a general war in Ukraine.