February 23

303 – Roman emperor Diocletian orders the destruction of the Christian church in Nicomedia, beginning 8 years of persecution until emperor Constantine becomes sole ruler and converts to Christianity.

532 – Byzantine emperor Justinian I orders the building of a new Orthodox Christian basilica in Constantinople – the Hagia Sophia.

1455 – Johan Gutenberg publishes a Bible, printed for the first time with movable type, in his printing shop in downtown metropolitan Mainz, Germany. (which, btw, I have laid eyes on one of the original copies, inside the vault inside the museum in Mainz, just across the river from Wiesbaden where I was stationed for a few years.)

1778 – Baron Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand von Steuben arrives at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania to help to train the Continental Army.

1836 – The Siege of the Alamo begins in San Antonio, Texas.

1870 – Mississippi is readmitted to the Union under Reconstruction.

1883 – Alabama becomes the first state to enact an anti-trust law.

1886 – Charles Martin Hall produces the first samples of aluminum from the electrolysis of aluminum oxide.

1903 – Cuba leases Guantánamo Bay to the United States “in perpetuity”.

1905 – Chicago attorney Paul Harris and three other businessmen meet for lunch to form the Rotary Club, the world’s first service club.

1927 – President Calvin Coolidge signs into law a bill establishing the Federal Radio Commission, later called the Federal Communications Commission.
German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg writes a letter to fellow physicist Wolfgang Pauli, in which he describes his Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Mechanics.

1941 – The radioactive element Plutonium is first produced and isolated by Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg at the University of California, Berkeley.

1942 – The Imperial Japanese Navy submarine I-17 under the command of Commander Kozo Nishino, bombards the Ellwood oilfield, near Santa Barbara, California inflicting minimal real damage and no casualties, but causing mass panic among the population.

1945 – On the Japanese island of Iwo Jima, First Lieutenant Harold G. Schrier, executive officer of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marine Regiment, 5th Marine Division, leads a combat patrol up Mount Suribachi, which, on reaching the summit, raises a U.S. flag, which is later replaced by a much larger flag, that raising being both photographed and filmed for posterity.
On the Philippine island of Luzon, troops of the U.S. 11th Airborne Division, along with Filipino guerrillas, free all 2,147 allied civilian and military  captives of the Los Baños internment camp.

1946 – At Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines, Imperial Japanese Army General Tomoyuki Yamashita, commander of all Japanese forces on Luzon, is executed by hanging for war crimes committed by his troops, which he did not attempt to discover and stop from occurring – which is known as the Yamashita standard.

1954 – The first mass inoculation of children against polio with the Salk vaccine begins in Pittsburgh.

1974 – The Symbionese Liberation Army demands $4 million to release kidnap victim Patty Hearst.

1983 – The U. S. Environmental Protection Agency announces the buy out and evacuation of the dioxin contaminated community of Times Beach, Missouri.

1998 – Near Kissimmee, Florida an outbreak of 15 tornados destroy or damage 2,600 structures and kill 42 people.

2008 – The U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirit bomber Spirit of Kansas crashes on takeoff from Anderson Air Force Base, on Guam, MI, with both pilots safely ejecting, the first operational loss of a B-2.

2019 – Atlas Air Flight 3591, a Boeing 767 freighter, crashes into Trinity Bay near Anahuac, Texas, killing all 3 crew on board.