more events on February 11
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1990
South African political leader Nelson Mandela is released from prison in Paarl, South Africa, after serving more than 27 years of a life sentence.
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1975
Mrs. Margaret Thatcher becomes the first woman to lead the British Conservative Party.
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1974
Communist-led rebels shower artillery fire into a crowded area of Phnom Pehn, killing 139 and injuring 46 others.
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1966
Vice President Hubert Humphrey begins a tour of Vietnam.
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1965
President Lyndon Johnson orders air strikes against targets in North Vietnam, in retaliation for guerrilla attacks on the American military in South Vietnam.
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1964
Cambodian Prince Sihanouk blames the United States for a South Vietnamese air raid on a village in his country.
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1962
Poet and novelist Sylvia Plath commits suicide in London at age 30.
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1959
Iran turns down Soviet aid in favor of a U.S. proposal for aid.
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1955
Nationalist Chinese complete the evacuation of the Tachen Islands.
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1954
A 75,000-watt light bulb is lit at the Rockefeller Center in New York, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Thomas Edison’s first light bulb.
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1953
Walt Disney’s film Peter Pan premieres.
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1951
U.N. forces push north across the 38th parallel for the second time in the Korean War.
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1945
The meeting of President Franklin Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Marshal Joseph Stalin in Yalta, adjourns.
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1942
The German battleships Gneisenau, Scharnhorst and Prinz Eugen begin their famed channel dash from the French port of Brest. Their journey takes them through the English Channel on their way back to Germany.
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1939
The Negrin government returns to Madrid, Spain.
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1936
The Reich arrests 150 Catholic youth leaders in Berlin.
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1926
The Mexican government nationalizes all church property.
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1912
Roy Fuller, poet and novelist.
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1910
Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and Eleanor Alexander announce their wedding date–June 20, 1910.
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1908
Phillipe Dunne, screenwriter and director (How Green Was My Valley).
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1907
William J. Levitt, U.S. businessman and community builder who led the postwar housing revolutions with his Levittowns.
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1904
President Theodore Roosevelt proclaims strict neutrality for the United States in the Russo-Japanese War.
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1903
Congress passes the Expedition Act, giving antitrust cases priority in the courts.
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1898
Leo Szilard, physicist, instrumental in the Manhattan Project.
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1858
14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous, a French miller’s daughter, claims to have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes.
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1855
Josephine Marshall Jewell Dodge, American educator, pioneer in the concept of day nurseries for children.
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1847
Thomas Alva Edison, prolific American inventor who jointly or singly held over 1,300 patents.
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1833
Melville Weston Fuller, eighth U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice.
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1815
News of the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812, finally reaches the United States.
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1809
Robert Fulton patents the steamboat.
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1805
Sixteen-year-old Sacajawea, the Shoshoni guide for Lewis & Clark, gives birth to a son, with Meriwether Lewis serving as midwife.
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1800
William Henry Fox Talbot, photography pioneer, produced the first book with photographic illustrations (The Pencil of Nature).
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1535
Gregory XIV, Roman Catholic Pope.
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1531
Henry VIII is recognized as the supreme head of the Church of England.
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660
Traditional founding of Japan by Emperor Jimmu Tenno.