01 February History
- 1327 - Edward III is coronated King of England.
- 1587 - Elizabeth I, Queen of England, signs the Warrant of Execution for Mary Queen of Scots.
- 1633 - The tobacco laws of Virginia are codified, limiting tobacco production to reduce dependence on a single-crop economy.
- 1793 - France declares war on Britain and the Netherlands.
- 1861 - A furious Governor Sam Houston storms out of a legislative session upon learning that Texas has voted 167-7 to secede from the Union.
- 1902 - U.S. Secretary of State John Hay protests Russian privileges in China as a violation of the "open door policy."
- 1905 - Germany contests French rule in Morocco.
- 1909 - U.S. troops leave Cuba after installing Jose Miguel Gomez as president.
- 1930 - A Loening Air Yacht of Air Ferries makes its first passenger run between San Francisco and Oakland, California..
- 1942 - Planes of the U.S. Pacific fleet attack Japanese bases in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands.
- 1943 - American tanks and infantry are battered at German positions at Fais pass in North Africa.
- 1944 - U.S. Army troops invade two Kwajalein Islands in the Pacific.
- 1945 - U.S. Rangers and Filipino guerrillas rescue 513 American survivors of the Bataan Death March.
- 1951 - Third A-bomb tests are completed in the desert of Nevada.
- 1960 - Four black students stage a sit-in at a segregated Greensboro, N.C. lunch counter.
- 1964 - President Lyndon B. Johnson rejects Charles de Gaulle's plan for a neutral Vietnam.
- 1965 - Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and 770 others are arrested in protest against voter discrimination in Alabama.
- 1968 - U.S. troops drive the North Vietnamese out of Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon.
- 1968 - South Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu declares martial law.
- 1986 - Two days of anti-government riots in Port-au-Prince result in 14 dead.
01 February Birthdays
- 1552 - Sir Edward Coke, English jurist who helped the development of English law with his arguments for the supremacy of common law over royal prerogative.
- 1878 - Hattie Caraway, first woman elected to the U.S. Senate.
- 1901 - Clark Gable, American film actor (Mutiny on the Bounty, Gone With the Wind).
- 1902 - Langston Hughes, African-American poet
- 1931 - Boris Yeltsin, The first president of the Republic of Russia and prime minister of the Russian Federation.