Today in history

February 28

Mardi Gras

1854
The Republican Party was organized. Their main platform was preventing an end to the expansion of slavery.

1877
U.S. Government seizes Black Hills from Lakota Sioux in violation of treaty.

1937
1,000 rally against war, Hyde Park, London.

1947
Peace Memorial Day, also called 228 Memorial Day, in Taiwan, commemorating a 1947 incident of government oppression.

1958
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was founded in London by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, Earl Russell, and the Rev. Canon (Lewis) John Collins. This was the origin of the peace symbol.

1989
Nevada-Semipalatinsk Movement to Stop All Nuclear Testing was founded in the USSR. Oleg Suleimenov, a popular Kazakh poet, was chosen to lead this first anti-nuclear non-governmental organization on the territory of the former USSR. Nevada-Semipalatinsk ended nuclear arms tests at the Semipalatinsk Polygon. Organizers had been inspired by the large Nevada Test Site anti-nuclear demonstrations and encampments outside Las Vegas in the mid-to-late 1980s.

demo at Semipalatinsk, 1990………………….a Semipalatinsk test

1994
NATO was involved in actual combat for the first timein its 45-year history when four U.S. fighter planes operating under NATO auspices shot down four Serb planes that’d violated the U.N. no-fly zone in central Bosnia.

1994
The Brady Gun Law goes into effect.

2000
Bowing to international pressure, Jorg Haider resigned as leader of Austria’s anti-immigrant Freedom Party. Haider had come under scrutiny for his reported admiration of Hitler when his party was included in a government coalition.