On February 27, 1951, the 22nd Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, prohibiting a President from being elected to more than two terms in office.
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On February 27, 1999, Nigerians elected Olusegun Obasanjo as the country’s President, ending 15 years of military rule under a series of dictators.
On February 26, 1924, Adolf Hitler and several others were put on trial for treason in Munich in connection with an attempted coup. Learn more about the Munich (or “Beer Hall”) Putsch and the subsequent trial of Hitler and his associates.
On February 26, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the National Banking Act into law, creating the American banking charter system. The Act furthermore created the Office of the Comptroller of Currency (OCC) within the Treasury Department. The law was further intended to help raise money for the Civil War by pressing banks to buy federal [...]
On February 25, 1913, the 16th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified, creating the Income Tax. Read more from FindLaw on the history and purpose of the 16th Amendment.
On February 25, 1982, in Campbell & Cosans v. The United Kingdom, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that parents can prevent teachers in the United Kingdom from striking their schoolchildren. At the time of the court’s decision, the UK was the only Western European nation that permitted corporal punishment in schools.
On February 24, 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall of the US Supreme Court ruled in Marbury v. Madison that any act of Congress that conflicts with the Constitution is null and void, thereby establishing the doctrine of judicial review.
On February 24, 1976, the Republic of Cuba promulgated the Socialist Constitution of Cuba. The document solidified the socialist system in Cuba. It was the fifth Cuban constitution since the country’s independence in 1901 and the first since the Cuban Revolution in 1959. The Socialist Constitution was subsequently amended in 1992 and 2002.
W.E.B. DuBois, founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was born on February 23, 1868. Review the W.E.B. DuBois Papers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and released FBI files on DuBois kept because of his affiliation with “communist front groups.”
On February 23, 1903, Cuba leased Guantanamo Bay to the United States “in perpetuity” as part of the Cuban-American Treaty. The United States subsequently used the lease to establish a Naval Base at Guantanamo. With the US invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, a military prison was built at Guantanamo to house prisoners of war [...]
