February 17 in History

Garry Kasparov outmaneuvers IBM's Deep Blue in Philadelphia to claim victory in their six-game rematch. This triumph temporarily halts fears that artificial intelligence would immediately surpass human strategic mastery, proving that intuition and experience still held the upper hand against raw computational power.

The peasants of Dithmarschen flooded their own fields the night before the battle. When Duke Friedrich's armored knights charged at dawn, their horses sank into knee-deep mud. The peasants — farmers with pitchforks — killed over 4,000 professional soldiers. They lost twelve men. Friedrich's army included Swiss mercenaries and heavy cavalry, the best money could buy. The farmers had studied the tide tables. Dithmarschen stayed independent for another 59 years.

Harold Ross promised a magazine "not edited for the old lady in Dubuque." The first issue of *The New Yorker* had 32 pages and lost $8,000. Ross was a high school dropout who'd edited *Stars and Stripes* during World War I. His wife Jane Grant put up half the money from her journalism salary. The magazine almost folded three times in its first year. By 1935, it was profitable. Today it's published continuously for 99 years without missing a week.

Emperor Jovian died in his tent at Tyana after ruling Rome for eight months. The official cause: carbon monoxide from a brazier. The unofficial version: assassination. He'd just signed a humiliating peace treaty with Persia, surrendering five provinces and the fortress city of Nisibis. His predecessor Julian had died in battle against Persia six months earlier. Two emperors, two deaths, both tied to the same war. The army elected a new emperor within 24 hours. They didn't wait for an investigation.

Musa Celebi seized the Ottoman sultanate with military backing from Wallachia's Mircea I, ending years of bloody civil war among Bayezid I's surviving sons. His rise consolidated power over the European provinces but alienated his brother Mehmed, who controlled Anatolia. Mehmed would defeat and execute Musa two years later, reunifying the empire.

Giordano Bruno spent seven years in an Inquisition prison before they burned him. His crime: insisting the universe was infinite, that other worlds existed beyond Earth, that stars were distant suns. The Church offered him multiple chances to recant. He refused every time. At the stake, they clamped his jaw shut with an iron spike so he couldn't speak to the crowd. He died silent. Three centuries later, they built his statue in the exact spot where they killed him.

The wave that hit Ambon in 1674 was taller than a football field is long. 330 feet. Eyewitnesses said it came so fast they couldn't run. The earthquake itself was violent enough to level buildings, but the water did most of the killing. Over 2,300 people drowned. Ambon sits in the Ring of Fire, where tectonic plates grind against each other constantly. The Dutch East India Company had a major trading post there. They recorded the losses meticulously — not out of grief, but because each death meant lost labor and trade disruption. The company's ledgers survived. Most of the victims' names didn't.

Pascual de Iriate's expedition lost sixteen men at Evangelistas Islets in 1676. The western entrance to the Strait of Magellan — where the Pacific meets one of the world's most dangerous passages. The islets sit directly in the path of storms that build across thousands of miles of open ocean. Spanish expeditions knew the route was deadly. They kept trying anyway because the alternative was sailing around Cape Horn, which was worse. The Strait of Magellan had been "discovered" 155 years earlier. Spain still couldn't navigate it reliably. Sixteen men gone in a single incident wasn't unusual. It was Tuesday.

The House voted 36 times over seven days. Jefferson and Burr had tied at 73 electoral votes each—they were running mates, but the Constitution didn't distinguish between president and vice president on the ballot. Alexander Hamilton, who despised both men, threw his weight behind Jefferson. "At least Jefferson has principles," he wrote. Burr never forgave him. Three years later, he shot Hamilton dead in a duel.

French naval infantry stormed the Citadel of Saigon, overwhelming its garrison of 1,000 Nguyen dynasty soldiers in a swift assault during the Cochinchina Campaign. The capture gave France its first permanent foothold in Southeast Asia and opened the door to sixty years of colonial rule over Vietnam. Saigon would become the capital of French Indochina.

The H. L. Hunley sank twice during trials, killing thirteen crew members including its inventor. On February 17, 1864, it sank a third time — but not before torpedoing the USS Housatonic off Charleston. The Union warship went down in five minutes. The Hunley never surfaced. When divers found it in 1995, the crew was still at their stations. Nobody knows what killed them. The sub was intact.