February 21 in History

Three men who had run the most powerful office in the world received prison sentences for their roles in the Watergate cover-up on February 21, 1975. Former Attorney General John Mitchell, former White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, and former domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman were each sentenced to 2.5 to 8 years for conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury. Mitchell, as Attorney General, had authorized the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in June 1972. Haldeman and Ehrlichman, as President Nixon's two closest advisors, orchestrated the subsequent cover-up, directing the CIA to obstruct the FBI's investigation, approving hush money payments to the burglars, and coordinating the destruction of evidence. Their trial, which ran from October 1974 to January 1975, produced over 12,000 pages of testimony and included the playing of the secret White House tape recordings that had been the key evidence in Nixon's downfall. All three were convicted on all counts. The sentences, however, were served in minimum-security facilities. Mitchell served 19 months at the Federal Prison Camp in Montgomery, Alabama. Haldeman served 18 months at the Federal Prison Camp in Lompoc, California. Ehrlichman served 18 months at the Federal Correctional Institution in Safford, Arizona. The burglars who actually broke into the Watergate, the men at the bottom of the conspiracy, received longer initial sentences than the men who had ordered and concealed the operation. The sentencing completed the legal reckoning for the most senior officials involved in Watergate, though Nixon himself was never charged, having received a blanket pardon from President Ford on September 8, 1974.

Thomas, Finland's first known bishop, resigned in 1245 after confessing to both torture and forgery, ending a twenty-year episcopate that had established Christianity's institutional presence in a region where paganism still dominated daily life. The confession was remarkable for its specificity. Medieval bishops confessed to sins routinely, but Thomas's admission was public enough and serious enough that Pope Innocent IV accepted his resignation immediately. The details of what he forged and whom he tortured have been lost, though historians speculate the forgery involved documents related to territorial claims or tax collection authority, and the torture likely involved methods used against pagans who resisted conversion. The Northern Crusades that established Christianity in Finland were brutal campaigns where the line between evangelism and conquest was functionally nonexistent. Bishops served simultaneously as spiritual leaders and colonial administrators, managing both the salvation of souls and the extraction of revenue from newly converted populations. Thomas operated in this dual capacity for two decades. His resignation did not result in prosecution, excommunication, or loss of clerical status. The Catholic Church simply allowed him to step down. He disappeared from historical records after 1245, his subsequent life entirely unknown. Finland's Christian infrastructure, the churches, the tax systems, the administrative structures that would govern the region for centuries, had been built by a man who admitted to crimes serious enough to end his career but who was never held accountable beyond losing his position.

Ahmed ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, known as "Ahmed Gragn" or "the Left-Handed," had conquered approximately two-thirds of the Ethiopian Christian empire by the time he met a combined Ethiopian and Portuguese army at the Battle of Wayna Daga on February 21, 1543. For fourteen years, his forces had swept through the highlands, burning churches, destroying manuscripts, and enslaving populations in a campaign that brought the ancient Ethiopian state closer to extinction than at any point in its history. Emperor Gelawdewos, a teenager who had inherited a kingdom in collapse, commanded approximately 8,000 Ethiopian troops reinforced by a small contingent of Portuguese musketeers. The Portuguese guns were decisive. European firearms were still unknown in the Horn of Africa, and musket fire devastated cavalry charges that had previously been unstoppable. Ahmed Gragn had obtained his own firearms from Ottoman allies, but at Wayna Daga, the Ethiopian-Portuguese force held superior ground and used their weapons more effectively. During the battle, a Portuguese musketeer shot Ahmed in the chest. He died on the field. His army, which had been held together primarily by his personal charisma and military genius, disintegrated within hours of his death. Ethiopia survived as a Christian kingdom. The Portuguese expeditionary force, which had originally numbered roughly 400 men, suffered catastrophic losses throughout the campaign. Most never returned home. Their intervention preserved Ethiopian independence for another three centuries, until the Italian invasion of 1935.

A sixteen-year-old hiding in a monastery became Tsar of all Russia on February 21, 1613, because the national assembly that elected him calculated that he was too young, too weak, and too politically disconnected to threaten anyone. Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov was chosen unanimously by the Zemsky Sobor, a consultative assembly of nobles, clergy, and townspeople, after a decade of chaos known as the Time of Troubles that had seen three false pretenders to the throne, a Polish military occupation of Moscow, and famine that killed approximately two million people. His father, Patriarch Filaret, was in Polish captivity. His mother, a nun, reportedly wept when told of her son's election, saying she feared for his life. The assembly chose Mikhail precisely because his weakness appeared to be an asset. A boyar faction believed they could control an inexperienced teenager. They were partially right, for a few years. When Filaret returned from captivity in 1619, he became the effective co-ruler, and the Romanov dynasty began consolidating real power. The dynasty Mikhail founded ruled Russia for 304 years, producing Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and the last tsar, Nicholas II, whose entire family was executed by Bolshevik revolutionaries in a basement in Yekaterinburg on July 17, 1918. Three centuries of Russian history began with a frightened boy in a monastery whom nobody thought would matter.

The last foreign army to invade mainland Britain landed at Fishguard, Wales — 1,400 French troops sent to spark an Irish rebellion. They were ex-convicts and conscripts, led by an Irish-American general who'd never seen combat. They spent their first night looting local farms for food and got drunk on stolen wine. The British sent 500 reservists — part-time soldiers, mostly farmers. The French surrendered after two days without a real battle. One reason given: they mistook Welsh women in traditional red cloaks for British Redcoats and thought they were outnumbered. Napoleon was still two years from taking power. This was the revolution's foreign policy.

The Cherokee Phoenix printed in two columns — English on the left, Cherokee on the right. Sequoyah had invented the syllabary just twelve years earlier. Before that, Cherokee had no written form. Now they had a newspaper. They used it to publish Cherokee laws, tribal decisions, and arguments against their forced removal. The U.S. government shut it down three years later. They knew what literate resistance looked like.

The first telephone directory was published by the New Haven District Telephone Company on February 21, 1878, less than two years after Alexander Graham Bell's first successful telephone call. It was a single sheet of cardboard listing approximately fifty names of subscribers in New Haven, Connecticut. There were no telephone numbers. Calls were placed by picking up the receiver and telling the operator the name of the person you wanted to reach. The operator would then physically connect the circuits by plugging cables into a switchboard. The system worked when fifty people had telephones. It would not scale. Within two years, the growing number of subscribers made name-based routing unworkable, and exchanges began assigning numerical designations. The shift from names to numbers fundamentally changed how humans related to telecommunications technology. A telephone stopped being a connection to a person and became a connection to a number associated with a person. This abstraction enabled the growth of telephone networks from hundreds to millions to billions of users. The New Haven directory also established the concept of a public listing of private information: your name and your ability to be contacted, published in a document available to anyone. Privacy concerns about telephone directories didn't emerge for decades, but the tension between accessibility and privacy that defines the digital age began with that single cardboard sheet listing fifty Connecticut residents who wanted to be reachable by a technology most of their neighbors hadn't heard of yet.

Bob Fitzsimmons knocked out Peter Maher in 95 seconds. One punch to the solar plexus. Shortest heavyweight title fight in history. But the fight itself wasn't the story — the location was. Texas banned prizefighting. So promoters built a temporary arena on a sandbar in the Rio Grande. Four hundred spectators took a train to the Mexican border, then crossed on a pontoon bridge. The ring sat in technically Mexican territory. Texas Rangers watched from the American side. They couldn't do anything. Fitzsimmons won the title on a sandbar because the law stopped at the river. Three countries involved, 95 seconds of actual boxing.

Kurt Eisner was shot twice in the head on a Munich street on February 21, 1919, while walking to parliament to tender his resignation as Bavaria's first republican premier. His assassin, Anton von Arco-Valley, was a twenty-two-year-old right-wing aristocrat and former military officer who believed Eisner had dishonored Germany by publicly admitting German war guilt and releasing diplomatic documents proving the Kaiser's government had pursued aggressive policies leading to World War I. Eisner died on the pavement. Within hours, the political situation in Munich spiraled into chaos. A man named Alois Lindner entered the Bavarian parliament and shot two conservative politicians, severely wounding one. The government fled Munich that night. Workers' councils seized control of the city. Radical socialists declared a Bavarian Soviet Republic on April 7, 1919, modeled on the Russian revolution. It lasted twenty-three days before Freikorps paramilitary units, composed of demobilized soldiers and right-wing volunteers, invaded Munich and crushed the republic with extreme violence. Over 600 people were killed in the fighting and subsequent reprisals. The cycle of leftist revolution and right-wing counterrevolution that followed Eisner's assassination radicalized Munich's political landscape in ways that would prove catastrophic. A young Austrian veteran named Adolf Hitler was living in Munich throughout these events. He later cited the brief Soviet Republic as proof that Bolshevism posed an existential threat to Germany.

Japanese kamikaze pilots sank the escort carrier USS Bismarck Sea and severely damaged the fleet carrier USS Saratoga in coordinated attacks off Iwo Jima on February 21, 1945. The Bismarck Sea became the last American aircraft carrier lost to enemy action in World War II. Four kamikaze aircraft struck the ship in rapid succession, igniting fires in the hangar deck that reached the ammunition magazines. The carrier sank in ninety minutes. Of her crew of approximately 860, 318 were killed. The Saratoga, hit the same evening by five kamikaze aircraft, survived but suffered 123 dead and was so badly damaged she never returned to frontline combat. She had been torpedoed twice before, bombed four times, and repaired each time. This was the blow that effectively ended her combat career. Japan had committed fully to kamikaze tactics by early 1945, recognizing that conventional air attacks could no longer penetrate the defensive screens around American carrier groups. Approximately 2,800 kamikaze pilots had been trained and equipped by this point in the war. Between October 1944 and August 1945, they sank or damaged over 300 American and Allied ships. The Bismarck Sea's survivors watched their ship go down while floating in the water, illuminated by the flames. Some carriers that absorbed kamikaze hits burned for days. The Bismarck Sea didn't make it to dawn.

The Brazilians took Monte Castello on their fifth attempt. They'd been trying since November. Three thousand men from the Brazilian Expeditionary Force — the only Latin American ground troops in Europe — finally broke through German positions in the Northern Apennines. They'd trained in the tropics. Now they were fighting in snow. The Germans held the high ground for months, dug into rock and ice. Brazil sent 25,000 soldiers to Italy total. More than 450 died there. When they came home, nobody talked about it. The dictatorship didn't want heroes who'd fought for democracy abroad.