10 Things You Didn’t Know Happened on Valentine’s Day

10 Things You Didn’t Know Happened on Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day is filled not only with cards, roses and chocolates but plenty of history as well.

Christopher Klein

1. Captain James Cook Is Killed: 1779

Among Britain’s most accomplished explorers, Cook charted lands from Newfoundland to New Zealand to Alaska. In 1778, on his third voyage to the Pacific Ocean, he became the first European on record to visit the Hawaiian Islands and was received with honors.

He encountered a much different reception, however, when he returned the following year. After one of the crew’s small boats was stolen, the captain decided to retaliate, not by seizing a boat of his own, but by holding Hawaiian King Kalaniopuu hostage instead.

A hostile mob surrounded Cook and his men as they reached Kealakekua Bay with the king. When news arrived that the foreigners had shot a local chieftain across the bay, the crowd attacked. Cook shot one man dead but before he could reload, the captain was clubbed on the head and stabbed repeatedly before dying in the knee-deep waters.

2. Battle Of Kettle Creek: 1779

As Cook battled the belligerent mob in Hawaii, his countrymen were embroiled in another fight thousands of miles away. In one of the most consequential battles in Georgia during the American Revolution, 400 patriots launched a surprise attack on a band of nearly 800 Loyalists from North and South Carolina that was camped along the flooded Kettle Creek in the woodlands of Wilkes County. Although outnumbered, the patriot militia scored a decisive victory and helped to quash the British strategy to cut off the southern colonies from those in the mid-Atlantic and New England.

3. Oregon Becomes A State: 1859

With the stroke of President James Buchanan’s pen, Oregon was admitted as the 33rd state in the Union just two years before it would be torn apart by the Civil War. Oregon had spent 11 years as a United States territory, and it would take more than a month for news of its admission to cross the country from Washington, D.C. by a combination of telegraph, stagecoach and steamship.

4. Alexander Graham Bell Applies For Telephone Patent: 1876

In the year of America’s centennial, a lawyer representing Bell filed his telephone patent application at the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C., just hours before the attorney for Elisha Gray filed a caveat announcing his intention to file a claim for a patent for his version of a telephone.

Presented with both applications, the Patent Office ultimately decided on March 7, 1876, to issue the first patent for a telephone, United States Patent No. 174,465, to Bell. Three days later in Boston, Bell successfully transmitted speech over telephone wires when he said these words to his assistant, “Mr. Watson—Come here—I want to see you.” The legal wrangling between Bell and Gray lasted for years.

5. General William Tecumseh Sherman Dies: 1891

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