Moments in time – Feb. 7, 2018

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• On Feb. 21, 1828, the first printing press designed to use the newly invented Cherokee alphabet arrives at New Echota, Georgia. Within months, the first Indian language newspaper in history, The Cherokee Phoenix, was published.
• On Feb. 25, 1890, Vlacheslav Mikhaylovich Skryabin, who took the revolutionary name Molotov, is born in Russia. He invented the famous “Molotov cocktail,” a flammable liquid-filled glass bottle stuffed with a lighted rag and thrown at the enemy.
• On Feb. 20, 1902, famed Western photographer Ansel Adams is born in San Francisco. Adams founded “Group f/64,” which was dedicated to promoting deep-focus photography and the use of “straight” images free from darkroom trickery.
• On Feb. 24, 1917, British authorities give the U.S. a copy of an official coded message from Germany that Mexico should be asked to enter a war against the U.S. as a German ally. In return, Germany promised to restore to Mexico the lost territories of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.
• On Feb. 19, 1942, right after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal of any or all people “as deemed necessary or desirable.” By June, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast were relocated to remote internment camps.
• On Feb. 23, 1954, a group of children in Pennsylvania receive the first injections of the new polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk. Although highly successful, a single faulty batch of the vaccine caused a sudden outbreak of 200 cases.
• On Feb. 22, 1980, the underdog U.S. hockey team, made up of college students, defeats the four-time defending gold-medal winning Soviet team at the Olympic Winter Games in New York. The Soviet squad fell to the American team 4-3 before a frenzied crowd of 10,000 spectators.

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