#Middlebury
On Feb. 1, 1884, the first portion of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is published. Originally begun in 1857, it was estimated the project would take 10 years to finish. In fact, it took over 40 years. The OED covers all vocabulary from the Anglo-Saxon period (1150 A.D.) to the present.- On Feb. 2, 1913, New York City’s Grand Central Terminal opens for the first time. The terminal, with a towering white marble facade, took 10 years to construct and more than $4 billion in today’s money. It needed a $100 million restoration starting in 1980.
- On Feb. 5, 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt announces a plan to expand the Supreme Court to as many as 15 judges. Critics immediately charged that Roosevelt was trying to “pack” the court and thus neutralize Supreme Court justices. The Senate struck down the bill by a vote of 70 to 22.
- On Feb. 3, 1959, rising American rock stars Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson are killed when their plane crashes in Iowa. Singer Don McLean memorialized the musicians in the 1972 hit “American Pie,” which refers to “the day the music died.”
- On Feb. 6, 1985, in his State of the Union address, President Ronald Reagan defines some of the key concepts of his foreign policy of supporting freedom fighters around the globe. These included covertly supporting the Contras in their attacks on the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
- On Jan. 31, 1990, the Soviet Union’s first McDonald’s fast-food restaurant opens in Moscow. Throngs of people lined up to pay the equivalent of several days’ wages for Big Macs, shakes and french fries.
- On Feb. 4, 2004, a Harvard sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg launches The Facebook, a social media website he had built in order to connect Harvard students with one another. The previous year, he had created FaceMash, a website where students could vote on which of two randomly selected Harvard women was more attractive, quickly running afoul of both the administration and several women’s groups.
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