Having previously served as a senator and later military governor for the state of Tennessee, Andrew Johnson was chosen by Abraham Lincoln to be his running mate in the election of 1864.

Emperor Diocletian ordered the destruction of the new church in the ancient city of Nicomedia, marking the start of the ‘Great Persecution’ of Christians.

The last invasion of Britain by a hostile foreign force began when French troops under the command of the Irish-American Colonel William Tate landed near the Welsh town of Fishguard.

The Romanov dynasty began after Michael Romanov was elected Tsar of Russia by the Zemsky Sobor national assembly.

The Northern Isles, which consist of the two island groups of Shetland and Orkney, have been inhabited since prehistoric times but were formally annexed by the Norwegian king Harald Hårfagre in around 875 after he…

Pedro Lascuráin began the shortest presidential term in history when he became President of Mexico for less than an hour.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, under his pen-name Mark Twain, had previously published the novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in which the character of Huckleberry “Huck” Finn is introduced for the first time.

On the 17th February 1966 Brian Wilson, the co-founder of the Beach Boys, began the first recording session for the song Good Vibrations at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles.

The DuPont company’s organic chemist Wallace Carothers received a patent for linear condensation polymers, the basis of the material better known as nylon.

On the 15th February 1971, the United Kingdom and Ireland abandoned their old currency of pounds, shillings and pence and introduced a decimalised system.

Pale Blue Dot, the most distant photograph ever taken of Earth, was created by the Voyager 1 space probe.

On the 13th February 1689, William and Mary became co-regents of the Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland after agreeing to the Declaration of Right.

George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue was performed for the first time at a concert by Paul Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra called An Experiment in Modern Music.

On the 11th February 1979 Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, was overthrown as a result of the Iranian Revolution.