#Middlebury
On Feb. 8, 1587, after 19 years of imprisonment, Mary Queen of Scots is beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle in England for her complicity in a plot to murder Queen Elizabeth I. In 1542, while just six days old, Mary had ascended to the Scottish throne upon the death of her father, King James V.- On Feb. 4, 1913, Rosa Parks is born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama. Parks’ name has become synonymous with her refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated bus in 1955.
- On Feb. 6, 1928, a woman calling herself Anastasia Tschaikovsky and claiming to be the youngest daughter of the murdered Russian czar Nicholas II Romanov arrives in New York City. It wasn’t until 1994 that Anastasia’s DNA showed her to be Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish-German factory worker.
- On Feb. 5, 1934, Henry Louis Aaron Jr., the baseball slugger who broke Babe Ruth’s legendary record of 714 homers, is born in Mobile, Alabama.
- On Feb. 3, 1950, Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British scientist who helped develop the atomic bomb, is arrested in Great Britain for passing top-secret information to the Soviet Union. His arrest led authorities to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their subsequent execution.
- On Feb. 9, 1960, Adolph Coors disappears while driving to work from his Morrison, Colorado, home. Adolph, grandson of Coors’ founder and the chairman of the Golden, Colorado, brewery, was kidnapped and held for ransom before being shot to death.
- On Feb. 7, 1984, while in orbit 170 miles above Earth, Navy Capt. Bruce McCandless becomes the first human to perform an untethered spacewalk. McCandless flew up to 320 feet away from the space shuttle Challenger while testing a rocket backpack of his own design.
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