NOW YOU KNOW

• On Feb. 1, 2003,  the space shuttle Columbia broke up during re-entry, killing all seven of its crew members.
• On Feb. 2, 1897,  fire destroyed the Pennsylvania state capitol in Harrisburg.  (A new statehouse was dedicated on the same site in 1906.)
• On Feb. 3, 1959,  rock-and-roll stars Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson died in a small plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa.
• On Feb. 6, 1911,  Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, was born in Tampico, Ill.
• On Feb. 7, 1857,  a French court acquitted author Gustave Flaubert of obscenity for his serialized novel "Madame Bovary."
• On Feb. 8, 1971,  South Vietnamese ground troops launches an incursion into Laos to try and cut off the Ho Chi Minh trail and stop communist infiltration.
• On Feb. 9, 1861,  Jefferson Davis was elected provisional president of the Confederate States of America at a congress held in Montgomery, Ala. (He was inaugurated on Feb. 18.)
• On Feb. 10, 1962,  the Soviet Union exchanged captured American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers for Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy held by the United States.
• On Feb. 13, 1999,  the Senate voted to acquit President Bill Clinton of perjury and obstruction of justice.
• On Feb. 14, 1920,  the League of Women Voters was founded in Chicago; its first president was MaudWood Park.
• On Feb. 15, 1961,  73 people, including an18-member U.S. figure skating team en route to the World Championships in Czechoslovakia, were illed in the crash of a Sabena Airlines Boeing 707 in Belgium.
• On Feb. 16, 1968,  the nation's first 911 emergency telephone system was inaugurated, in Haleyville, Ala.
• On Feb. 17, 1801,  the U.S. House of Representatives broke an electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, electing Jefferson president; Burr became vice president.
• On Feb. 21, 1995,  Chicago adventurer Steve Fossett became the first person to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon, landing in Leader, Saskatchewan.
• On Feb. 22, 1732,  the first president of the United States, George Washington, was born in Westmoreland County in the Virginia Colony.
• On Feb. 23, 1954,  the first mass inoculation of children against polio with the Salk vaccine began in Pittsburgh.
• On Feb. 24, 1761,  James Otis Jr. went to court to argue against "writs of assistance"  that allowed British customs officers to arbitrarily search people's premises.  Citing English common law, Otis declared: "A man's house is his castle."
• On Feb. 25, 1913,  the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, giving Congress the power to levy and collect income taxes, was declared in effect by Secertary of State Philander Chase Knox.
• On Feb. 28, 1849,  the California gold rush began in earnest as regular steamship service started ringing gold-seekers to San Francisco.