Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/February 28

This is a list of selected February 28 anniversaries that appear in the "On this day" section of the Main Page. To suggest a new item, in most cases, you can be bold and edit this page. Please read the selected anniversaries guidelines before making your edit. However, if your addition might be controversial or on a day that is or will soon be on the Main Page, please post your suggestion on the talk page instead.

Please note that the events listed on the Main Page are chosen based more on relative article quality and to maintain a mix of topics, not based solely on how important or significant their subjects are. Only four to five events are posted at a time and thus not everything that is "most important and significant" can be listed. In addition, an event is generally not posted this year if it is also the subject of the scheduled featured article, featured list or picture of the day.

To report an error when this appears on the Main Page, see Main Page errors. Please remember that this list defers to the supporting articles, so it is best to achieve consensus and make any necessary changes there first.

← February 27	February 29 →

Staging area

Images

Use only ONE image at a time

• 
  Liu Bang
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  Robert Nelson
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  USS Indiana (BB-1)
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  Olof Palme
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  Ranavalona III of Madagascar
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  C. V. Raman
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  Pope Benedict XVI
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  Protesters in Taipei before the February 28 incident

Ineligible

Blurb	Reason
Teachers' Day in the Arab world;	refimprove
870 – The Fourth Council of Constantinople, the eighth Catholic Ecumenical Council, ended.	refimprove
1838 – Lower Canada Rebellion: Robert Nelson, leader of the Patriotes, proclaimed the independence of Lower Canada.	short, needs more footnotes
1844 – A gun on USS Princeton exploded while the warship cruised on the Potomac River, killing six people and injuring twenty others.	Too much uncited
1900 – Second Boer War: The 118-day Siege of Ladysmith in South Africa was lifted after British forces finally broke through the Boer positions.	refimprove
1935 – Working with polyamides to developing a new viable fiber for the chemical company DuPont, American chemist Wallace Carothers invented nylon.	both: unreferenced section
1952 – Vincent Massey was sworn in as the first Canadian-born Governor General of Canada.	refimprove section
1972 – U.S. president Richard Nixon's visit to the People's Republic of China concluded after the two countries issued the Shanghai Communiqué the previous day.	lots of CN tags (10)
1983 – The final episode of the television series M*A*S*H was broadcast in the United States, and became the most-watched television program in history.	refimprove section
1986 – Swedish prime minister Olof Palme was assassinated by a lone gunman in Stockholm while walking home from a cinema with his wife.	refimprove
1997 – In what has been has viewed as a "postmodern coup", the Turkish Military leadership issued a memorandum that eventually precipitated the retirement of Turkish Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan.	unreferenced section
Henry James |d|1916|	lots of CN tags (10)
Marah Halim Harahap |b|1921	unreferenced section

Eligible

• 202 BC – Rebel leader Liu Bang declared himself Emperor Gaozu of Han after overthrowing the Qin dynasty, the first imperial dynasty of China.
• 1638 – The National Covenant was formally adopted in opposition to proposed reforms to the Church of Scotland by King Charles I.
• 1893 – USS Indiana, the lead ship of her class and the first battleship in the United States Navy comparable to foreign battleships of the time, was launched.
• 1897 – Ranavalona III, the last sovereign ruler of the Kingdom of Madagascar, was deposed by French military forces.
• 1928 – Indian physicist C. V. Raman and his colleagues discovered what is now known as Raman scattering, for which he later became the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.
• 1947 – Nationalist soldiers fired on protesters in Taipei (crowd pictured), triggering widespread uprisings and violent suppression in the White Terror.
• 1963 – Chicago alderman Benjamin F. Lewis was murdered in his office by unknown assailants two days after having been reelected.
• 1972 – Japanese police stormed a mountain lodge near Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture, to end a ten-day siege by members of the paramilitary group United Red Army.
• 1975 – A London Underground train failed to stop at the terminal Moorgate station, crashing and causing the deaths of 43 people.
• 1985 – The Troubles: The Provisional Irish Republican Army launched a mortar attack on a Royal Ulster Constabulary station in Newry, Northern Ireland, killing nine people.
• 1997 – GRB 970228, a highly luminous 80-second flash of gamma rays, was detected on Earth, providing early evidence that gamma-ray bursts occur well beyond the Milky Way.
• 1997 – Two heavily armed bank robbers exchanged gunfire with officers of the Los Angeles Police Department in North Hollywood, in one of the most intense gun battles in American police history.
• 2001 – A high-speed train crash occurred near Selby in North Yorkshire, England, killing 10 and injuring 82.
• 2002 – During a period of religious violence in Gujarat, India, mobs of Hindus attacked Muslims in Naroda Patiya and in Chamanpura, resulting in 166 deaths.
• 2013 – Benedict XVI became the first pope in nearly 600 years to resign from the papacy.
• 2021 – Bus drivers in Greater Manchester began an eleven-week strike, one of the longest in British transportation history.
• Born/died this day: | Margaret of Scotland, Queen of Norway |b|1261| Michel de Montaigne |b|1533| Cornelius Gemma |b|1535| Martin Bucer |d|1551| Guillaume Delisle |b|1675| Thomas Cushing |d|1788| Alfred von Schlieffen |b|1833|Pierre Fatou |b|1878| Sjafruddin Prawiranegara |b|1911| Charles Bassett and Elliot See |d|1966| Neville Cardus |d|1975| Anna Muzychuk|b|1990| Koesbini |d|1991 |Yaşar Kemal |d|2015

Notes

• 2002 Gujarat violence/Godhra train burning appear on February 27, so Naroda Patiya massacre/Gulbarg Society massacre should not appear in the same year
• Abaoji (Emperor Taizu of Liao) appears on February 27 also, so Qin dynasty should not appear in the same year either

February 28: Tibetan New Year begins (2025); Kalevala Day / Finnish Culture Day

The first team of S.L. Benfica

• 1874 – In one of the longest cases ever heard in an English court, the claimant in the Tichborne case was convicted of perjury for attempting to assume the identity of the missing heir to the Tichborne baronetcy.
• 1904 – The most successful football club in Portugal, S.L. Benfica (first team pictured), was founded in Lisbon as Sport Lisboa.
• 1914 – In the aftermath of the Balkan Wars, Greeks living in southern Albania proclaimed the short-lived Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus.
• 1939 – In one of the most famous errors in lexicography, the erroneous word "dord" was discovered in Webster's New International Dictionary by an editor.
• 1974 – The British election ended in a hung parliament after the Liberal Party, under Jeremy Thorpe, achieved their highest ever number of votes.

• Hortense Allart (d. 1879)
• William Zorach (b. 1889)
• Christopher C. Kraft Jr. (b. 1924)
• Fernando Cajías (b. 1949)

More anniversaries:

• February 27
• February 28
• February 29