February 23

A royal order of 23 February 33 BCE, dated “Year 19, which is also Year 4”, grants tax exemptions to a Roman, probably Antony’s general Publius Canidius, though the damaged name has also been read otherwise. At its foot a different hand has written one Greek word, ginesthoi, “let it be done”,…

On the feast of the Terminalia soldiers tore down the church at Nicomedia, in sight of the palace; next day an edict ordered scripture burned and churches destroyed. It was the last and harshest empire-wide persecution of Christians.

Anabaptists won the city council and made Münster a “New Jerusalem”. Under siege by its bishop they expelled unbelievers, held goods in common and, under the tailor Jan van Leiden, crowned king in 1534, allowed polygamy. The city fell by treachery on the night of 24 to 25 June 1535.

Led by Coffy (Kofi), enslaved people in the Dutch colony of Berbice rose and held most of it for nearly a year, outnumbering its few hundred Europeans many times over, until Dutch reinforcements arrived. Guyana keeps 23 February as its Republic Day.

A Prussian officer who spoke almost no English drilled a model company himself and wrote the army’s first common drill manual. The army that marched out in June could fight in line.

Eight days, 8 to 16 March in the West, from a women’s march for bread to the end of the monarchy. Hasegawa counts 1,443 killed and wounded in Petrograd; other estimates run from about 1,300 to 1,500. Very little happened outside the capital: the provinces followed its lead.

Women textile workers on the Vyborg Side walked out and called the men from the metal works to join them. By evening about 90,000 were on strike. 23 February in Russia was 8 March in the West, the date the day is still kept.

In room 307 of Gilman Hall, Glenn Seaborg, Arthur Wahl and Joseph Kennedy chemically identified element 94. Within weeks they showed that plutonium-239 splits like uranium-235, and it became the core of the Trinity and Nagasaki bombs. The discovery was kept secret until 1946.

Glenn Seaborg, Arthur Wahl and Joseph Kennedy chemically identified element 94 in room 307 of Gilman Hall. In March they showed plutonium-239 splits with slow neutrons: a second road to a bomb, bred from common uranium in reactors.

Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of six Marines raising the Stars and Stripes shows the second flag, a bigger one put up to replace the first later that day. Three of the six were killed on the island in the weeks that followed.

At 05:00, after a night attack along the southern wall, the South Vietnamese 3rd Regiment pulled down the Front’s flag, which had flown over the Citadel’s flag tower since 31 January, and raised the yellow flag of the Republic in its place.

The most expensive Olympics yet. Russia topped the medal table, but the McLaren report found a state-run doping programme: urine samples were swapped through a hole in the laboratory wall at night. Russian athletes competed as neutrals at the next Winter Games.