12 February in history

7 events that happened on 12 February, from 1502 to 1974.

  1. ✦ Anniversary of the day

    1502 CE 524 years ago

    Castile orders its Muslims to convert or leave

    A decree of Isabella I gave the Muslims of Castile a choice between baptism and exile. Most converted, becoming Moriscos, whose descendants were expelled from Spain in 1609-14.

    Moriscos

  2. 1554 CE 472 years ago

    Lady Jane Grey is executed at the Tower

    The teenage Protestant queen, deposed after nine days in 1553, was beheaded on Mary I's orders following Wyatt's Rebellion. Her husband Guildford Dudley was executed the same morning.

  3. 1809 CE 217 years ago

    Abraham Lincoln is born in Kentucky

    Born in a one-room log cabin near Hodgenville, Lincoln was largely self-taught. As the 16th President he led the Union through the Civil War and helped bring about the end of slavery.

  4. 1809 CE 217 years ago

    Charles Darwin is born in Shrewsbury

    Born on the same day as Lincoln, Darwin sailed on HMS Beagle and developed the theory of evolution by natural selection, published in 'On the Origin of Species' in 1859.

  5. 1818 CE 208 years ago

    Chile proclaims its independence from Spain

    Bernardo O'Higgins formally proclaimed Chile's independence on the first anniversary of the victory at Chacabuco. Spanish forces were decisively beaten at Maipú that April.

  6. 1912 CE 114 years ago

    Puyi, the last Emperor of China, abdicates

    The Empress Dowager Longyu issued the edict of abdication for the six-year-old Puyi. The fall of the Qing ended more than two thousand years of imperial rule in China.

  7. 1974 CE 52 years ago

    Soviet authorities arrest Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

    Weeks after 'The Gulag Archipelago' appeared in Paris, the Nobel laureate was arrested in Moscow and charged with treason. The next day he was stripped of citizenship and deported to West Germany.

    MoscowParis

February

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