TODAY IN HISTORY - FEBRUARY 3RD

1747 – Samuel Osgood, American soldier and politician, 1st United States Postmaster General (d. 1813) is born.

1809 – The Territory of Illinois is created by the 10th United States Congress.

1834 – Wake Forest University is established.

1870 – The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing voting rights to citizens regardless of race.

1897 – The Greco-Turkish War breaks out.

1900 – Governor of Kentucky William Goebel dies of wound sustained in an assassination attempt three days earlier in Frankfort, Kentucky.

1913 – The Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, authorizing the Federal government to impose and collect an income tax.

1918 – The Twin Peaks Tunnel in San Francisco, California begins service as the longest streetcar tunnel in the world at 11,920 feet (3,633 meters) long.

1924 – Woodrow Wilson, American historian, academic, and politician; 28th President of the United States, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1856) dies.

1931 – The Hawke's Bay earthquake, New Zealand's worst natural disaster, kills 258.

1943 – The SS Dorchester is sunk by a German U-boat. Only 230 of 902 men aboard survive. The Chapel of the Four Chaplains, dedicated by President Harry Truman, is one of many memorials established to commemorate the Four Chaplains story.

1947 – The lowest temperature in North America, −63.9 °C (−83.0 °F), is recorded in Snag, Yukon.

1952 – Fred Lynn, American baseball player, Boston Red Sox, and sportscaster is born.

1959 – Deaths of rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa.

1961 – The United States Air Forces begins Operation Looking Glass, and over the next 30 years, a "Doomsday Plane" is always in the air, with the capability of taking direct control of the United States' bombers and missiles in the event of the destruction of the SAC's command post.

1966 – The unmanned Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft makes the first controlled rocket-assisted landing on the Moon.

1967 – Ronald Ryan, the last person to be executed in Australia, is hanged in Pentridge Prison, Melbourne.

1971 – New York Police Officer Frank Serpico is shot during a drug bust in Brooklyn and survives to later testify against police corruption. Many believe the incident proves that NYPD officers tried to kill him.

1984 – John Buster and the research team at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center announce history's first embryo transfer, from one woman to another resulting in a live birth.

1995 – Astronaut Eileen Collins becomes the first woman to pilot the Space Shuttle as mission STS-63 gets underway from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.