TODAY IN HISTORY - FEBRUARY 25TH

1836 – Samuel Colt is granted a United States patent for the Colt revolver.

1843 – Lord George Paulet occupies the Kingdom of Hawaii in the name of Great Britain in the Paulet Affair (1843).

1866 – Miners in Calaveras County, California, discover what is now called the Calaveras Skull - human remains that supposedly indicated that man, mastodons, and elephants had co-existed.

1870 – Hiram Rhodes Revels, a Republican from Mississippi, is sworn into the United States Senate, becoming the first African American ever to sit in the U.S. Congress.

1901 – J. P. Morgan incorporates the United States Steel Corporation.

1918 – Bobby Riggs, American tennis player (d. 1995) is born.

1919 – Oregon places a one cent per U.S. gallon tax on gasoline, becoming the first U.S. state to levy a gasoline tax.

1928 – Charles Jenkins Laboratories of Washington, D.C. becomes the first holder of a broadcast license for television from the Federal Radio Commission.

1932 – Adolf Hitler obtains German citizenship by naturalization, which allows him to run in the 1932 election for Reichspräsident.

1933 – The USS Ranger is launched. It is the first US Navy ship to be designed from the start of construction as an aircraft carrier.

1951 – The first Pan American Games were officially opened in Buenos Aires, Argentina by President Juan Perón.

1956 – In his speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union denounces the cult of personality of Joseph Stalin.

1966 – Nancy O'Dell, American model and journalist is born.

1975 – Chelsea Handler, American comedian, author, and talk show host is born.

1983 – Tennessee Williams, American playwright, and poet (b. 1911) dies.

1986 – People Power Revolution: President of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos flees the nation after 20 years of rule; Corazon Aquino becomes the Philippines' first woman president.

1987 – Southern Methodist University's football program is the first college football program to receive the death penalty by the NCAA's Committee on Infractions. It was revealed that athletic officials and school administrators had knowledge of a "slush fund" used to make illegal payments to the school's football players as far back as 1981.

2005 – Peter Benenson, English lawyer, founded Amnesty International (b. 1921) dies.

2016 – Three people are killed and fourteen others injured in a series of shootings in the small Kansas cities of Newton and Hesston.