February 21

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish "The Communist Manifesto," a pamphlet that would go on to shape socialist and communist movements worldwide.

Written as a call to action for the international communist movement, "The Communist Manifesto" argued that history was driven by class struggle and predicted capitalism's eventual overthrow by the working class. Though it had little immediate impact, it became one of the most influential political documents in modern history.

The newly completed Washington Monument is formally dedicated in the U.S. capital.

The Washington Monument's construction had been interrupted for over two decades due to funding shortages and the Civil War before finally being completed using different-colored marble, still visible today as a stripe partway up the obelisk, marking where construction had paused.

The Battle of Verdun begins on the Western Front, becoming one of the longest and costliest battles of World War I.

The Battle of Verdun, launched by Germany with the explicit strategic goal of "bleeding France white," became a symbol of the war's brutal attritional stalemate, lasting nearly ten months and producing roughly 700,000 combined casualties for minimal territorial change.

Inventor Edwin Land publicly demonstrates the first instant camera, the Polaroid Land Camera, which could develop photos in under a minute.

Land's Polaroid camera allowed users to see a developed photograph within about a minute of taking it, a revolutionary convenience at a time when film typically required days of processing. The instant photography format remained popular for decades before digital cameras eventually eclipsed it.

Student protests in support of the Bengali language erupt at the University of Dhaka, a movement later commemorated worldwide as International Mother Language Day.

Bengali-speaking students protested the imposition of Urdu as Pakistan's sole national language, and police gunfire on the demonstrators killed several students, an event that fueled Bengali nationalism and contributed to the eventual independence of Bangladesh two decades later. UNESCO later designated the date International Mother Language Day.

Artist Gerald Holtom designs the now-iconic peace symbol, originally created for the British nuclear disarmament movement.

Holtom designed the symbol, combining semaphore signals for the letters "N" and "D" (nuclear disarmament) within a circle, for a British anti-nuclear weapons march. Deliberately left unclaimed as intellectual property, the design spread globally and became the most widely recognized peace symbol in the world.

President Richard Nixon visits China, a historic trip that began the normalization of relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China.

Nixon's visit to China, arranged through secret diplomacy led by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, ended over two decades of diplomatic isolation between the two countries and set in motion the eventual normalization of formal U.S.-China relations, reshaping Cold War geopolitics.

Israeli fighter jets shoot down a Libyan airliner that strayed into contested airspace over the Sinai Peninsula, killing 108 people.

Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114 strayed off course in poor visibility over the Sinai Peninsula, then under Israeli control following the 1967 war, and was shot down by Israeli fighter jets after failing to respond to signals, killing all but a handful of the 113 people aboard.

CIA officer Aldrich Ames is arrested for spying for the Soviet Union and Russia, one of the most damaging moles in CIA history.

Ames, a senior CIA counterintelligence officer, had sold the identities of numerous U.S. intelligence assets to the Soviet Union and later Russia in exchange for millions of dollars, leading to the deaths of at least ten agents. His arrest exposed one of the most damaging betrayals in CIA history.

Russian President Vladimir Putin recognizes two breakaway regions of eastern Ukraine as independent states, days before launching a full-scale invasion.

Putin's recognition of the Luhansk and Donetsk separatist regions as independent states, granting Russia a pretext to deploy troops there, came just three days before he launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, marking the opening moves of Europe's largest war since World War II.