February 26

The Roman Catholic Church formally bans Galileo Galilei from teaching or defending the Copernican view that the Earth orbits the Sun.

The Catholic Church's ban followed a formal inquiry into Galileo's astronomical writings, warning him not to teach or defend heliocentrism as established fact. He was later tried and condemned more severely in 1633 after publishing a book seen as defying the earlier warning, resulting in house arrest for the rest of his life.

Napoleon Bonaparte escapes his exile on the island of Elba, beginning the dramatic hundred-day return to power that ended at Waterloo.

Napoleon's escape from his exile on the small Mediterranean island of Elba began the dramatic period known as the Hundred Days, during which he rapidly regathered political and military support in France before his final defeat by allied forces at the Battle of Waterloo.

President Woodrow Wilson signs legislation establishing Grand Canyon National Park, protecting one of America's most iconic natural landmarks.

Wilson's designation of Grand Canyon National Park capped decades of conservation advocacy, including earlier efforts by President Theodore Roosevelt to protect the site as a national monument. It remains one of the most visited and iconic national parks in the United States.

Adolf Hitler secretly orders the reformation of the Luftwaffe, Germany's air force, in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles.

Hitler's secret order to rebuild the Luftwaffe, explicitly banned under the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I, was part of a broader pattern of German military rearmament that Western powers largely failed to meaningfully counter in the years leading up to World War II.

A group of young nationalist Japanese army officers attempts a coup in Tokyo, assassinating several government ministers in what became known as the February 26 Incident.

The February 26 Incident saw a faction of young nationalist army officers attempt to purge Japan's government of perceived corrupt influences, briefly seizing central Tokyo and assassinating several officials before the coup was suppressed, strengthening the military's overall political influence in the years leading to World War II.

American troops recapture the fortress island of Corregidor in the Philippines from Japanese forces.

American forces recaptured Corregidor after a combined parachute and amphibious assault against Japanese defenders holed up in the island's extensive tunnel system, a hard-fought victory that helped secure Manila Bay ahead of the war's final Pacific campaigns.

Egypt and Israel establish full diplomatic relations, a landmark step following the 1979 Camp David peace treaty.

The establishment of full diplomatic relations followed the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the first such agreement between Israel and an Arab nation, and marked a historic, if still politically contentious, thaw between the two former wartime adversaries.

A truck bomb detonates beneath the World Trade Center's North Tower in New York, killing six people and injuring over a thousand in an early act of Islamist terrorism on U.S. soil.

The 1993 World Trade Center bombing, carried out by Islamist militants using a truck bomb parked in the building's underground garage, aimed to topple one tower into the other but caused far less damage than intended, foreshadowing the far deadlier attack on the same complex eight years later.

The New York Philharmonic performs in Pyongyang, North Korea, an unprecedented cultural exchange amid otherwise frozen diplomatic relations.

The New York Philharmonic's Pyongyang performance, including the American and North Korean national anthems, was a rare and closely watched moment of cultural diplomacy between two nations with no formal diplomatic relations, though it produced little lasting political thaw.

Indian fighter jets strike an alleged militant training camp in Balakot, Pakistan, sharply escalating tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbors.

India's airstrike on an alleged militant camp inside Pakistani territory, in retaliation for a deadly attack on Indian security forces, marked the first such cross-border strike between the nuclear-armed rivals since a 1971 war, triggering a brief but tense military confrontation.