February 5

The Roman Senate grants Caesar Augustus the honorary title "pater patriae," or father of the country, cementing his status as the empire's revered founding ruler.

The honorific title, roughly meaning "father of the fatherland," was among the highest honors the Roman Senate could bestow, reflecting Augustus's transformation of Rome from a war-torn republic into a stable empire. He reportedly considered it one of the greatest achievements of his reign, second only to ending decades of civil war.

A powerful earthquake devastates Pompeii and the surrounding region, causing damage the city was still repairing when Mount Vesuvius erupted seventeen years later.

The earthquake caused significant damage to Pompeii's buildings, temples, and infrastructure, and ancient accounts describe panic and superstitious fear that it might be a divine omen. Archaeological evidence shows the city was still undergoing repairs when Vesuvius's catastrophic eruption in 79 CE buried it and neighboring Herculaneum under volcanic ash.

French-born marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte ascends the thrones of Sweden and Norway, founding the House of Bernadotte, which still reigns in Sweden today.

Bernadotte, a former marshal under Napoleon, was elected heir to the Swedish throne after the country's royal line ran short of successors, an unusual choice of a foreign military commander with no Swedish royal blood. His pragmatic decision to align Sweden against his former emperor helped the country avoid the worst of the Napoleonic Wars' devastation.

Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland announces Bakelite, the world's first fully synthetic plastic, launching the modern plastics industry.

Baekeland's invention resulted from experiments seeking a synthetic substitute for shellac, a natural resin used as an electrical insulator. Bakelite's durability, heat resistance, and moldability made it enormously popular for everything from telephones and radios to jewelry, and it is widely regarded as launching the modern age of plastics.

Mexico adopts its current constitution, establishing a federal republic and enshrining sweeping labor and land reforms.

Drafted in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, the constitution enshrined progressive protections for workers, land redistribution provisions aimed at breaking up large estates, and restrictions on the power of the Catholic Church. Though frequently amended since, it remains the foundational legal document of the modern Mexican state.

General Douglas MacArthur returns to Manila as Allied forces liberate the Philippine capital from Japanese occupation.

MacArthur's return fulfilled a promise he had made nearly three years earlier upon evacuating the Philippines ahead of the Japanese invasion, famously declaring "I shall return." The recapture of Manila came at a heavy cost, however, with brutal urban fighting and Japanese atrocities against civilians causing massive destruction and loss of life.

A U.S. Air Force bomber jettisons a hydrogen bomb off the coast of Georgia after a mid-air collision; the weapon, known as the Tybee Bomb, was never recovered.

During a training exercise, a mid-air collision forced the bomber crew to jettison the Mark 15 nuclear bomb into shallow coastal waters near Savannah to prevent it from detonating during an emergency landing. Despite extensive Air Force searches over the following decades, the weapon, believed to lack its plutonium core, has never been recovered.

Astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell land on the Moon during the Apollo 14 mission, the third crewed lunar landing.

Shepard and Mitchell's mission collected the largest haul of lunar rock samples up to that point, and Shepard famously hit two golf balls across the surface using a makeshift club. The mission successfully redirected NASA's program after Apollo 13's near-disastrous failure the previous year.

Hackers attempt to steal nearly $1 billion from Bangladesh's central bank, successfully transferring $101 million before spelling errors in a fraudulent request triggered suspicion.

The Bangladesh Bank cyberheist exploited the SWIFT international banking messaging system to issue fraudulent transfer requests, routing stolen funds through casinos in the Philippines. A simple spelling error, "fandation" instead of "foundation," in one transfer request alerted a routing bank and helped block billions more in attempted theft.

The U.S. Senate acquits President Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial, largely along party lines.

The Senate acquitted Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress related to his dealings with Ukraine, with only one senator from his own party voting to convict on one of the two charges. It marked just the third presidential impeachment trial in U.S. history to that point.