Today in history–February 21

1431: Joan of Arc is first brought before the panel of University of Paris scholars who are charged by the English occupation government with finding some ground for executing her.  They will.

1791: John Mercer, the self-taught chemist who will start work as a bobbin weaver at age 9 but will go on to revolutionize the cotton industry, is born at Great Harwood, Lancashire.

1848: Former law student Karl Marx publishes his Communist Manifesto.

1925: The New Yorker magazine is published for the first time, so that little old ladies in Dubuque know what is happening in the Big Apple.

1936: Barbara Charlene Jordan (Boston College Law 1959), who will become the first African American Democrat to sit in the Texas Senate and later will be a professor at the University of Texas, is born at Houston.

1943: Record and film impresario David Lawrence Geffen, who will start in the mail room at the William Morris Agency but will later co-found Dreamworks SKG Studio, is born at Brooklyn, New York.

1947: Edwin Land demonstrates the first “instant camera,” called the “Polaroid Land,” at a meeting of New York’s Optical Society of America.

1948: America’s most popular sports organization, the National Association of Stock Car Automobile Racing, is founded at Daytona Beach, Florida.

1960: Cuban lawyer and caudillo Fidel Castro nationalizes all businesses in Cuba, which will ultimately result in the cutting off of trade with the U.S.