TODAY IN HISTORY ― FEBRUARY 28

February 28 is the 59th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 306 days remaining until the end of the year (307 in leap years). This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Tuesday, Thursday or Sunday (58 in 400 years each) than on Friday or Saturday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Monday or Wednesday (56). 

NATIONAL PUBLIC SLEEPING DAY  

1700 – Today is followed by March 1 in Sweden, thus creating the Swedish calendar. 

1784 – John Wesley charters the Methodist Church.

1827 – The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad is incorporated, becoming the first railroad in America offering commercial transportation of both people and freight.

1847 – The Battle of the Sacramento River during the Mexican–American War is a decisive victory for the United States leading to the capture of Chihuahua.

1867 – Seventy years of Holy See – United States relations are ended by a Congressional ban on federal funding of diplomatic envoys to the Vatican and are not restored until January 10, 1984.

1885 – The American Telephone and Telegraph Company is incorporated in New York as the subsidiary of American Bell Telephone. (American Bell would later merge with its subsidiary.)

1928 – C. V. Raman discovers Raman scattering or the Raman Effect (a change of wavelength exhibited by some of the radiation scattered in a medium).

1935 – DuPont scientist Wallace Carothers invents nylon.

1940 – Basketball is televised for the first time (Fordham University vs. the University of Pittsburgh in Madison Square Garden).

1953 – James Watson and Francis Crick announce to friends that they have determined the chemical structure of DNA; the formal announcement takes place on April 25 following publication in April's Nature (pub. April 2).

1954 – The first color television sets using the NTSC standard are offered for sale to the general public.

1959 – Discoverer 1, an American spy satellite that is the first object intended to achieve a polar orbit, is launched. It failed to achieve orbit.

1972 – Sino-American relations: The United States and People's Republic of China sign the Shanghai Communiqué.

1993 – Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents (AND the FBI) raid the Branch Davidian church in Waco, Texas with a warrant to arrest the group's leader David Koresh. Four BATF agents and five Davidians die in the initial raid, starting a 51-day standoff. (No mention whatsoever in this Wiki reference about Bill Clinton or Janet Reno. Hmm.)

1997 – GRB 970228, a highly luminous flash of gamma rays, strikes the Earth for 80 seconds, providing early evidence that gamma-ray bursts occur well beyond the Milky Way.

2013 – Pope Benedict XVI resigns as the pope of the Catholic Church, becoming the first pope to do so since 1415.

BORN TODAY

1712 – Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, French general (d. 1759)

1896 – Philip Showalter Hench, American physician and endocrinologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1965)

1901 – Linus Pauling, American chemist and activist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1994)

1906 – Bugsy Siegel, American gangster (d. 1947)

1930 – Leon Cooper, American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate

1945 – Linda Preiss Rothschild, American mathematician and academic

1948 – Steven Chu, American physicist and politician, 12th United States Secretary of Energy, Nobel Prize laureate

1953 – Paul Krugman, American economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate

From Wikipedia and Google (images), ex as noted.