On This Day - February 22nd

On this day in the year 303 of the common era (CE) the Roman emperor Diocletian, while in Nicomedia issues his first official edict expressing condemnation for and authorizing the persecution of Christians, ordering all churches to be closed and scriptures burnt; this marks the fourth period of general persecution that the early church would endure…but not the last; one thousand, three hundred and twenty-nine years later, Galileo Galilei publishes his book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems comparing the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems and whether the Earth orbits the sun…or not; leading to his trial for heresy and subsequent condemnation. One hundred and forty-three years after that, in the year 1774 CE the British House of Lords rules that authors do not have perpetual copyright to their work; two hundred and forty nine years later, astronomers explain how data being produced by the James Webb deep-space-telescope is upending existing theories of how early galaxies were/are formed, after finding six massive galaxies 100x larger than expected soon after the Big Bang

On this day in the year 1775 (CE) the first joint stock company in the United States (a cloth weaver) sells shares at 10 cents in its initial public offering (IPO); nine years later the Empress of China, the first United States ship to trade with China, sails from New York, New York.

On this day in 1854 CE the first meeting of the Republican Party in held in Michigan[ two years later they hold their first national meeting in Pittsburgh; Pennsylvania. Nine years after that, in 1865 CE, the state of Tennessee adopts a new constitution abolishing slavery; thirty-three years later an African-American postmaster is lynched, while his wife and three daughters are shot in Lake City, South Carolina. One hundred and twenty-four after that, three white men are convicted of killing black jogger Ahmaud Arbery and found guilty of federal hate crimes, in Georgia.

In 1876 CE Johns Hopkins University opens.

In 1889 CE, United States president Grover Cleveland signs a bill to admit the Dakotas, Montana and Washington into the union. Thirty-four years later the first enduring and profitable chinchilla farm opens in Los Angeles, California; also on this day, transcontinental airmail service begins in the United States. Twelve years later it is announced that airplanes are no longer permitted to fly over the White House

In 1933 CE the Hungarian scholar and the founder of Tibetan studies, Alexander Csoma de Kőrös is declared to be a Bodhisattva in Japan.

In 1972 CE the Irish Republican Army bombs Aldershot military barracks, the headquarters of the British Parachute Regiment, killing seven people; in retaliation for the Irish Bloody Sunday.

In 1989 CE, United Kingdom physicist Stephen Hawking calls the proposed missile defense system known as Star Wars a "deliberate fraud;" eight years later, scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland announce they have cloned an adult mammal, producing Dolly the sheep, born on 5 July 1996 (d. 2003); twenty-one years after that it is revealed that Neanderthals, not humans, were the first artists on Earth, producing red cave paintings 65,000 years ago in Spain, according to new research published in Science.

In 2009 CE, at the eighty-first Academy Awards, Heath Ledger posthumously wins Best Supporting Actor for his performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight, while his death is ruled a suicide by drug overdose, it is widely marked as the first killing of a human being by the ultra-nihilistic Joker, in the real world…Heath Ledger could not recover from his complete self-identification with the mass-murderer and succumbed to his madness; five years later Viktor Yanukovych is ousted as President of Ukraine by its Parliament following the Euromaidan revolution.