Today in History: February 3

1690 – First paper money in America issued in the colony of Massachusetts
1740 – Charles de Bourbon, King of Naples, invites Jews to return to Sicily

1882 – Circus owner P.T. Barnum buys his world famous elephant, Jumbo. Jumbo was born in East Africa in late 1960, was captured two years later and brought Europe, becoming the first African elephant to reach modern Europe alive. Jumbo lived in the London Zoo for nearly sixteen years before Barnum purchased Jumbo, the largest elephant in captivity. Jumbo debuted in the United States in Madison Square Garden a couple months later, and continued touring with Barnum’s circus for three years before being killed in a railway accident at the age of twenty-four. African Elephants generally live up to seventy years in the wild.
1917 – U.S. ocean liner Housatonic sunk by German submarine, severing diplomatic relations between the two nations
1919 – League of Nations holds its first meeting in Paris
1950 – Nuclear physicist Klaus Fuchs arrested on spying charges
1959 – American Airlines Electra crashes in East River, killing sixty-five
1966 – First operational weather satellite, ESSA-1 launched in the United States
1973 – President Nixon signs Endangered Species Act into law
1992 – Maximum New York State unemployment benefits are raised to three-hundred dollars per week
Birthdays
1811 – Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune. Greely is credited with popularizing the phrase “Go west, young man, and grow up with the country”. He was involved with politics throughout his life, briefly serving as a New York congressman, and was the candidate of the Democratic and Liberal Republican parties in the 1872 presidential election.
1894 – Norman Rockwell, American artist and illustrator
Deaths
1922 – John Butler Yeats, Northern Irish artist
1924 – Woodrow Wilson, twenty-eight President of the United States, dies at his home in Washington at sixty-seven