February 3
• 1900 – Governor of Kentucky William Goebel dies of wound sustained in an assassination attempt three days earlier in Frankfort, Kentucky.
• 1908 – The Panathinaikos athletic club is created
• 1913 – The Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, authorizing the Federal government to impose and collect an income tax.
• 1916 – The Centre Block of the Parliament buildings in Ottawa, Canada burns down with the loss of 7 lives.
• 1917 – World War I: The United States breaks off diplomatic relations with Germany a day after the latter announced a new policy of unrestricted submarinewarfare.
• 1918 – The Twin Peaks Tunnel in San Francisco, California begins service as the longest streetcar tunnel in the world at 11,920 feet (3,633 meters) long.
• 1930 – Communist Party of Vietnam is founded at a "Unification Conference" held in Kowloon, British Hong Kong.
• 1931 – The Hawke's Bay earthquake, New Zealand's worst natural disaster, kills 258.
• 1933 – Adolf Hitler announces that the expansion of Lebensraum into Eastern Europe, and its ruthless Germanisation, are the ultimate geopolitical objectives ofThird Reich foreign policy.
• 1943 – The SS Dorchester is sunk by a German U-boat. Only 230 of 902 men aboard survive. The Chapel of the Four Chaplains, dedicated by President Harry Truman, is one of many memorials established to commemorate the Four Chaplains story.
• 1944 – World War II: During the Gilbert and Marshall Islands campaign, U.S. Army and Marine forces seize Kwajalein Atoll from the defending Japanese garrison.
• 1945 – World War II: As part of Operation Thunderclap, 1,000 B-17s of the Eighth Air Force bomb Berlin, a raid which kills between 2,500 and 3,000 anddehouses another 120,000.
• 1945 – World War II: The United States and the Philippine Commonwealth begin a month-long battle to retake Manila from Japan.
• 1947 – The lowest temperature in North America, −63.9 °C (−83.0 °F), is recorded in Snag, Yukon.
• 1957 – Senegalese political party Democratic Rally merges into the Senegalese Party of Socialist Action (PSAS).
• 1958 – Founding of the Benelux Economic Union, creating a testing ground for a later European Economic Community.
• 1959 – Deaths of rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa.
• 1960 – British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan speaks of "a wind of change", an increasing national consciousness blowing through colonial Africa, signalling that his Government is likely to support decolonisation.
• 1961 – The United States Air Forces begins Operation Looking Glass, and over the next 30 years, a "Doomsday Plane" is always in the air, with the capability of taking direct control of the United States' bombers and missiles in the event of the destruction of the SAC's command post.
• 1966 – The unmanned Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft makes the first controlled rocket-assisted landing on the Moon.
• 1967 – Ronald Ryan, the last person to be executed in Australia, is hanged in Pentridge Prison, Melbourne.
• 1969 – In Cairo, Yasser Arafat is appointed Palestine Liberation Organization leader at the Palestinian National Congress.
• 1971 – New York Police Officer Frank Serpico is shot during a drug bust in Brooklyn and survives to later testify against police corruption. Many believe the incident proves that NYPD officers tried to kill him.
• 1972 – The first day of the seven-day 1972 Iran blizzard, which would kill at least 4,000 people, making it the deadliest snowstorm in history.
• 1984 – John Buster and the research team at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center announce history's first embryo transfer, from one woman to another resulting in a live birth.
• 1984 – Space Shuttle program: STS-41-B is launched using Space Shuttle Challenger.
• 1989 – After a stroke two weeks previously, South African President P. W. Botha resigns as leader of the National Party, but stays on as president for six more months.
• 1989 – A military coup overthrows Alfredo Stroessner, dictator of Paraguay since 1954.
• 1995 – Astronaut Eileen Collins becomes the first woman to pilot the Space Shuttle as mission STS-63 gets underway from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
• 1998 – Karla Faye Tucker is executed in Texas, becoming the first woman executed in the United States since 1984.
• 1998 – Cavalese cable car disaster: a United States military pilot causes the death of 20 people when his low-flying plane cuts the cable of a cable-car nearTrento, Italy.
• 2007 – A Baghdad market bombing kills at least 135 people and injures a further 339.
• 2008 – The New York Giants end the New England Patriots undefeated season in one of the greatest upsets in sports history by winning Super Bowl XLII 17-14.
• 2014 – Two people are shot and killed and 29 students are taken hostage at a high school in Moscow, Russia.
• 2015 – A collision between a commuter train and a passenger vehicle kills six in Valhalla, New York.