AwesomeStories - February Highlights and Black History

SPACE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA. Sixteen minutes before it was scheduled to land - on the 1st of February, 2003 - Columbia broke apart, killing all seven crew members. As debris fell to earth, the bits and pieces were detected on Doppler radar. Among the Orbiter's recovered remnants was a videotape the crew was recording minutes before the explosion. What remains of that tape is linked in chapter 10 of this story. Although experts initially examined several possible reasons for the disaster's cause - including failed heat tiles - a simulation of foam hitting the wing confirmed what happened. You can see a video of that simulation - with its shocking results - in chapter 11. 
 
BATTLE of STALINGRAD. War and human misery are always soul-mates. Rarely, however, do people bear the kind of suffering residents of Stalingrad endured when the German 6th Army became their "enemy at the gates." Hitler thought he could conquer the city named after Stalin. Stalin issued a proclamation that anyone who surrendered, or retreated, would be shot. The lives of ordinary people, trapped in the middle, were reduced to unimaginable horror. Those who survived were sustained by little more than the human will to live. That they lived at all, given the conditions they endured, is astonishing. By February 2nd - of 1943 - the city was back in Soviet hands. The German defeat was a major turning point in the war, ultimately leading to Hitler's demise.
 
THE YALTA CONFERENCE. During the winter of 1945, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin met at Yalta (in the Crimea) to discuss plans for post-war Europe in the likely event that Germany would be defeated. On February 11, of that year, they signed the Yalta Agreement. Those actions led to the carving-up of eastern Europe.

KING TUT'S TOMB. On the 13th of February, 1924, archeologists opened the tomb of King Tutankhamun. It contained treasures which had not been damaged, or stolen, by grave robbers. In the ensuing years, people throughout the world have had an opportunity to see some of the contents of the young Pharaoh's tomb.
 
JAPANESE-AMERICAN INTERNMENT. On the 19th of February - 1942 - President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. It required people of Japanese descent who lived in areas along, or near, the Pacific coast to report to relocation centers. More than 110,000 people were forced to close businesses, sell property, leave school and move to internment camps. Resistors were convicted of breaking the law which the U.S. Supreme Court - despite a blistering dissent by Justice Frank Murphy - found constitutional.