On This Day: February 26

This is the 57th day of the year.

Fact of the Day: Johnny Cash

Johnny Cash recorded more than 1,500 songs in his career. Cash is one of ten performers (as of mid-2005) to be inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Country Music Hall of Fame, alongside Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams Sr., Bill Monroe, Bob Wills, Elvis Presley, The Everly Brothers, Brenda Lee, Chet Atkins, and Floyd Cramer, as well as Cash's first producer and discoverer, Sam Phillips of Sun Records.

Holidays

Feast day of St. Alexander of Alexandria, St. Porphyry of Gaza, St. Nestor of Magydus, and St. Victor the Hermit.

Events

1815 - Napoleon left his exile on the island of Elba, returning to France to attempt a second conquest.

1919 - Congress established Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona.

1929 - President Calvin Coolidge established Grand Teton National Park.

1933 - Ground was broken for the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

1935 - Nazi leader Adolf Hitler signed a secret decree authorizing the founding of the Reich Luftwaffe as a third German military service to join the Reich army and navy.

1951 - The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, limiting a president to two terms of office, was ratified.

1952 - Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced that Britain had developed its own atomic bomb.

1993 - A bomb built by a group of Islamic extremists exploded in the parking garage of New York's World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring more than 1000.

2001 - The Taliban destroy two giant Buddha statues in Bamyan, Afghanistan.

2004 - Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski is killed in a plane crash near Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Births

1802 - Victor Hugo, French author.

1829 - Levi Strauss, American businessman, creator of blue jeans.

1846 - William Frederick Cody (Buffalo Bill), American frontiersman, showman.

1852 - John Harvey Kellogg, American physician who developed dry cereal.

1908 - Tex Avery, American cartoonist, famous for producing animated cartoons during The Golden Age of Hollywood animation.

1916 - Jackie Gleason, American comedian, actor.

1920 - Tony Randall (born Arthur Leonard Rosenberg), American comic actor.

1928 - Fats (Antoine) Domino, American pianist, songwriter, singer.

1932 - Johnny Cash (born J. R. Cash) American country-western, and rock and roll singer and songwriter.

1950 - Helen Clark, Prime Minister of New Zealand.

1954 - Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Prime Minister of Turkey.

Deaths

1813 - Robert Livingston, New York representative at the Continental Congress.

1903 - Richard Gatling, American inventor of the Gatling gun.

2005 - Jef Raskin, a human-computer interface expert best known for starting the Macintosh project for Apple Computer in the late 1970s.