February 15, USS Maine explodes in Havana Harbor

Today is Sunday, Feb. 15, the 46th day of 2026. There are 319 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On Feb. 15, 1898, the battleship USS Maine mysteriously exploded in Havana Harbor, killing more than 260 crew members and bringing the United States closer to war with Spain.

Also on this date:

In 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes signed a law allowing female attorneys to argue cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1933, President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt escaped an assassination attempt in Miami that mortally wounded Chicago Mayor Anton J. Cermak; gunman Giuseppe Zangara was executed by electric chair the following month.

In 1950, Walt Disney’s animated film “Cinderella” premiered in Boston.

In 1961, 73 people, including all 18 members of the U.S. figure skating team en route to the World Championships in Czechoslovakia, were killed in the crash of a Sabena Airlines Boeing 707 in Belgium.

In 1978, boxer Leon Spinks scored a massive upset as he defeated Muhammad Ali by split decision to become the world heavyweight champion.

In 1989, the Soviet Union announced that the last of its troops had left Afghanistan, after more than nine years of military intervention.

In 2001, the first draft sequence of the complete human genome was published in the scientific journal Nature.

In 2013, with a blinding flash and a booming shock wave, a meteor blazed across Russia’s western Siberian sky and exploded, injuring nearly 1,500 people as it blasted out windows.

In 2022, the families of nine victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting agreed to a $73 million settlement of a lawsuit against Remington Arms, the maker of the rifle used by a gunman to kill 20 first graders and six educators in 2012.

In 2023, Payton Gendron, the white gunman who massacred 10 Black shoppers and workers at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket in May of the previous year, was sentenced to life in prison without parole after pleading guilty to murder and hate-motivated terrorism charges.