Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/February 20

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 * 1816 – Italian composer Gioachino Rossini's opera buffa The Barber of Seville premiered at the Teatro Argentina in Rome to jeers from the audience.
 * 1835 – An earthquake registering approximately 8.5 Mw devastated Concepción, Chile, and triggered a tsunami that destroyed neighbouring Talcahuano.
 * 1846 – Polish insurgents in the Free City of Kraków led an uprising attempting to incite a fight for national independence that was put down by the Austrian Empire nine days later.
 * 1864 – American Civil War: The Union Army suffered a one-in-three casualty rate at the Battle of Olustee near Lake City, Florida.
 * 1872 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art, today the largest art museum in the United States with a collection of more than two million works, opened in New York.
 * 1905 – The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Jacobson v. Massachusetts that states had the authority to order compulsory vaccination.
 * 1931 – Paraguayan anarchists briefly seized the city of Encarnación as part of a larger plan to initiate a social revolution in the country.
 * 1943 – The Saturday Evening Post published the first of Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms, among the most widely distributed paintings ever produced, in support of U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms.
 * 1943 – A fissure opened in a cornfield in the Mexican state of Michoacán and continued to erupt for nine years, forming the cinder cone Parícutin.
 * 1965 – The NASA spacecraft Ranger 8 spacecraft transmitted 7,137 photographs of the Moon in the final 23 minutes of its mission before crashing as planned in Mare Tranquillitatis.
 * 1988 – The Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast voted to secede from Azerbaijan and join Armenia, triggering the First Nagorno-Karabakh War.
 * 1992 – Appearing on the talk show Larry King Live, U.S. industrialist Ross Perot announced that he would begin a presidential campaign if "ordinary people" wanted him to run for office.
 * 2009 – The Tamil Tigers attempted to crash two aircraft laden with C-4 in suicide attacks on Colombo, Sri Lanka, but the planes were shot down before they reached their targets.
 * 2010 – Severe flooding and mudslides on the island of Madeira, Portugal, killed 51 people.
 * Born/died this day: | Laura Bassi |d|1778| Judith Montefiore |b|1784| Hod Stuart |b|1879| P. G. T. Beauregard |d|1893| Ivan Albright |b|1897| Ansel Adams |b|1902|Johnny Checketts |b|1912| Forbes Burnham |b|1923| Maria Goeppert Mayer |d|1972| Jiah Khan |b|1988| Audrey Munson |d|1996