As part of the diplomatic settlement ending the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch Republic prioritized the lucrative sugar-producing colony of Suriname in South America over the fur-trading colony of New Netherland in North America, which became English New York. The trade seemed sound by 17th-century economic logic, sugar was immensely more profitable than furs, but in hindsight ranks among history's most consequential real estate decisions.

After a three-day siege on the Cumberland River, Confederate commander Simon Bolivar Buckner asked for surrender terms. Grant famously replied that only 'unconditional and immediate surrender' would be accepted, earning him the nickname 'Unconditional Surrender' Grant. The victory, with nearly 12,000 Confederates captured, was the Union's first major triumph of the Civil War and opened Tennessee to Northern advance.

Weeks after discovering the antechamber, Carter and his team formally opened the sealed inner chamber before a small crowd of dignitaries. Behind the wall stood an enormous gilded shrine nearly filling the room, encasing the sarcophagus of the boy king who died around 1323 BC. The discovery became one of the most sensational archaeological events of the 20th century, sparking global 'Egyptomania.'

Working through tedious blink-comparator examinations of star fields photographed weeks apart, 24-year-old Clyde Tombaugh spotted a faint object shifting position against the fixed stars, exactly what a distant planet should do. Further confirming observations followed in the days after this initial identification, leading to Pluto's public announcement on March 13, 1930, fulfilling decades of searching for a hypothesized 'Planet X' beyond Neptune.

North Korean mythology holds that Kim Jong-il was born in a secret guerrilla camp on Mount Paektu, accompanied by a double rainbow and a new star, cementing his father's revolutionary legend. Soviet archives instead record his birth in Vyatskoye, Russia, in 1941, where his father Kim Il-sung commanded an exiled Korean brigade. The discrepancy illustrates the elaborate personality cult built around North Korea's ruling dynasty.

Battleships and cruisers unleashed thousands of shells on the eight-square-mile volcanic island, targeting the extensive tunnel and bunker network Japanese General Tadamichi Kuribayashi had built into Mount Suribachi and the surrounding terrain. Despite the intensity, most fortified Japanese positions survived deeply buried underground, setting the stage for one of the bloodiest amphibious battles of the Pacific War when Marines landed on February 19.

Weighing 30 tons and filled with nearly 18,000 vacuum tubes, ENIAC could perform 5,000 additions per second, a staggering leap from mechanical calculators. Built to compute artillery firing tables, it arrived too late for World War II but ushered in the electronic computing age. Reporters marveled as its lights flickered through calculations that would have taken humans weeks.

As the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union wound toward its close in mid-February 1956, tension built ahead of Nikita Khrushchev's closed-door session, delivered just days later, that would denounce Joseph Stalin's cult of personality and reveal the scale of his purges. The congress marked a hinge point in Soviet history, initiating a cautious political thaw after decades of Stalinist terror.