February 14: Fun Facts about Today in History

(February 14)
Today is Valentine's Day, the feast day of St. Valentine, a priest and physician who was martyred in Rome around 270 ce, and the tradition of exchanging Valentine's Day greetings is based on the legend that Valentine signed a letter to his jailer's daughter, with whom he had fallen in love, "from your Valentine."

(February 14, 1989)
On this day in 1989, Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa and offered a reward for the killing of author Salman Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses (1988) was deemed by Khomeini as heretical.

(February 14, 1990)
The snapshot of planet Earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft is afterwards known as Pale Blue Dot.

(February 14, 1991)
The psychological thriller The Silence of the Lambs was premiered in American theatres; it was widely considered as a classic and received five Academy Awards, including best picture, actor (Anthony Hopkins), actress (Jodie Foster), and director (Jonathan Demme).

(February 14, 2005)
YouTube, a video-sharing website founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, would go on to become enormously successful, with over one billion unique users visiting the site each month.

(Died on February 14, 2021)
William Meninger, an American Trappist monk and a principal developer of Centering Prayer (b. 1932).