Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/February 23
This is a list of selected February 23 anniversaries that appear in the "On this day" section of the Main Page. To suggest a new item, in most cases, you can be bold and edit this page. Please read the selected anniversaries guidelines before making your edit. However, if your addition might be controversial or on a day that is or will soon be on the Main Page, please post your suggestion on the talk page instead.
Please note that the events listed on the Main Page are chosen based more on relative article quality and to maintain a mix of topics, not based solely on how important or significant their subjects are. Only four to five events are posted at a time and thus not everything that is "most important and significant" can be listed. In addition, an event is generally not posted this year if it is also the subject of the scheduled featured article or picture of the day.
To report an error when this appears on the Main Page, see Main Page errors. Please remember that this list defers to the supporting articles, so it is best to achieve consensus and make any necessary changes there first.
February 23: Defender of the Fatherland Day in Russia and several other former Soviet republics; Mashramani in Guyana (1970); National Day in Brunei (1984)
- 1820 – British authorities arrested the conspirators of the Cato Street Conspiracy, an attempt to murder Prime Minister Lord Liverpool and all the British cabinet ministers.
- 1861 – President-elect of the United States Abraham Lincoln arrived secretly in Washington, D.C. for his inauguration, thwarting an alleged assassination plot in Baltimore.
- 1941 – Plutonium (a button of the metal pictured) was first chemically identified by chemist Glenn T. Seaborg and his team at the University of California, Berkeley.
- 1944 – In response to an insurgency in Chechnya, the Soviet Union began the forced deportation of native Chechen and Ingush populations of North Caucasus to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
- 1945 – American photographer Joe Rosenthal took the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II, an image that was later reproduced as the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial.