From Historynet: Today in History February 16

1760          Cherokee Indians held hostage at Fort St. George are killed in revenge for Indian attacks on frontier settlements.

1804          US Navy lieutenant Steven Decatur  leads a small group of sailors into Tripoli harbor and burns the USS Philadelphia, captured earlier by Barbary pirates.

1862          Fort Donelson, Tennessee, falls to 

Grant's  Federal forces, but not before 

Nathan Bedford Forrest  escapes.

1865          Columbia, South Carolina, surrenders to Federal troops.

1923          Bessie Smith  makes her first recording "Down Hearted Blues."

1934          Thousands of Socialists battle Communists at a rally in New York's Madison Square Garden.

1937          Dupont patents a new thread, nylon, which will replace silk in a number of products and reduce costs.

1940          The British destroyer HMS Cossack rescues British seamen from a German prison ship, the Altmark, in a Norwegian fjord.

1942          Tojo  outlines Japan's war aims to the Diet, referring to "new order of coexistence" in East Asia.

1945          American paratroopers land on Corregidor, in a campaign to liberate the Philippines.

1951          Stalin  contends the U.N. is becoming the weapon of aggressive war.

1952          The FBI arrests 10 members of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina.

1957          A U.S. flag flies over an outpost in Wilkes Land, Antarctica.

1959          Fidel Castro  takes the oath as Cuban premier in Havana.

1965          Four persons are held in a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty, Liberty Bell and the Washington Monument.

1966          The World Council of Churches being held in Geneva, urges immediate peace in Vietnam.

1978          China and Japan sign a $20 billion trade pact, which is the most important move since the 1972 resumption of diplomatic ties.