What happened on 12 February?

9 events from the Ever-When timeline, ranked by how much they mattered.

1. 1809 Born: Charles Darwin Naturalist whose theory of evolution by natural selection reshaped biology.
2. 1809 Born: Abraham Lincoln 16th US president; led the Union through the Civil War; drove the abolition of slavery, then was assassinated.
3. 1924 Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue Jazz-symphonic fusion that fused European concert tradition with American popular idioms.
4. 1912 Abdication of Puyi The boy emperor Puyi abdicates, ending over two millennia of imperial rule in China.
5. 1929 Trotsky expelled from the Soviet Union Defeated by Stalin, expelled from the party and banished to Alma-Ata, Trotsky is deported to Turkey — the start of eleven years of exile.
6. 1797 Haydn's Emperor's Hymn Haydn's anthem for Francis II's birthday, 'Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser'; its melody later becomes the German national anthem.
7. 2002 Trial of Slobodan Milošević Handed to the Hague tribunal by Serbia's new government, the former president is tried for war crimes and genocide in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo; after four years he dies in his ce
8. 1909 NAACP founded Black and white activists including W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in response to the Springfield race riot
9. 1554 Execution of Lady Jane Grey After her father joins Wyatt's rebellion, Mary I signs the death warrant of the teenage 'Nine Days' Queen', who is beheaded on Tower Green hours after her husband Guildford Dudley.