February 2 Birthday
February 2, 1848: The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, ending the Mexican-American War. Mexico ceded 529,000 square miles — present-day California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming — for $15 million. The territory represented more than half of Mexico's pre-war land. The war had begun in 1846 under President Polk, whose administration provoked a border incident to justify the invasion. Ulysses S. Grant, who served in the war, called it "one of the most unjust" ever waged by a stronger nation against a weaker one. The acquisition intensified the slavery debate — would the new territory be free or slave? — and set the course toward the Civil War. James Joyce published Ulysses on February 2, 1922, his fortieth birthday. The novel had been serialized in the Little Review, and the Nausicaa episode had been deemed obscene, leading to a ban. Sylvia Beach, the American owner of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, published the first book edition. It was printed in Dijon, bound in blue linen, and limited to 1,000 copies. The novel describes a single day in Dublin — June 16, 1904 — and follows Leopold Bloom through the streets of the city. The final chapter, Molly Bloom's soliloquy, is one of the most famous passages in literature: eight sentences, four thousand words, no punctuation. Joyce went blind while writing it. Groundhog Day was first officially observed at Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, on this day in 1887. The tradition derives from Candlemas, a Christian holiday where clergy would distribute blessed candles. An old English rhyme held that if Candlemas were sunny, winter would continue. German immigrants brought the tradition to Pennsylvania and substituted a groundhog for the European badger. Punxsutawney Phil has been correct about 39% of the time, which is worse than a coin flip. The 1993 film Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray, made the holiday internationally known and added the concept of an endless time loop to the cultural vocabulary. Ayn Rand, born this day in 1905 as Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, witnessed the Russian Revolution as a teenager and emigrated to the United States in 1926. Her novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) promoted a philosophy she called Objectivism — rational self-interest, laissez-faire capitalism, and the rejection of altruism. She died on Social Security and Medicare, which she had been forced to enroll in under a pseudonym to avoid contradicting her own philosophy. Her influence on American conservatism and libertarianism is immense and almost entirely unacknowledged. People born on February 2 fall under the zodiac sign of Aquarius. The birthstone is Amethyst and the birth flower is Violet. Historical events on February 2 include 1848: Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed, ending Mexican-American War, 1887: First official Groundhog Day observed in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, 1922: James Joyce's Ulysses published in Paris. Famous people born on February 2 include James Joyce (1882), Ayn Rand (1905), Farrah Fawcett (1947).