Associated Press

On Feb. 20, 1792, President George Washington signed an act creating the U.S. Post Office Department.

In 1905, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, upheld, 7-2, compulsory vaccination laws intended to protect the public’s health.

In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt signed an immigration act which excluded “idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded persons, epileptics, insane persons” from being admitted to the United States.

In 1933, Congress proposed the 21st Amendment to the Constitution to repeal Prohibition.

In 1965, America’s Ranger 8 spacecraft crashed on the moon, after sending back thousands of pictures of the lunar surface.

In 2005, death claimed actor Sandra Dee at age 62; musical actor John Raitt at age 88; and counterculture writer Hunter S. Thompson at age 67.