1. On February 1, 1785, the New York State Legislature met in Albany for the first time. Previously, the Legislature had met in New York City, but after the city was destroyed by fire in 1776 during the Revolutionary War, the seat of government was temporarily moved to Kingston, then to Poughkeepsie, and finally to Albany.

2. On February 1, 1893, Thomas A. Edison completed the construction of the first motion picture studio in West Orange, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. The Black Maria, as it was called, was a small, round building with a rotating roof that allowed sunlight to flood the interior. The first film shot in the studio was a 47-second clip of a man sneezing that Edison himself directed.

3. On February 1, 1960, four African American college students from North Carolina A&T State University staged a sit-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, to protest segregation. The sit-in quickly became a national movement, inspiring similar protests in cities across the country. In New York, students from Columbia University organized a successful boycott of Woolworth's stores in the city.

4. On February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas, killing all seven crew members. The shuttle had launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida sixteen days earlier and conducted a range of experiments in orbit. The tragedy led to a two-and-a-half-year hiatus in the space shuttle program.

5. On February 1, 2014, the Seattle Seahawks beat the Denver Broncos 43-8 in Super Bowl XLVIII at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. The game was the first outdoor, cold-weather Super Bowl in the history of the event, and was watched by an estimated 111.5 million people, making it the most-watched television program in American history at the time.