1. On February 18, 1861, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as the first (and only) president of the Confederate States of America in Montgomery, Alabama. This event marked the beginning of the Civil War and the formation of a new government in opposition to the United States.

2. In 1931, the Alabama governor signed a law allowing "Scottsboro Boys" teenagers to be tried as adults and face the death penalty after being falsely accused of rape. The case gained national attention, and the defendants ultimately had their death sentences overturned due to inadequate legal representation.

3. On this day in 1965, civil rights activists tried to stage a voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery. However, police blocked them on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and violently dispersed the crowd with tear gas and batons in what became known as "Bloody Sunday."

4. In 2000, the state of Alabama apologized officially for its role in its dark history of slavery. It was one of the last states to do so.

5. The active method of continuous steelmaking, the LD process, was invented by Fritz Klockner and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1948. The first commercial LD process plant in North America was constructed by Republic Steel in Gadsden, Alabama, in 1962.