Today in History.....February 1

On this day in

* 1861, Texas voted to secede from the Union

* 1893, inventor Thomas A. Edison completed work on the world's first motion picture studio, his "Black Maria," in West Orange, N.J.

* 1943, one of America's most highly decorated military units of World War II, the 442d Regimental Combat Team, made up almost entirely of Japanese-Americans, was authorized

* 1960, four black college students began a sit-in protest at a lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., where they'd been refused service

* 1968, during the Vietnam War, Saigon's police chief (Nguyen Ngoc
Loan) executed a Viet Cong officer with a pistol shot to the head in a scene captured in a famous news photograph

* 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini received a tumultuous welcome in Tehran as he ended nearly 15 years of exile. ALSO: Newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, whose prison sentence for bank robbery had been commuted by President Carter, left a federal prison near San Francisco

* 1995, both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly to rewrite the 61-year-old Communications Act, freeing the exploding television, telephone and home computer industries to jump into each other's fields

* 2000, John Ashcroft won confirmation as attorney general on a
58-42 Senate vote, completing
President Bush's Cabinet over strong Democratic opposition