Hello, and welcome to This Day in History. Here’s what happened on February 15th. The term “fake news” has been thrown around a lot over the past several years, but the concept isn’t necessarily new. On this day in 1898, the Navy battleship USS Maine exploded and sank in Cuba’s Havana Harbor, killing some 260 crew. Almost immediately, so-called yellow journalists published sensational headlines blaming Spain for the tragedy, and within a couple of months, the Spanish-American War had begun.

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