27 March History


Month:                           Date:     

  • 1350    -    While besieging Gibraltar, Alfonso XI of Castile dies of the black death.
  • 1512    -    Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon sights Florida.
  • 1802    -    The Treaty of Amiens is signed, ending the French Revolutionary War.
  • 1814    -    U.S. troops under Gen. Andrew Jackson inflict a crushing defeat on the Creek Indians at Horshoe Bend in Northern Alabama.
  • 1836    -    The Mexican army massacres Texan rebels at Goliad.
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  • 1866    -    President Andrew Johnson vetoes the civil rights bill, which later becomes the 14th amendment.
  • 1884    -    The first long-distance telephone call is made from Boston to New York.
  • 1893    -    The American Bell Telephone Company makes the first long distance telephone call to its branch office in New York.
  • 1899    -    The Italian inventor G. Marconi achieves the first international radio transmission between England and France.
  • 1900    -    The London Parliament passes the War Loan Act, which gives 35 million pounds to the Boer War cause.
  • 1912    -    The first cherry blossom trees, a gift from Japan, are planted in Washington, D.C.
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  • 1933    -    Some 55,000 people stage a protest against Hitler in New York.
  • 1941    -    Tokeo Yoshikawa arrives in Oahu, Hawaii, to begin spying for Japan on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor.
  • 1942    -    The British raid the Nazi submarine base at St. Nazaire, France.
  • 1944    -    One thousand Jews leave Drancy, France for the Auschwitz concentration camp.
  • 1944    -    Thousands of Jews are murdered in Kaunas, Lithuania. The Gestapo shoots forty Jewish policemen in the Riga, Latvia ghetto.
  • 1945    -    General Dwight Eisenhower declares that the German defenses on the Western Front have been broken.
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  • 1952    -    Elements of the U.S. Eighth Army reach the 38th parallel in Korea, the original dividing line between the two Koreas.
  • 1958    -    The United States announces a plan to explore space near the moon.
  • 1976    -    Washington, D.C. opens its subway system.
  • 1977    -    In aviation's worst disaster yet, 582 die when a KLM Pan Am 747 crashes.

  • 27 March Birthdays

  • 1785    -    Louis XVII, pretender to the throne during the French Revolution.
  • 1809    -    Georges-Eugene Haussmann, French town planner, designed modern-day Paris.
  • 1813    -    Nathaniel Currier, lithographer for Currier and Ives.
  • 1845    -    Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, German physicist, accidentally discovered X-rays.
  • 1863    -    Sir Henry Royce, cofounder the Rolls-Royce automotive company.
  • 1879    -    Edward Steichen, pioneer of American photography.
  • 1906    -    Pee Wee Russell, jazz clarinetist.
  • 1910    -    John Robinson Pierce, the father of comunications satellites.
  • 1914    -    Budd Schulberg, journalist, novelist and screenwriter (What Makes Sammy Run).
  • 1923    -    Louis Simpson, Pultizer Prize-winning poet.
  • 1924    -    Sarah Vaughan, jazz singer.