27 March History
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.