TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – MARCH 27
1350 While besieging Gibraltar, Alfonso XI of Castile dies of the black death.
1512 Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon sights Florida.
1794 Pres Washington & Congress creates US Navy
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 In Goliad, TX, about 350 Texan prisoners, including their commander James Fannin, were executed under orders from Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna. An estimated 30 Texans escaped execution.
1836 1st Mormon temple dedicated in Kirtland Ohio
1866 President Andrew Johnson vetoes the civil rights bill, which later becomes the 14th amendment.
1899 The Italian inventor G. Marconi achieves the first international radio transmission between England and France.
1904 Mary Jarris “Mother” Jones was ordered by Colorado state authorities to leave the state. She was accused of stirring up striking coal miners.
1909 For the first time fingerprint evidence is used to solve a murder case. The worlds first official Fingerprint Bureau was founded in Scotland Yard in 1901.
1912 The first cherry blossom trees, a gift from Japan, are planted in Washington, D.C.
1914 1st successful blood transfusion (in Brussels)
1933 Some 55,000 people stage a protest against Hitler in New York.
1935 Hitler demanded that Germany have equal military power with other European nations. He wanted this on a gun-for-gun basis. (However, it was also recorded that he wanted superiority over the Russian army.)
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.
1955 A demolition crew using helicopters blasted ice in Niagara Falls. This was considered a fruitless attempt to break up the ice that has caused destruction along the shores of this body of the Niagara River.
1958 Nikita Khrushchev becomes Soviet Premier as well as First Secretary of the Communist Party
1958 The United States announces a plan to explore space near the moon.
1962 Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel of Louisiana, called for all Roman Catholic schools in the city of New Orleans to end their segregation policies.
1977 In aviation’s worst disaster yet, 582 die when a KLM Pan Am 747 crashes.
1980 After a week of small earthquakes below the area, an eruption of Mount St. Helens blasts a mushroom cloud over most of the state of Washington. Just 2 months later St. Helens catastrophically erupted on May 18th, 1980 during which 57 people were killed or never found and huge tracts of forest and homes were destroyed.
1998 The FDA approves the drug Viagra produced by Pfizer for use against impotence in men.
2001 California regulators approved electricity rate hikes of up to 46 percent following the partially deregulated California energy system.
2006 Al-Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui a French citizen of Moroccan descent claimed in his trial that he was supposed to hijack a fifth airplane on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House but it is unclear if he was telling the truth or seeking publicity.
2014 Nine mid-level nuclear commanders were fired from the US Air Force after they were implicated in a test cheating scandal. Several others who were reportedly involved in the scandal were being disciplined.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
