March 27
1350 Death: Alfonso XI of Castile, of the black death while besieging Gibraltar. "The plague had no permanent effect on the course of politics, but it did take its toll. King Alfonso XI of Castile was the only reigning monarch to die of the plague, but many lesser notables died, including the queens of Aragon and France, and the son of the Byzantine emperor. Parliaments were adjourned when the plague struck, though they were reconvened. The Hundred Years' War was suspended in 1348 because so many soldiers died. But it started up again, soon enough. The effect at local levels was more severe. City councils were ravaged. Whole families of local nobles were wiped out. Courts closed down and wills could not be probated. But new courts were convened. The legal mess caused by so many deaths was eventually sorted out, and political life went on. Still, more than once you will read of a siege being lifted because of the plague, or of some principality falling into disarray because the prince died of the Black Death."
1512 Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon first sights Florida.
1614 The Netherlands passes the Ordinance of 1614 to encourage exploration and colonisation efforts by the Dutch.
1625 Charles I, king of England, Scotland and Ireland, ascends to throne.
1703 Tzar Peter the Great founds St. Petersburg by jabbing his thumb on a map on this day. Builders will have to contend with the fact that he's chosen water-logged terrain.
1746 Birth: Carlo Bonaparte, Corsican attorney, father of emperor Napoleon.
1765 Birth: Franz Xaver von Baader, German philosopher, theologist.
1787 Birth: Louis XVII, pretender to the throne during the French Revolution, 1793-95.
1794 The United States Navy is formed as the US Congress authorises the US president to provide a navy.
1802 The Treaty of Amiens is signed by Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands - the "Peace of Amiens," as it is known, brings a temporary peace of 14 months during the Napoleonic Wars - one of its most important cultural effects is that travel and correspondence across the English Channel becomes possible again. (Bradley)
1804 The US Navy Yard is established.
1809 Birth: Georges-Eugene Haussmann, French town planner, will design modern-day Paris.
1813 Birth: Nathaniel Currier, printmaker, lithographer; Currier and Ives.
1814 US troops under General Andrew Jackson inflict a crushing defeat on the Creek Indians at Horshoe Bend in northern Alabama.
1835 The Mexican army massacres Texan rebels at Gohad.
1844 Birth: Adolphus Washington Greely, US Arctic explorer, US Army General. Greely will be a Medal of Honor recipient, decorated by Great Britain and France to acknowledge his numerous contributions to telecommunications. General Greely will be an outstanding soldier and communicator to whom Greely Hall, Fort Huachuca, Arizona will be rededicated in a bicentennial year observance on 21 June 1976. His nineteen year service as Chief Signal Officer (1887-1906) will represent the longest continuous period an incumbent has occupied. 1845 - Born this day, Wilhelm Konrad Von Rontgen, German physicist/scientist who accidentally discovered X-rays. Nobel (1901) Prize-winner. Died in 1923. (Bradley)
1847 Birth: Otto Wallach, in Germany, pioneering chemist, Nobel 1910. "Otto Wallach was born on March 27, 1847, in Königsberg, Germany, the son of Gerhard Wallach and his wife, née Otillie Thoma. His father was a high-ranking civil servant, who later became Auditor General at Potsdam. During his early school years at the humanistic "Gymnasium" at Potsdam, Wallach had a profound liking for history and art - in those days subjects like chemistry were hardly taught at secondary-school level. In 1867 he went to Göttingen to study chemistry with Wöhler, Fittig and Hübner but soon left for Berlin to study for one semester under A.W. Hofmann and G. Magnus. After his return to Göttingen he worked so hard that he managed to obtain his doctor's degree - in 1869 under Hübner - after studying for only five semesters. (At that time working hours at the Wöhler laboratory were from 7 a.m. till 5 p.m., after which gas was turned off and some work had to be rounded-off under the light of privately bought candles.) His thesis dealt with the position isomers in the toluene series. In 1869 and 1870 he was assistant to H. Wichelhaus in Berlin, with whom he worked on the nitration of b-naphthol. Easter 1870 found him in Bonn with Kekulé. The latter, himself an artist at heart and who once seriously considered making architecture his profession, had written to Wallach: "It will not hurt you to come to Bonn. Here we are leading a scientific artist life." That same year, however, Wallach had to leave Bonn for military service in the Franco-Prussian war. After the war he..."
1847 Mexican War: General Winfield Scott captures the fortress on the harbor of Veracruz.
1855 Abraham Gesner patents kerosene.
1857 Birth: Karl Pearson, in London, England, mathematician.
1860 M. L. Byrn of New York, patents the corkscrew.
1863 Birth: Sir Henry Royce, co-founder of the Rolls Royce Motor Co., in Alwalton, near Peterborough, the son of a miller.
1866 President Andrew Johnson vetoes the civil rights bill, which will later become the 14th amendment.
1868 Birth: Patty Smith Hill, author, songwriter; Happy Birthday To You.
1871 Birth: Heinrich Mann. "...wrote German novels with social themes whose attacks on the authoritarian and increasingly militaristic nature of post-Weimar German society led to his exile in 1933. He was born in Lübeck as the oldest child of Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann and his wife Julia da Silva-Bruhns and was the elder brother of Thomas Mann. His father came from a patrician grain merchant family and was a Senator of the Hanseatic city. After the death of his father, his mother moved the family to Munich, where Heinrich began his career as a freier Schriftsteller. His essay on Zola and the novel Der Untertan earned him much respect during the Weimar Republic, since it satirized German society and explained how its political system had led to the First World War. Eventually, his book Professor Unrat was turned into the successful movie Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel).Carl Zuckmayer wrote the script, Josef von Sternberg was the director. Marlene Dietrich played her first major role in it (as Lola). Together with Albert Einstein and other celebrities, Mann was a signatory to a letter to the International League of Human Rights condemning the murder of Croatian scholar Dr Milan Sufflay on February 18, 1931. He became a persona non grata in Nazi Germany and eventually made his was to Marseille in Vichy, France. There, he was aided to escape to Spain, and eventually the United States by Varian Fry in 1940. During the 1930s and later in American exile, his literary career went downhill, and eventually he died in Santa Monica, California, lonely and without much money, just months before he was to move to Soviet-occupied Germany to become president of the Prussian Academy of Arts. His ashes were later taken to East Germany."
1879 Birth: Edward Steichen, artist, pioneer of American photographer.
1886 Birth: Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, German born US architect.
1892 Birth: Thorne Smith, author; Topper, Rain in the Doorway, Stray Lamb.
1893 Birth: Dragoljub 'Draza' Mihailovic, Yugoslavian General, Nazi collaborator.
1893 Birth: Karl Mannheim, Hungarian/German/British sociologist; Ideology and Utopia.
1897 Birth: Carlo Mierendorff, German politician, anti-fascist.
1897 Birth: Douglas Rayner Hartree, mathematician.
1900 Boer War: The London Parliament passes the War Loan Act, which gives 35 million pounds to the Boer War cause.
1901 Birth: Carl Barks, Disney animator, cartoonist. "...on a grain ranch near Merrill, Oregon, a small town on the Oregon-California border, just south of Klamath Falls. The young Carl was a solitary youngster, partly due to the isolated location of his home and his partial deafness. Already at an early age, Barks began drawing. Further on, besides school, his youth was mainly filled with working for his parents. In December, 1918, Barks left home to try his luck elsewhere. After several heavy jobs varying from logger to working in a riveting gang, he finally got a job as cartoonist for a magazine called Calgary Eye-Opener. A few years later, in 1935, he heard of work at the Disney Studio and he decided to apply. Shortly after he was contracted, Barks submitted a gag about a mechanized barber chair for the Donald Duck cartoon Modern Inventions. This gag meant a promotion to the story department where Barks co-worked on famous cartoons like Donald's Nephews (1938), Donald's Cousin Gus (1939), Timber (1941), The Vanishing Private (1942) and The Plastics Inventor (1944). In the early 1940s, Barks was tired of working in collaboration. In addition, the Studio was rapidly being converted in a war plant which produced lots of films for the military. Getting sick of the air conditioning each day was the final straw and on November 6, 1942, he decided to leave the Studio to set up a chicken farm. To earn a living, Barks wrote to Western Publishing saying that he was available to draw..."
1901 Birth: Erich Ollenhauer, German politician, SPD.
1901 Birth: Sato Eisaku, Liberal Japanese Prime Minister 1964-72, Nobel 1974.
1902 Birth: Mary Armour, artist.
1905 Birth: László Kalmár, in Edde, Hungary, mathematician; will promote the development of computer science in Hungary.
1909 Birth: Golo Mann (Gottfried), German/US historian; Antisemitism.
1912 The first cherry blossom trees, a gift from Japan, are planted in Washington, DC.
1914 Birth: Budd Schulberg, in New York, NY, journalist, novelist, screenwriter; What Makes Sammy Run, On the Waterfront.
1914 The first successful blood transfusion is performed in a Brussels hospital.
1917 Birth: Cyrus R. Vance, US Secretary of State, 1977-80.
1917 Leon Trotsky and a group of communist revolutionaries sail from New York aboard the S.S. Christiania Fiord, bound for Russia.
1918 Volkishness: A Germanenorden newsletter states that the articles of the Order had been formulated after discussions with Karl August Hellwig of the Armanenschaft. The ritual is also ascribed to Armanenschaft ceremony, but the suggestion that brothers of the higher grades in the Germanenorden be called Armanen was said to have been vetoed by the Armanenschaft. (Roots)
1918 WW1: After a long convalescence, Rudolf Hess volunteers for service as a fighter pilot. (Missing Years)
1923 Death: Sir James Dewar, chemist and physicist who invented the vacuum flask.
1924 Romanian-Russian negotiations begin in Vienna after strong pressure from the French.
1924 Weimar: Hitler addresses the court during his trial for the Munich Putsch. "When did the ruin of Germany begin? You know the watchword of the old German system in its foreign policy: it ran - maintenance of world peace, economic conquest of the world. With both these principles one cannot govern a people. The maintenance of world peace cannot be the purpose and aim of the policy of a State. The increase and maintenance of a people - that alone can be the aim. If you are going to conquer the world by an economic policy, other peoples will not fail to see their danger..."
1927 Birth: Anthony Lewis, newspaper columnist for the New York Times, author; Gideon's Trumpet.
1933 Japan announces it will leave the League of Nations after being found guilty of aggression in Manchuria.
1933 Max Warburg writes a letter assuring Harriman and his associates at Brown Brothers Harriman that the Hitler government is good for Germany. "I feel perfectly convinced that there is no cause for any alarm whatsoever," Warburg concludes. (Warburgs)
1933 The American Jewish Congress sponsors a mass anti-Nazi demonstration in New York City.
1934 The Blutorden (Blood Order) medal is instituted by the Nazi party. Originally named "The Sign of Honor for November 9, 1923" it is awarded only to veterans of the Munich Putsch. It will later be presented to a very select few for outstanding personal achievement.
1941 WW2: Nazi agencies in Serbia are wrecked by the people. German tourists and colonists leave the country.
1941 WW2: In Lybia, German motorized divisions reinforce the Italians. Conquest of Italian East Africa is practically completed by the British.
1941 Roosevelts $7,000,000,000 appropriations bill for Lend-Lease is approved by Congress as Britain leases defense bases in Trinidad to the United States for 99 years.
1941 Holocaust: Dietrich Bonhoeffer is forbidden to print or publish.
1941 Tokeo Yoshikawa arrives in Oahu, Hawaii, to begin spying for Japan on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor.
1941 WW2: A popular revolt in Yugoslavia forces the resignation of Regent Prince Paul's Government. Cvetkovich's government is overthrown by the Yugoslav military. Mussolini's ambitions for Croatia and other Yugoslavian territories and British intrigues in Belgrade lead to a coup by General Dusan Simovitch, resulting in the overthrow of the pro-Nazi regime of Prince Paul and the beginning of hostilities with Germany. Prince Paul is replaced by his heir, 17-year-old King Peter. (Sturdza; Duffy)
1942 Volkishness: The Lumenclub and the Order of the New Templars (ONT) in Austria are said to have been suppressed by the Gestapo in accordance with a party edict of December 1938. (Daim, Roots)
1942 WW2: British commandoes raid and destroy the Nazi U-boat submarine base at St. Nazaire, France. German gunners sink their own ships trying to cut them off as the commandoes escape in fast launches.
1942 Holocaust: Jews from France are deported to Auschwitz. All are foreign-born Jews who had been rounded up seven months earlier, and interned. (Atlas)
1944 Diary of Leon Gladun: For the first time we were shelled by German artillery. Some of us got a good fright and began building shelters!
1945 WW2: Germany launches its last V2 rocket from the Hague in the Netherlands, crashing in Orpington, southeast of London.
1945 WW2: Argentina declares war on Germany and Japan.
1945 WW2: General Dwight Eisenhower declares the German defenses on the Western front broken.
1952 Korea: Elements of the US Eighth Army reach the 38th parallel in Korea, the original dividing line between the two Koreas.
1958 After ousting Prime Minister Bulganin, Nikita Khrushchev becomes Soviet premier and first secretary of the Communist Party.
1964 At 5.36pm local time, the strongest earthquake in American history, measuring 9.2 on the Richter scale, hits southern Alaska, killing one hundred and twenty-five people and injuring thousands. The massive earthquake has its epicenter 20-30 km under Northern Prince William Sound (latitude 61.04 N longitude 147.73 W), about eight miles northeast of Anchorage, although approximately 300,000 square miles of US, Canadian, and international territory are affected. Anchorage, Alaska's largest city, sustains the most property damage and initial loss of life, with about thirty blocks of dwellings and commercial buildings damaged or destroyed in the downtown area. Although only fifteen people die or are fatally injured during the duration of the three-minute quake, the ensuing tsunami kills another one hundred and ten people. The tidal wave, which measures over a hundred feet at certain points, devastates towns along the Gulf of Alaska, and causes serious damage in British Columbia, Canada, in Hawaii, and along the West Coast of the United States, where fifteen people die. Property damage is estimated in excess of four hundred million dollars. The next day, US President Lyndon B. Johnson declares Alaska an official disaster area. (Bradley)
1972 Tom Batiuk launches his comic strip Funky Winkerbean.
1977 Two Boeing 747 jumbo jets collide on the ground at foggy Tenerife airport, in the Canary Islands. Both planes explode in flames on the foggy runway killing 577 people in the worst aviation disaster in history.
1980 Mount St. Helens in Washington state awakens after 123 year nap.
1987 President Reagan announces that he will place a 100% duty on a wide range of Japanese electronic products.
1989 Militant Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini prompts the resignation of his moderate successor-designate, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri.
1989 The first free elections for the Soviet Duma deal a devastating blow to the Soviet old guard; defeat for the Moscow Communist Party leader and deputy.
1990 Soviet soldiers drag Lithuanian army deserters from a hospital in Vilnius and take over the headquarters of Lithuania's independent Communist Party in an effort to reassert Moscow's control over the dissident Baltic republic.
1996 An Israeli court convicts Yigal Amir of assassinating Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and sentences him to life in prison.
1996 The European Commission bans the sale of British beef and cattle to the rest of the world because of mad cow disease but tries to ease London's pain with an offer of help for its battered industry.
1998 Russia gets a new premier when President Boris Yeltsin nominates Sergei Kiriyenko, 35, to replace fired Premier Viktor Chernomyrdin.
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