On April 27th...

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Freedom Day (South Africa)*
Independence Day (Togo)

1509 Pope Julius II excommunicated Venice.

1521 Explorer Ferdinand Magellan died.

1522 A combined French and Venetian army was defeated by a Spanish-Imperial and Papal army at the Battle of Bicocca.

1565 The first Spanish settlement in the Philippines was established at what is now Cebu City.

1605 Pope Leo XI died.

1646 King Charles I of England fled Oxford.

1667 John Milton sold the copyright of Paradise Lost for £10.

1737 Historian Edward Gibbon was born.

1773 The British Parliament passed the Tea Act.

1791 Inventor Samuel F.B. Morse was born.

1805 U. S. Marines attacked the shores of Tripoli.

1813 American explorer Zebulon Pike died.

1822 Civil War General and President of the United States Ulysses Grant was born.

1859 The Pomona sank in the North Atlantic, killing all 400 persons aboard.

1861 U. S. President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus.
1861 West Virginia seceded from Virginia.

1865 John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, was killed.
1865 The SS Sultana exploded in the Mississippi River, killing about 1,800 people (most of them Union POW's on their way home) in the greatest maritime disaster in U.S. history.
1865 Cornell University was chartered.

1870 Heinrich Schliemann discovered Troy.

1877 Reconstruction officially ended when U. S. President Rutherford B. Hayes removed federal troops from Louisiana.

1882 Essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson died.

1897 Grant's Tomb in New York City, New York, was dedicated.

1902 Julius Sterling Morton, the founder of Arbor Day, died.

1908 The 4th Olympic Games opened in London, England.

1909 Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid II was overthrown.

1922 Actor Jack Klugman was born.

1927 Activist Coretta Scott King was born.
1927 U.S. Senator Albert Jeremiah Beveridge died.

1932 Radio personality Casey Kasem was born.

1937 The first U. S. Social Security payment was made.

1940 Heinrich Himmler ordered establishment of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

1941 German troops occupied Athens, Greece.

1942 A tornado destroyed Pryor, Oklahoma, killing about 100 people and injuring 300.

1945 The Second Republic of Austria was formed.
1945 Italian partisans captured Benito Mussolini at Lake Como.

1950 South Africa passed the Group Areas Act, segregating races.

1951 Guitarist Ace Frehley was born.

1953 The first general elections were held in British Guyana.

1956 Heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano retired from boxing, having never lost a fight.

1957 Bob Gutowski broke a 15-year-old pole vault record by clearing 15 feet 9-3/4 inches.

1959 Singer Sheena Easton was born.
1959 Gordon Armstrong, inventor of the baby incubator, died.

1960 The United Nations Trust Territory of Togoland became the independent Republic of Togo.
1960 Syngman Rhee resigned as President of South Korea.
1960 The first constitution for the territory of American Samoa was promulgated.

1961 Sierra Leone declared itself independent from the United Kingdom.

1965 R. C. Duncan patented a disposable diaper (brand name Pampers).
1965 Radio and television journalist Edward R. Murrow died.

1967 Crown Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands gave birth to Willem-Alexander, the first male heir to the throne since the birth of Crown Prince Alexander in 1851.

1972 Kwame Nkrumah, former President of Ghana, died.

1974 A Pan Am 707 crashed into a mountain on Bali, Indonesia, killing 107 persons.

1978 Afghan President Sardar Mohammad Daud Khan was overthrown and killed in a military coup.
1978 Scaffolding inside a cooling tower at the Monongahela Power Plant at Willow Island, West Virginia, collapsed, sending 51 workers, 10 of them from one family, to their deaths.

1982 The trial of John W Hinckley, Jr., attempted assassin of President Ronald Reagan, began.

1989 Students took over Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China.

1991 David Ozio won the Firestone World Bowling Tournament of Champions.

1992 The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, comprising Serbia and Montenegro, was proclaimed.
1992 Betty Boothroyd became the first woman to be elected Speaker of the British House of Commons.

1993 An Afghan AN-32 crashed at Tashqurgan, Afghanistan, killing 76 persons.

1994 The Republic of Bophuthatswana was dissolved.

1996 Former CIA Director William Colby died.

1998 Author Carlos Castaneda died.

1999 Jazz trumpeter Al Hirt died.

2005 The Airbus A380 made its first flight from Toulouse, France.

2006 Construction began on the Freedom Tower for the new World Trade Center in New York City.

2012 Four explosions killed 27 persons in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine.

2013 A bomb attack in Karachi, Pakistan, killed 10 persons and injured 25.

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This page was last updated on August 19, 2018.