27 OCTOBER
312 Roman Emperor Constantine the Great is said to have received his famous Vision of the Cross
939 Edmund I succeeded Athelstan as King of England.
1275 Traditional founding of the city of Amsterdam.
1644 The Second Battle of Newbury in the English Civil War took place in Speen, adjoining Newbury in Berkshire. The combined armies of Parliament inflicted a tactical defeat on the Royalists, but failed to gain any strategic advantage.
1662 Charles II of England sold the coastal town of Dunkirk to King Louis XIV of France.
1682 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is founded.
1728 The birthday of Captain James Cook, English naval officer and one of the greatest navigators in history. His voyages in the Endeavour led to the European discovery of Australia, New Zealand and the Hawaiian Islands. Thanks to Cook’s understanding of diet, no member of the crew ever died of scurvy, the great killer on other voyages. In his youth he was apprenticed to a ship owner in Whitby.
1795 Pinckney's Treaty [Treaty of San Lorenzo] signed by Spain and US, establishing the southern boundary of the US and giving Americans right to navigate the Mississippi River
1838 Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issues the Extermination Order, which orders all Mormons to leave the state or be exterminated.
1904 The first underground New York City Subway line opens; the system becomes the biggest in United States, and one of the biggest in world.
1914 Birth of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. He had a long affinity with Laugharne, spending the last four years of his life in the Boathouse -
1914 World War I: The British super-dreadnought battleship HMS Audacious was sunk off Tory Island, north-west Ireland, by a minefield laid by the armed German merchant-cruiser Berlin. The Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, Sir John Jellicoe, proposed that the sinking be kept a secret, to which the Board of Admiralty and the British Cabinet agreed, and for the rest of the war, Audacious' name remained on all public lists of ship movements and activities.
1936 American Wallis Simpson, the future Duchess of Windsor, was granted a divorce from her second husband Ernest, leaving her free to marry King Edward VIII.
1939 The birth of John Cleese, actor, comedian, writer and film producer. He appeared in BBC TV's Monty Python's Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers, and has starred in many films including the four Monty Python films, Clockwise and A Fish called Wanda.
1952 The BBC screened part one of the 26 part series 'Victory At Sea', Britain's first TV documentary.
1958 The birth of Simon Le Bon, English musician, best known as the lead singer, lyricist and musician of the band Duran Duran.
1962 Black Saturday - Russian nuclear missile crisis in Cuba
1962 Major Rudolf Anderson of the USAF becomes the only direct human casualty of the Cuban Missile Crisis when his U-2 reconnaissance airplane is shot down in Cuba.
1964 Ronald Reagan delivers a speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater. The speech launched his political career and came to be known as "A Time for Choosing".
1965 An airliner crashed at Heathrow, killing 36 people.
1967 Britain passed the Abortion Act, allowing abortions to be performed legally for medical reasons.
1967 Catholic priest Philip Berrigan and others of the 'Baltimore Four' protest the Vietnam War by pouring blood on Selective Service records.
1968 An estimated 6,000 marchers, demonstrating against the Vietnam War, faced up to police outside the US Embassy in London.
1978 Four people were killed and four others seriously wounded after a gunman (Barry Williams) went on a shooting spree on the Bustleholm estate, Wednesbury and later at a service station in Nuneaton.
1980 The start of a hunger strike by Republican prisoners interned in the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland.
1982 China announces its population has reached 1 billion plus people
1986 The government suddenly deregulated financial markets, leading to a total restructuring of the way in which they operated, in an event now referred to as the Big Bang.
1987 Gilbert McNamee was sentenced to 25 years in prison for being an IRA bomb maker
1988 Ronald Reagan decides to tear down the new U.S. Embassy in Moscow because of Soviet listening devices in the building structure.
1992 United States Navy radioman Allen R. Schindler, Jr. is murdered by shipmate Terry M. Helvey for being gay, ultimately resulting in the "Don't ask, don't tell" military policy.
1998 Welsh Secretary Ron Davies resigned after what he described as his 'inappropriate behaviour' late at night on Clapham Common, London which led to him being robbed at knife point.
Famous Birthday's
James Cook
(1728 - 1779)
Theodore Roosevelt
(1858 - 1919)
John Gotti
(1940 - 2002)
Famous Deaths
Ivan the Great
(1440 - 1505)
Akbar
(1542 - 1605)
Ivan the Great
(1462 - 1505)
Lou Reed
(1942 - 2013)
Famous Weddings
1880 Theodore Roosevelt, later 26th US President marries Alice Hathaway Lee, on his 22nd birthday
1910 Baseball legend Connie Mack (47) weds Katherine Holahan
1964 Singers Sonny & Cher wed, Cher wore bell-bottoms
1971 Steve Garvey weds Cynthia Truhan
1984 "Jessie's Girl" singer Rick Springfield (35) weds Barbara Porter in Australia