October 27

Events710 - Saracen invasion of Sardinia.939 - Edmund I succeeds Athelstan as King of England.1275 - Traditional founding of the city of Amsterdam.1524 - Italian Wars: The French troops lay siege to Pavia.1553 - Condemned as a heretic, Michael Servetus is burned at the stake just outside Geneva.1644 - Second Battle of Newbury in the English Civil War.1682 - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is founded.1795 - The United States and Spain sign the Treaty of Madrid, which establishes the boundaries between Spanish colonies and the U.S.1806 - The French Army enters in Berlin.1807 - Occupation of Portugal by French-Spanish troops.1810 - United States annexes the former Spanish colony of West Florida.1838 - Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issues the Extermination Order, which orders all Mormons to leave the state.1870 - Marshal François Achille Bazaine surrenders to Prussian forces at Metz along with 140,000 French soldiers in one of the biggest French defeats of the Franco-Prussian War.1904 - The first underground New York City Subway line opens; the system becomes biggest in United States of America, and one of the biggest in world.1916 - Battle of Segale: Negus Mikael, marching on the Ethiopian capital in support of his son Emperor Iyasus V, is defeated by Fitawrari Habte Giyorgis, securing the throne for Empress Zauditu.1922 - A referendum in Rhodesia rejects the country's annexion to the South African Union.1924 - The Uzbek SSR is founded in the Soviet Union.1936 - Mrs Wallis Simpson filed for divorce which would eventually allow her to marry King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom, thus forcing his abdication from the throne.1946 - First commercially-sponsored television program airs (Geographically Speaking, sponsored by Bristol-Myers).1948 - Léopold Sédar Senghor founds the Senegalese Democratic Bloc (BDS).1949 - An airliner flying from Paris to New York crashes near the Azores. Among the victims are violinist Ginette Neveu and boxer Marcel Cerdan.1953 - British nuclear test Totem 2 is detonated at Emu Field, South Australia.1954 - Benjamin O. Davis Jr. becomes the first African-American general in the United States Air Force.1958 - Iskander Mirza, the first President of Pakistan, is deposed in a bloodless coup d'état by General Ayub Khan, who was appointed the enforcer of martial law by Mirza 20 days earlier. 1961 - NASA launched the first Saturn I rocket in Mission Saturn-Apollo 1.1962 - Major Rudolph Anderson of the US Air Force became the only direct human casualty of the Cuban Missile Crisis when his U-2 reconnaissance airplane was shot down in Cuba by a Soviet-supplied SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missile.1962 - The plane of Enrico Mattei, Italian industry's most relevant figure, crashes in mysterious circumstances.1964 - Ronald Reagan delivers a speech on behalf of Republican candidate for president, Barry Goldwater. The speech launched his political career and came to be known as "A Time for Choosing".1970 - Louis Néel receives the Nobel Prize.1971 - Democratic Republic of the Congo is renamed Zaire.1973 - The Canyon City meteorite, a 1.4 kg chondrite type meteorite strikes in Fremont County, Colorado.1981 - The Soviet submarine U 137 runs aground on the east coast of Sweden.1990 - Supreme Soviet of Kirghiz SSR chooses Askar Akayev as republic's first president.1991 - Turkmenistan achieved independence from the Soviet Union.1991 - First free legislative elections in Poland since 1936.1992 - US Navy radioman Allen R. Schindler, Jr. is brutally murdered by shipmates for being gay, precipitating first military, then national debate about gays in the military that resulted in the United States "Don't ask, don't tell" military policy.1995 - Latvia applies for membership in the European Union.1995 - Former Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi is condemned in absentia for corruption.1997 - Stock markets around the world crash because of fears of a global economic meltdown. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummets 554.26 points to 7,161.15. For the first time, the New York Stock Exchange activated their "circuit breakers" twice during the day eventually making the controversial move of closing the Exchange early (see October 27, 1997 mini-crash).1998 - Gerhard Schröder becomes Chancellor of Germany for the first time.2002 - Trades unionist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is elected as President of Brazil.2002 - The ITV Network aired a constant regional service for the last time in England and Wales, but London Weekend Television (LWT) lost its identity completely. All companies (except UTV, Channel, Scottish TV & Grampian TV) formed the national ITV1 with regional references only before regional programmes.2005 - Riots begin in Paris after the deaths of two Muslim teenagers
See more at Wikipedia.org...