Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe Today is Nov. 27. The nation's first living donor liver transplant took place on this date in 1989. Doctors at the University of Chicago removed a portion of a woman's liver and implanted it in her 21-month-old daughter. Both recovered, and the procedure has since become an alternative to transplants involving cadaver livers. Advertisement Also on this date in 1989, Virginia certified Douglas Wilder as the nation's first elected black governor by a razor-thin margin of 0.38 percentage points. British treasury chief John Major was elected leader of the ruling Conservative Party on this date in 1990, succeeding Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. Thatcher, Britain's first female prime minister, also was the longest-serving PM of the 20th century, having taken office in 1979. It was on this date back in 1901 that the U.S. War Department authorized creation of the Army War College to instruct commissioned officers. The officers' school was to be built in Leavenworth, Kan. During a visit to the Philippines, Pope Paul VI was stabbed in the chest by a Bolivian painter disguised as a priest on this date in 1970. The pontiff survived the attack at Manila Airport and continued as leader of the world's Roman Catholics for another eight years. Advertisement And town officials in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, evicted the Rev. Francis Gastrell, the Vicar of Frodsham, from William Shakespeare's home on this date in 1759 after he cut down a 150-year-old tree that had been planted by the famed writer. Gastrell chopped down the tree because he was annoyed by the many Shakespeare enthusiasts who came to look at it. He sold the tree for firewood, but it was recovered by a jeweler-woodcarver, who fashioned hundreds of relics from the wood. We now return you to the present, already in progress.
