On This Day in History - January 27th - Almanac

Today is Monday, Jan. 27, the 27th day of 2020 with 339 to follow.

The moon is waxing. Morning stars are Jupiter, Mars, Saturn and Uranus. Evening stars are Mercury, Neptune, Uranus and Venus.

Those born on this date are under the sign of Aquarius. They include composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1756; author Lewis Carroll in 1832; labor organizer Samuel Gompers in 1850; Edward Smith, captain of the RMS Titanic, in 1850; U.S. Adm. Hyman Rickover, "father of the nuclear Navy," in 1900; Art Rooney, founder of the Pittsburgh Steelers, in 1901; U.S. newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst Jr. in 1908; musician Elmore James in 1918; actor Donna Reed in 1921; actor James Cromwell in 1940 (age 80): actor John Witherspoon in 1942; Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire in 1944 (age 76); drummer Nick Mason of Pink Floyd in 1944 (age 76); ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1948 (age 72); Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts in 1955 (age 65); actor Mimi Rogers in 1956 (age 64); news commentator Keith Olbermann in 1959 (age 61); former NFL player/television commentator Cris Collinsworth in 1959 (age 61); actor Bridget Fonda in 1964 (age 56); actor Alan Cumming in 1965 (age 55); comedian Patton Oswalt in 1969 (age 51); actor Guillermo Rodriguez in 1971 (age 49); actor Rosamund Pike in 1979 (age 41).

On this date in history:

In 1606, the surviving conspirators in the "Gunpowder Treason" plot to blow up the English Parliament and the king of England on Nov. 5, 1605, were convicted. They were executed four days later.

In 1785, the first public university in the United States was founded as the University of Georgia.

In 1888, The National Geographic Society was founded in Washington.

In 1926, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird launched a revolution in communication and entertainment with the first public demonstration of a true television system in London.

In 1944, the Soviet army lifted the siege of Leningrad, a more than 2-year occupation of the Russian city by Nazi forces in which more than 1 million civilians died or went missing.

In 1945, the Soviet army liberated the Auschwitz network of concentration camps in Poland, freeing some 7,000 survivors. Months later, four Jewish young women told United Press correspondent Edward W. Beattie Jr. how they used rouge to during their captivity to avoid being killed along with other prisoners who looked too ill to work.

In 1967, U.S. astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in a fire aboard the Apollo 1 spacecraft during a launch simulation at Florida's Kennedy Space Center.

In 1973, the United States and North Vietnam signed a cease-fire agreement following lengthy Paris talks between U.S. national security adviser Henry Kissinger and Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho. The same day, the United States announced an end to the military draft. Although the U.S.combat mission officially ended in 1973, the Vietnam War would not be over until April of 1975.

In 1984, singer Michael Jackson sustained a burn on his scalp during the filming of a soft-drink commercial.

In 1987, U.S. President Ronald Reagan acknowledged mistakes and accepted responsibility in the Iran-Contra arms scandal.

In 1991, U.S. planes bombed pipelines to Kuwaiti oil fields to cut off the flow of oil into the Persian Gulf.

In 1996, France conducted an open-air nuclear test in the South Pacific.

In 1998, in his State of the Union address, U.S. President Bill Clinton hailed the fact that the federal government would have a balanced budget in 1999 -- the first in 30 years.

In 2002, a series of explosions at a military depot in Lagos, Nigeria, killed more than 1,000 people.

In 2011, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced it was replacing the nationwide color-coded, terror-alert scale with a system that would focus on specific terror threats to potential targets.

In 2013, fire at the overcrowded Kiss nightclub in Santa Maria, Brazil, killed more than 230 people, most of them victims of smoke inhalation. About 170 others were injured.

In 2017, President Donald Trump signed his first executive order banning travel to the United States for people from seven mostly Muslim countries, prompting protests and multiple lawsuits.

In 2019, Novak Djokovic beat Rafael Nadal to win a record seventh Australian Open.

A thought for the day: "The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it has also become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it." -- Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld