Poet and politician Dante Alighieri is exiled from Florence, where he served as one of six priors governing the city. Dante’s political activities, including the banishing of several rivals, led to his own banishment, and he wrote his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, as a virtual wanderer, seeking protection for his family in town after town. […]

On January 27, 1888, the National Geographic Society is incorporated in Washington, D.C., for “the increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge.” The 33 men who originally met and formed the National Geographic Society were a diverse group of geographers, explorers, teachers, lawyers, cartographers, military officers and financiers. All shared an interest in scientific and geographical […]

On January 27, 1944, Soviet forces permanently break the Leningrad siege line, ending the almost 900-day German-enforced containment of the city, which cost hundreds of thousands of Russian lives. The siege began officially on September 8, 1941. The people of Leningrad began building antitank fortifications and succeeded in creating a stable defense of the city, […]

Forcefully marking the continued importance of the West in the development of nuclear weaponry, the government detonates the first of a series of nuclear bombs at its new Nevada test site. Although much of the West had long lagged behind the rest of the nation in technological and industrial development, the massive World War II […]

A launch pad fire during Apollo program tests at Cape Canaveral, Florida, kills astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Roger B. Chaffee. An investigation indicated that a faulty electrical wire inside the Apollo 1 command module was the probable cause of the fire. The astronauts, the first Americans to die in a […]

The United States, South Vietnam, Viet Cong and North Vietnam formally sign “An Agreement Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam” in Paris. Due to South Vietnam’s unwillingness to recognize the Viet Cong’s Provisional Revolutionary Government, all references to it were confined to a two-party version of the document signed by North Vietnam and […]

On January 27, 1992, a judge in the murder trial of porn producer Jim Mitchell allows the first-ever use of video re-creation of the crime. Jim Mitchell shot his brother Artie to death in his Corte Madera, California, house a year earlier, on February 27, 1991. When police responding to a 911 call by Artie’s […]

On January 27, 1996, Serbian-born tennis player Monica Seles, the former No. 1 women’s player in the world, defeats Anke Huber of Germany to win the Australian Open. The win in Melbourne was Seles’ first Grand Slam title since she was stabbed by Gunther Parche, a self-professed fan of the German tennis champion Steffi Graf […]