ON JANUARY 27 ...
In 1756 composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria.
In 1832 Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who wrote “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” under the pen name Lewis Carroll, was born in Cheshire, England.
In 1872 American jurist Learned Hand was born in Albany, N.Y.
In 1880 Thomas Edison received a patent for his electric incandescent lamp.
In 1888 the National Geographic Society was incorporated in Washington, D.C.
In 1900 Hyman Rickover, the U.S. admiral and naval engineer who developed the world’s first nuclear-powered engines and the first atomic-powered submarine, was born in Makov, Russia.
In 1913 the musical play “The Isle O’ Dreams,” featuring the song “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” by Ernest R. Ball, Chauncey Olcott and George Graff Jr., opened in New York.
In 1943 about 50 bombers struck Wilhelmshaven in the first all-American air raid against Germany in World War II.
In 1944 the Soviet Union announced the end of the deadly German siege of Leningrad, which had lasted for more than two years.
In 1945 Soviet troops liberated the Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland.
In 1951 an era of atomic testing in the Nevada desert began as an Air Force plane dropped a 1-kiloton bomb on Frenchman Flats.
In 1967 astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee died in a flash fire during a test aboard their Apollo 1 spacecraft at Cape Kennedy, Fla.
In 1967 more than 60 nations signed a treaty banning the orbiting of nuclear weapons.
In 1973 the Vietnam peace accords were signed in Paris.
In 1977 the Vatican reaffirmed the Roman Catholic Church’s ban on female priests.
In 1984 singer Michael Jackson suffered serious burns to his scalp when pyrotechnics set his hair on fire during the filming of a Pepsi-Cola TV commercial at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.
In 1995 about 5,000 mourners gathered at the site of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz to commemorate the 50th anniversary of its liberation.
In 2000 President Bill Clinton proposed a $350 billion tax cut, big spending increases for schools and health care and photo ID licenses for handgun purchases in his final State of the Union address.
In 2004 John Kerry won the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary. Also in 2004 former “Tonight Show” host Jack Paar died in Greenwich, Conn.; he was 85.
In 2010 J.D. Salinger, one of contemporary literature’s most famous recluses, who created a lasting symbol of adolescent discontent in his 1951 novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” died; he was 91.
In 2011. in a stinging rejection of an Appellate Court opinion that earlier in the week threatened the mayoral candidacy of Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois Supreme Court emphatically rejected a challenge to the former White House chief of staff’s residency status and ensured his place on the Feb. 22 ballot.
In 2014 folk singer, songwriter and social activist Pete Seeger died in New York City; he was 94.
In 2017 President Donald Trump signed an executive order suspending refugee arrivals and banning travel to the U.S. from seven Muslim-majority countries, spawning chaos and protests across the globe, trapping unwitting airline passengers in terminals and foreign lands and igniting legal challenges that put the bans on hold.
In 2018 a suicide bomber detonated explosives packed into an ambulance outside a hospital in central Kabul, killing at least 103 people and wounding more than 200; the Taliban claimed responsibility.