ON AUGUST 27 ...
In 1776, British forces led by Lt. Gen. William Howe defeated the Continental Army of Gen. George Washington at Long Island, New York, in the Revolutionary War.
In 1859, the first successful oil well in the U.S. was drilled near Titusville, Pennsylvania, by Col. Edwin Drake.
In 1883, the island volcano Krakatoa blew up; the resulting tidal waves in Indonesia’s Sunda Strait claimed some 36,000 lives in Java and Sumatra.
In 1894, Congress passed the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act, which contained a provision for a graduated income tax that was later struck down by the Supreme Court.
In 1945, U.S. troops began landing in Japan after the surrender of the Japanese government in World War II.
In 1962, the U.S. launched the Mariner 2 space probe. (It would fly past Venus the following December.)
In 1963, sociologist and civilrights activist W.E.B. DuBois died in Accra, Ghana; he was 95.
In 1975, Haile Selassie, the last emperor of Ethiopia’s 3,000-year-old monarchy, died in Addis Ababa at age 83, almost a year after being overthrown.
In 1990, blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan, 35, and four other people were killed when a helicopter ferrying the group crashed near East Troy, Wisconsin.
In 1995, American and Chinese officials agreed to begin planning a fall summit between President Bill Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
In 2004, President George W. Bush signed executive orders designed to strengthen the CIA director’s power over the nation’s intelligence agencies and create a national counterterrorism center.
In 2015, a former papal envoy accused of paying young boys for sex died before his trial at the Vatican could get underway; Jozef Wesolowski, 67, faced seven years in jail.