• 312 - Constantine the Great is said to have received his famous Vision of the Cross.
• 710 - Saracen invasion of Sardinia.
• 939 - Edmund I succeeds Athelstan as King of England.
• 1275 - Traditional founding of the city of Amsterdam.
• 1524 - Italian Wars: The French troops lay siege to Pavia.
• 1553 - Condemned as a heretic, Michael Servetus is burned at the stake just outside Geneva.
• 1644 - Second Battle of Newbury in the English Civil War.
• 1682 - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is founded.
• 1795 - The United States and Spain sign the Treaty of Madrid, which establishes the boundaries between Spanish colonies and the U.S.
• 1806 - The French Army enters in Berlin.
• 1810 - United States annexes the former Spanish colony of West Florida.
• 1838 - Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issues the Extermination Order, which orders all Mormons to leave the state or be exterminated.
• 1870 - Marshal François Achille Bazaine surrenders to Prussian forces at Metz along with 140,000 French soldiers in one of the biggest French defeats of the Franco-Prussian War.
• 1904 - The first underground New York City Subway line opens; the system becomes the biggest in United States, and one of the biggest in world.
• 1916 - Battle of Segale: Negus Mikael, marching on the Ethiopian capital in support of his son Emperor Iyasus V, is defeated by Fitawrari abte Giyorgis, securing the throne for Empress Zauditu.
• 1922 - A referendum in Rhodesia rejects the country's annexation to the South African Union.
• 1924 - The Uzbek SSR is founded in the Soviet Union.
• 1936 - Mrs Wallis Simpson filed for divorce which would eventually allow her to marry King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom, thus forcing his abdication from the throne.
• 1948 - Léopold Sédar Senghor founds the Senegalese Democratic Bloc (BDS).
• 1953 - British nuclear test Totem 2 is detonated at Emu Field, South Australia.
• 1954 - Benjamin O. Davis Jr. becomes the first African-American general in the United States Air Force.
• 1958 - Iskander Mirza, the first President of Pakistan, is deposed in a bloodless coup d'état by General Ayub Khan, who was appointed the enforcer of martial law by Mirza 20 days earlier.
• 1961 - NASA launched the first Saturn I rocket in Mission Saturn-Apollo 1.
• 1962 - Major Rudolph Anderson of the United States Air Force became the only direct human casualty of the Cuban Missile Crisis when his U-2 reconnaissance airplane was shot down in Cuba by a Soviet-supplied SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missile.
• 1962 - The plane of Enrico Mattei, Italian industry's most relevant figure, crashes in mysterious circumstances.
• 1964 - Ronald Reagan delivers a speech on behalf of Republican candidate for president, Barry Goldwater. The speech launched his political career and came to be known as "A Time for Choosing".
• 1971 - Democratic Republic of the Congo is renamed Zaire.
• 1973 - The Canon City meteorite, a 1.4 kg chondrite type meteorite strikes in Fremont County, Colorado.
• 1981 - The Soviet submarine U 137 runs aground on the east coast of Sweden.
• 1986 - The United Kingdom government suddenly deregulates financial markets, leading to a total restructuring of the way in which they operate in the country, in an event now referred to as the Big Bang.
• 1990 - Supreme Soviet of Kirghiz SSR chooses Askar Akayev as republic's first president.
• 1991 - Turkmenistan achieved independence from the Soviet Union.
• 1992 - United States Navy radioman Allen R. Schindler, Jr. is brutally murdered by shipmates for being gay, precipitating first military, then national debate about gays in the military that resulted in the United States "Don't ask, don't tell" military policy.
• 1995 - Latvia applies for membership in the European Union.
• 1995 - Former Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi is condemned in absentia for corruption.
• 1997 - October 27, 1997 mini-crash: Stock markets around the world crash because of fears of a global economic meltdown. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummets 554.26 points to 7,161.15. For the first time, the New York Stock Exchange activated their "circuit breakers" twice during the day eventually making the controversial move of closing the Exchange early.
• 1999 - Gunmen open fire in the Armenian Parliament, killing Prime Minister Vazgen Sargsyan, Parliament Chairman Karen Demirchyan, and 6 other members.
• 2002 - The ITV Network aired a constant regional service for the last time in England and Wales, but LWT lost its identity completely. All companies (except UTV, Channel, Scottish TV & Grampian TV) formed the national ITV1 with regional references only before regional programmes.
• 2005 - Riots begin in Paris after the deaths of two Muslim teenagers.

Births