History of the Day for:
March 27
- 1513: Spaniard Juan Ponce de Leon discovered Florida.
- 1794: President George Washington and Congress authorized formation of the U.S. Navy.
- 1836: The first Mormon temple was dedicated, in Kirtland, Ohio.
- 1860: The corkscrew was patented by M. L. Byrn of New York City.
- 1884: The first long-distance telephone call was made between Boston and New York.
- 1917: The Seattle Metropolitans of the Pacific Coast League of Canada defeated the Montreal Canadiens to become the first U.S. hockey team to win the Stanley Cup.
- 1938: The Battle of Taierzhuang takes place.
- 1941: World War II: Yugoslavian Air Force officers topple the pro-axis government in a bloodless coup.
- 1943: World War II: Battle of the Komandorski Islands – In the Aleutian Islands the battle begins when United States Navy forces intercept Japanese attempting to reinforce a garrison at Kiska.
- 1945: World War II: Operation Starvation, the aerial mining of Japan's ports and waterways begins.
- 1948 The Second Congress of the Workers Party of North Korea is convened.
- 1958: Nikita Khrushchev became Soviet premier in addition to First Secretary of the Communist Party; CBS Laboratories announced a new stereophonic record that was playable on ordinary phonographs.
- 1968: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man to orbit the earth (1961), died in a plane crash.
- 1971: UCLA became the first team ever to win five consecutive NCAA basketball titles.
- 1972: Adolph Rupp of the University of Kentucky retired this day after coaching the Wildcats for 42 years.
- 1973: "The Godfather" won the Academy Award for best picture of 1972, but its star, Marlon Brando, refused to accept his Oscar for best actor in support of Indians occupying the Wounded Knee reservation in South Dakota. Liza Minnelli won best actress for "Cabaret."
- 1977: A KLM Boeing 747 crashed into a Pan Am 747 on a runway on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, killing 582 people. It was the worst aviation disaster in history.
- 1996: Yigal Amir received a life sentence for assassinating Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995.
- 1998: The Food and Drug Administration approves Viagra for use as a treatment for male impotence, the first pill to be approved for this condition in the United States.
- 1999: An F-117 Nighthawk is shot down during the Kosovo War.
- 2000: A Phillps Petroleum plant explosion in Pasadena, Texas kills 1 and injures 71.
- 2002: Passover Massacre: A Palestinian suicide bomber kills 29 people partaking of the Passover meal in Netanya, Israel.
- 2004: HMS Scylla (F71), a decommissioned Leander class frigate, is sunk as an artificial reef off Cornwall, the first of its kind in Europe.
- 2009: Situ Gintung, an artificial lake in Indonesia, fails killing at least 99 people.