Today's Highlights in History
On May 27, 1964, independent India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, died.
On May 27, 1907, Rachel Carson, the American biologist whose books helped inspire the environmental movement, was born. Following her death on April 14, 1964, her obituary appeared in The Times.
On May 27, 1865, Harper's Weekly featured a cartoon about the capture of Jefferson Davis at the end of the Civil War.
On this date in:
1647 Alse Young became the first person executed as a witch in America when she was hanged in Hartford, Conn.
1896 A tornado struck St. Louis and East St. Louis, Ill., killing 255 people.
1935 The Supreme Court struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act.
1937 The Golden Gate Bridge connecting San Francisco and Marin County, Calif., opened.
1941 The British navy sank the German battleship Bismarck off France with a loss of more than 2,100 lives.
1963 The album "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," which featured the song "Blowin' in the Wind," was released.
1994 Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia after spending two decades in exile.
1995 Actor Christopher Reeve was paralyzed when he was thrown from his horse during a jumping event in Charlottesville, Va. (He died in 2004.)
1996 Russian President Boris Yeltsin negotiated a cease-fire to the war in Chechnya in his first meeting with the rebels' leader.
1997 The Supreme Court ruled Paula Jones could pursue her sexual harassment lawsuit against President Bill Clinton while he was in office.
1998 Michael Fortier, the government's star witness in the Oklahoma City bombing case, was sentenced to 12 years in prison after apologizing for not warning anyone about the deadly plot.
1999 A U.N. tribunal indicted Slobodan Milosevic for crimes against humanity, holding the Yugoslav president personally responsible for the horrors in Kosovo.
2006 A 6.3-magnitude earthquake in central Indonesia killed at least 5,800 people.