On This Day - January 27th

On this day in the year 1591 of the common era (CE) Scottish schoolmaster Dr. John Fian was burned for witchcraft at Castle Hill, Edinburgh by order King James VI as a part of the gruesome display of Christian savagery and human sacrifice known as the Berwick Witch Trials; two years later the Vatican opens a blasphemy and theological heresy trial against Italian scholar and friar Giordano Bruno. The proceedings drag on for over seven years.

On this day in the year 1853 CE the U.S S Levant, a sealing and whaling vessel captained by Mercator Cooper, makes the first known landing on mainland Antarctica at Oates Coast, Victoria Land.

On this day in 1880 CE, Thomas Edison patents the electric-incandescent lamp.

In 1894 CE the first college basketball game is played between the University of Chicago and the Chicago YMCA, the University of Chicago wins 19-11.

In 1924 CE Vladimir Lenin is laid to rest in a mausoleum in Red Square, Moscow, Russia; twenty years later the siege of Leningrad is lifted by the Soviet army after 880 days and more than two million Russians killed. One year after that Soviet troops liberate the Auschwitz and Birkenau Concentration Camps in Poland…this day is now commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Twenty-one years later, in 1966 CE Germany commemorates its First Holocaust Remembrance Day.

In 1926 CE Physicist Erwin Schrödinger publishes his theory of wave mechanics and presents what becomes known as the Schrödinger equation in quantum mechanics; twenty-five years later the United States begins a series of one hundred and twenty-six above ground (open-air) nuclear war head tests at the Nevada Nuclear Test site. Fourteen years after that the first ground station-to-aircraft radio communication via satellite is performed; two years later a fire breaks out in NASA's Apollo One command module, killing astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger B. Chaffee during a launch rehearsal. On this same day in 1967 CE the United States becomes signatory to a treaty banning the military use of nuclear weapons in space.

In 1948 CE the first tape recorder is sold.

In 1973 CE the Paris Peace Accords are signed by United States Secretary of State William P. Rogers, (North) Vietnam Minister for Foreign Affairs Nguyen Duy Trinh, Republic of South Vietnam Minister of Foreign Affairs Nguyễn Thị Bình, and Republic of Vietnam Minister for Foreign Affairs Trần Văn Lắm, ending America's then longest war and it's military draft, though it would take two years and the fall of Saigon to complete the withdraw of all U.S. troops, .

In 1984 CE, Michael Jackson, the king of pop suffers severe burns to the face while filming a television commercial for Pepsi Cola.