On March 27, 1512, Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon sighted Florida.
In 1703 Russian Czar Peter the Great founded the city of St. Petersburg.
In 1836 the first Mormon temple was dedicated in Kirtland, Ohio.
In 1845 physicist Wilhelm Roentgen, the discover of X-rays, was born in Lennep, Prussia.
In 1917 the Seattle Metropolitans became the first U.S. hockey team to win the Stanley Cup.
In 1945, during World War II, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower declared that German military forces on the Western front had been defeated.
In 1964 Alaska was rocked by an earthquake that killed more than 100 people and caused an estimated $750 million in property damage.
In 1977, in history’s worst airplane disaster, more than 580 people were killed when two jumbo jets collided on a runway on the island of Tenerife, Canary Islands.
In 1985 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police may not shoot unarmed, fleeing criminal suspects who pose no apparent threat to the officers or the public.
In 1991 British customs officials announced they had foiled an attempt to supply Iraq with 40 U.S.-made devices for triggering nuclear weapons.
