On Jan. 27, 1832, mathematician and writer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, whose nom de plume was Lewis Carroll (“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”), was born in Daresbury, England.
In 1885 composer Jerome Kern was born in New York.
In 1888 the National Geographic Society was incorporated in Washington.
In 1943 American bombers staged their first raid on Germany in World War II.
In 1944 the Russian city of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) was liberated from the Nazis after a two-year siege.
In 1945 Russian troops entered the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps in Poland to find hundreds of dead prisoners whose bodies hadn’t yet been burned in Nazi ovens.
In 1951 atomic testing in the Nevada desert began when an Air Force plane dropped a one-kiloton bomb on Frenchman Flats.
In 1964 France recognized communist China.
In 1967, after more than 24 hours, the Chicago area’s worst blizzard ended, leaving a record snowfall of 23 inches. Also in 1967 Apollo astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee died in a fire aboard their space capsule during a ground test.
In 1973 accords ending the Vietnam War were signed in Paris and the military draft ended in the United States.
In 1977 the Vatican reaffirmed the Roman Catholic Church’s ban on female priests, declaring a priest must bear a “natural resemblance” to Christ, who “was and remains a man.”
In 1982 President Ronald Reagan proposed a 5 percent withholding tax on interest and dividends.
