On this day in history

April 27

7 births · 5 deaths · 2 events

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Anniversary highlights

Event anniversary

167

Second Italian War of Independence

167 years ago

Born this day

1822

Ulysses S. Grant

Would be 204

Oldest record

421st

Leo XI

death anniversary

Famous births7

1737 · 289 yrs

Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon (8 May 1737 – 16 January 1794) was a British essayist, historian and politician. His most important and influential work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789, to critical and commercial success.

ScholarshipWould be 289

Photo: Joshua Reynolds · Public domain

1759 · 267 yrs

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft (also UK:; 27 April 1759 – 10 September 1797) was an English writer and philosopher best known for her advocacy of women's rights.

LiteratureWould be 267

Photo: John Opie · Public domain

1791 · 235 yrs

Samuel Finley Breese Morse

Samuel Finley Breese Morse (April 27, 1791 – April 2, 1872) was an American inventor and painter. After establishing his reputation as a portrait painter, Morse, in his middle age, contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph system based on European telegraphs.

ArtWould be 235

Photo: Mathew Benjamin Brady · Public domain

1820 · 206 yrs

Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English polymath active as a philosopher, psychologist, biologist, sociologist, and anthropologist.

PhilosophyWould be 206

Photo: Unknown · Public domain

1822 · 204 yrs

Ulysses S. Grant

Ulysses S. Grant (born Hiram Ulysses Grant; April 27, 1822 – July 23, 1885) was the 18th president of the United States, serving from 1869 to 1877, and was the Commanding General of the Union Army, leading it to victory in the American Civil War in 1865.

PoliticsWould be 204

Photo: Brady-Handy Photograph Collection, Library of Congress · Public domain

1941 · 85 yrs

Fethullah Gülen

Muhammed Fethullah Gülen (27 April 1941 – 20 October 2024) was a Turkish Muslim scholar, preacher, and leader of the Gülen movement, which as of 2010 had 8-10 million of followers globally and had established a network of over 2,000 STEM focused schools in more than 150 countries.

ReligionWould be 85

Photo: VOA · Public domain

1967 · 59 yrs

William Alexander of the Netherlands

Willem-Alexander (Dutch:; Willem-Alexander Claus George Ferdinand; born 27 April 1967) is King of the Netherlands, reigning since 30 April 2013. Willem-Alexander was born in Utrecht during the reign of his maternal grandmother, Queen Juliana, as the eldest child of Princess Beatrix (later Queen) and Prince Claus.

RoyaltyAge 59

Photo: Sander Perquin · CC BY 4.0

Famous deaths5

1605 · 421 yrs

Leo XI

Pope Leo XI (Italian: Leone XI; 2 June 1535 – 27 April 1605), born Alessandro di Ottaviano de' Medici, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 1 April 1605 to his death, on 27 April 1605. His pontificate is one of the briefest in history, lasting under a month.

ReligionWould be 491

Photo: anonymous · Public domain

1882 · 144 yrs

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.

PhilosophyWould be 223

Photo: User:Scewing derivative work: 2009 · Public domain

1937 · 89 yrs

Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Francesco Gramsci (UK: GRAM-shee, US: GRAHM-shee; Italian:; 22 January 1891 – 27 April 1937) was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist and politician. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party.

PhilosophyWould be 135

Photo: Unknown author · Public domain

1938 · 88 yrs

Edmund Husserl

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (Austrian German:; 8 April 1859 – 27 April 1938) was an Austrian and German philosopher and mathematician who established the school of phenomenology. In his early work, he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic based on analyses of intentionality.

PhilosophyWould be 167

Photo: Unknown (Mondadori Publishers) · Public domain

1972 · 54 yrs

Kwame Nkrumah

Kwame Nkrumah (born Francis Nwia Kofi Ngonloma, /(ə)nˈkruːmə/ (ə)n-KROO-mə; 21 September 1909 – 27 April 1972) was a Ghanaian politician, political theorist, and revolutionary. He served as Prime Minister of the Gold Coast from 1952 until 1957, when it gained independence from the United Kingdom.

PoliticsWould be 117

Photo: USSR Post · Public domain

Events2

1859 · 167 yrs

Second Italian War of Independence

The Second Italian War of Independence was fought by the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Sardinia against the Austrian Empire in 1859 and played a crucial part in the process of Italian Unification.

War

1978 · 48 yrs

Saur Revolution

The Saur Revolution, also known as the April Revolution or the April Coup, was a violent coup d'état and uprising staged on 27 and 28 April 1978 by the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), which overthrew Afghan president Mohammad Daoud Khan, who had himself taken power in the 1973 Afghan coup d'état and…

Politics

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