01010727 This Day In History, July 27

190 BC: Apollonius of Perga died at age 72. He was known to his contemporaries as "The Great Geometer." His treatise "Conics" (conic sections) is one of the greatest scientific works from the ancient world. He introduced the terms parabola, ellipse and hyperbola for the conic sections (see also Parabolic Prophecies).

1054: Siward of Northumbria and Malcolm defeated Macbeth at Dunsinane, a peak in Scotland.

1189: During the Third Crusade (see Constantine's Crusades In History And Prophecy), Friedrich Barbarossa arrived at Nis, the capital of Serbian King Stefan Nemanja.

1214: Philip II of France defeated an allied English, Flemish and German army under Otto IV, the Holy Roman Emperor (see The Holy Roman Empire), at the Battle of Bouvines. This broke up the coalition and secured Philip's position.

1245: Frederick II of France was deposed by a council at Lyons, which found him guilty of "sacrilege."

1299: Osman I invaded the territory of Nicomedia. The date is regarded as the founding day of the Ottoman state. The later Ottoman Empire occupied much of the Middle East, including the land of Israel, until it was liberated by British forces in the early 20th Century (see A History Of Jerusalem: The British Mandate and A History Of Jerusalem: War And Peace)

1540: Thomas Cromwell, principal adviser to King Henry VIII of England, was executed for treason.

1586: Sir Walter Raleigh brought the first tobacco to England from Virginia.

1588: The Spanish Armada reached the Strait of Dover and anchored off Calais. The invasion force position on the coast of the Netherlands that was to arrive was not prepared, which thwarted the entire Spanish plan of a coordinated land and sea invasion of Britain, leaving only a few thousand marines on the ships. The next night, the English launched 6 fire ships (derelict ships set on fire and sailed into the enemy ship formation) into the harbor at Calais, causing the Spanish to irretrievably lose their battle formation. The Royal Navy then attacked. Of the 130 ships originally in the Spanish Armada, only 76 made it back to Spain.

1675: Henri de Turenne, French military leader in the Thirty Years' War, was killed during the Battle of Sasbach during the Dutch War.

1689: General Mackay led troops loyal to William of Orange to subdue the Scottish Jacobites under Dundee. The royal troops were utterly routed at the following Battle of Killiecrankie and over 2,000 were killed.

1694: A Royal charter was granted to the Bank of England.

1742: The Peace of Berlin between Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and Prussia ended the first Silesian War.

1866: A transatlantic cable laid by the steamer Great Eastern established reliable communication by telegraph between Britain and the U.S.

1900: Kaiser Wilhelm II ("Kaiser" is the German form of "Caesar"; see also The Holy Roman Empire Of The German Nation) delivered a speech that referred to Germans as Huns (a warlike people who invaded Europe from Asia). "Hun" thereafter became a disparaging name for Germans.

1921: Canadian medical researchers Frederick Banting and Charles Best at the University of Toronto isolated insulin for the first time. It proved an effective treatment for diabetes.

1953: After over 3 years of war, the armistice at Panmunjon was signed between the United Nations and North Korea to end the Korean War. The agreement saw a 4 kilometer buffer zone created to separate the two Koreas. During the war, 116,000 United Nations and 1,500,000 Chinese and North Korean troops were killed.

1954: Britain and Egypt signed an agreement to end British administration of the Suez Canal Zone (that Britain had defended, for Egypt, against Nazi Germany during the Second World War; see also A History Of Jerusalem: The British Mandate).

1955: Austria regained its sovereignty after 17 years of occupation by foreign troops (German troops just before and during the Second World War, the primarily U.S., British and Canadian troops after).

1964: Winston Churchill, the longest-serving Member of Parliament in British history, made his last appearance in the House of Commons.

1964: President Lyndon Johnson sent an additional 5,000 U.S. Army "advisers" into the Vietnam War (which was actually a civil war between the people of Vietnam whose nation had been divided into "north" and "south" by French colonial forces in the 1950s; the U.S. resumed the occupation when the French left).

1974: During the Watergate criminal investigations, the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee voted 27 to 11 to recommend the first article of impeachment, for obstruction of justice, against President Richard Nixon.

1980: Mohammed Reza Pahlavi died of cancer while in exile in Egypt. The Shah of Iran from 1941, the U.S. stooge-dictator fled the country during the Iranian revolution in 1979. Ayatollah Khomeini succeeded him as Iran's leader, resulting in Iran replacing a puppet thug with a rabid Muslim thug.

1989: Christer Pettersson was found guilty and jailed for life for the 1986 murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. He was later acquitted and the crime has remained unsolved.

1990: Belarus declared its independence from the Soviet Union.

1996: During the Olympic Games in Atlanta a bomb exploded in an entertainment park, killing two and wounding 110.