December 27

537 – The construction of the second Hagia Sophia Church, the first being destroyed 5 years earlier, in Constantinople is completed.

1512 – The Spanish Crown issues the Laws of Burgos, governing the conduct of settlers with regard to native Indians in the New World.

1657 – The residents (none of them Quakers but conscientious of tolerance) of the small settlement of Flushing, (now the Flushing neighborhood in Queens, New York) petition Director-General of New Netherland, Peter Stuyvesant, for an exemption to his ban on Quaker worship, which is considered as the first time in North American history that freedom of religion is put forth as a fundamental right.

1845 – Ether anesthetic is used for childbirth for the first time by Dr. Crawford Long in Jefferson, Georgia.
Journalist John L. O’Sullivan, writing in his newspaper the New York Morning News, argues that the United States had the right to claim the entire Oregon Country “by the right of our manifest destiny”.

1929 – Soviet General Secretary Stalin orders the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” in Russia, and beginning the ‘Holodomor‘ in Ukraine.

1932 – Radio City Music Hall opens in New York City.

1968 – Apollo 8 splashes down in the Pacific Ocean, ending the first orbital manned mission to the Moon.

1979 – The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. Interesting that the cost of the invasion and occupation and later retreat is considered a prime cause of the Soviet collapse a decade later.

1985 – Moslem terrorists kill 18 people inside the airports of Rome and Vienna.

2004 – Radiation from an explosion on the magnetar neutron star SGR 1806-20 in the constellation of Sagittarius, reaches Earth. It is the brightest extrasolar event known to have been witnessed on the planet.

2012 – General Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. dies, age 78, at Tampa, Florida.

2016 – Actress Carrie Fishe dies, age 60, at the UCLA Medical Center, after suffering from a cardiac arrest while flying from London to Los Angeles, 4 days earlier.