Today in History: March 27

1998: The drug Viagra from the pharmaceutical company Pfizer was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use in treating erectile dysfunction.

1977: Two airplanes, a Pan Am 747 and a KLM 747, collided on a runway in the Canary Islands, killing 582.

1976: Washington, D.C. opens its subway system.

1958: The United States announces a plan to explore space near the moon.

1958: Nikita Khrushchev replaced Nikolay Bulganin as premier of the Soviet Union.

1952: Elements of the U.S. Eighth Army reach the 38th parallel in Korea, the original dividing line between the two Koreas.

1945: General Dwight Eisenhower declares that the German defenses on the Western Front have been broken.

1944: Thousands of Jews are murdered in Kaunas, Lithuania. The Gestapo shoots forty Jewish policemen in the Riga, Latvia ghetto.

1942: The British raid the Nazi submarine base at St. Nazaire, France.

1941: Tokeo Yoshikawa arrives in Oahu, Hawaii, to begin spying for Japan on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor.

1933: Some 55,000 people stage a protest against Hitler in New York.

1912: The first cherry blossom trees, a gift from Japan, are planted in Washington, D.C.

1900: The London Parliament passes the War Loan Act, which gives 35 million pounds to the Boer War cause.

1899: The Italian inventor G. Marconi achieves the first international radio transmission between England and France.

1893: The American Bell Telephone Company makes the first long distance telephone call to its branch office in New York.

1886: German American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose rectilinear forms crafted in elegant simplicity epitomized the International style of architecture, was born.

1884: The first long-distance telephone call is made from Boston to New York.

1866: President Andrew Johnson vetoes the civil rights bill, which later becomes the 14th amendment.

1836: The Mexican army massacres Texan rebels at Goliad.

1814: At the Battle of Horseshoe Bend (Tohopeka, Alabama) in the Creek War, Andrew Jackson and his 3,000 troops defeated the Creek Indians, slaughtering more than 800 warriors and imprisoning 500 women and children.

1802: The Treaty of Amiens is signed, ending the French Revolutionary War.

1625: Upon the death of James I, Charles I ascended the throne of Great Britain and Ireland.

1512: Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon sights Florida.

1351: As part of the struggle between Charles of Blois (supported by the king of France) and John of Montfort (backed by the king of England) over succession to the duchy of Brittany, their knights waged the Battle of the Thirty near Ploërmel.

1350: While besieging Gibraltar, Alfonso XI of Castile dies of the Black Death.

47: The legendary Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator, aided by her Roman lover Julius Caesar, was reinstated as coruler of Egypt (with her brother Ptolemy XIV) this day in 47 BC following a civil war with her brother Ptolemy XIII.