On the afternoon of October 27, 1904, New York City's new rapid transit system opens for business: the subway. Today the New York City subway is the largest rapid transit system in the world by number of stations.

On October 27, 1966, “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” makes its debut on CBS.

On October 27, 1994, the U.S. Justice Department announces the prison population topped 1 million for the first time in American history.

On October 27, 1858, future President Theodore Roosevelt is born in New York City to a wealthy family. Roosevelt was home-schooled and then attended Harvard University, graduating in 1880. He served in the New York state legislature from 1881 to 1884. In 1880, Roosevelt married Alice Hathaway Lee. The couple had a daughter, Alice, on […]

John Joseph Gotti, Jr., the future head of the Gambino crime family and a man later nicknamed “the Dapper Don” due to his polished appearance and expensive suits, is born in the Bronx, New York. Gotti, the grandson of Italian immigrants, was raised in a poor family with 13 children. Growing up, he did errands […]

On October 27, 1961, a U.S. appeals court affirms rock ‘n’ roller Chuck Berry’s second conviction for transporting a minor across state lines for immoral purposes in violation of the Mann Act. After an earlier conviction in the case had been thrown out a year earlier, Berry was retried—and this time, the charges stuck. He […]

On October 27, 1873, a DeKalb, Illinois, farmer named Joseph Glidden submits an application to the U.S. Patent Office for his clever new design for a fencing wire with sharp barbs, an invention that will forever change the face of the American West. Glidden’s was by no means the first barbed wire; he only came […]

On October 27, 1932, poet Sylvia Plath is born in Boston. Her father, a German immigrant, was a professor of biology and a leading expert on bumblebees. An autocrat at home, he insisted his wife give up teaching to raise their two children. He died at home after a lingering illness that consumed the energy […]

Complicated and tension-filled negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union finally result in a plan to end the two-week-old Cuban Missile Crisis. A frightening period in which nuclear holocaust seemed imminent began to come to an end.  Since President John F. Kennedy’s October 22 address warning the Soviets to cease their reckless program […]

William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson, two Quakers who came from England in 1656 to escape religious persecution, are executed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for their religious beliefs. The two had violated a law passed by the Massachusetts General Court the year before, banning Quakers from the colony under penalty of death. The Religious Society […]