Things are kind of slow in Regina today, so here are five things of relative significance that have happened on Nov. 27 throughout history. For your convenience they are listed in chronological order:
On Nov. 27,1095 Pope Urban II declared the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont. Christian forces subsequently invaded the Muslim-held Holy Land, and the two religions have been at it ever since.
In 1295, the first elected representatives from the county of Lancashire were called to Westminster by King Edward I to attend what later became known as “The Model Parliament”. That was more or less the start of representative democracy in the Western World. Hopefully, the current reign of King Stephen I in Canada won’t mark the end of democracy here.
In 1963, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson made his first appearance in Congress following the assassination five days earlier of John F. Kennedy. No doubt about it, a dramatic (and traumatic) moment in American history.
On this date in 1971, the USSR’s Mars 2 orbiter released a descent module. Like about half the probes we’ve launched toward Mars (pictured) in the last 45 years or so, it malfunctioned and crashed. But in doing so it became the first human-made object to reach the Martian surface.
In 2001, astronomers with the aid of the Hubble Telescope discovered a hydrogen atmosphere on the extrasolar planet Osiris. Osiris is located about 150 million light years from Earth in the Pegasus system, and is about 2.5 times the size of Jupiter (which itself is the size of 1000 Earths ). That was the first time an atmosphere had ever been detected on an extrasolar planet.