On This Day:
Tuesday August 27, 2013 This is the 239th day of the year, with 126 days remaining in 2013. Fact of the Day: spices A spice is any of the many aromatic, plant-derived substances that have a fragrant or sharp flavor and are used to season food. Most spices come from the East; the first to be introduced to Europe was pepper (from India), which long remained a rare and expensive commodity. The use of spices in cooking started with the Byzantines, probably to hide the fact that meat was spoiled or unflavorful. The "spice route" was important during the Crusades as well as later on when British and Dutch trading companies worked hard to make money by buying and selling spices. There are four basic kinds: fresh spices, ground spices, spice pastes, and whole dried spices.
Holidays Feast Day of St. Caesarius of Arles, St. David Lewis, Little St. Hugh, St. Monica, St. Margaret the Barefooted, St. Marcellus of Tomi, and St. Poemen.
Moldova: Independence Day.
Events 1859 - Edwin Drake was the first in the U.S. to strike oil -- at Titusville, Pennsylvania.
1892 - Fire seriously damaged New York's original Metropolitan Opera House.
1910 - Thomas Edison demonstrated the first "talking" pictures in his New Jersey laboratory.
1928 - Fifteen nations signed the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact, outlawing war and calling for the settlement of disputes through arbitration. Forty-seven other countries eventually signed the pact.
1939 - Captain Erich Warshitz flew the first jet plane.
1954 - The first white men crossed the Arctic Circle's Northwest Passage in a pair of icebreakers.
1962 - The United States launched the Mariner 2 space probe, which flew past Venus the following December.
1990 - The British Broadcasting Corporation launches BBC Radio Five Live with a mixture of sports, news, and children's programming.
1993 - The Rainbow Bridge, connecting Tokyo's Shibaura Wharf and the island of Odaiba, is completed.
2003 - Mars makes its closest approach to Earth in nearly 60,000 years, passing approximately 34,646,416 miles (55,758,002 kilometers) from Earth.
2006 - Comair Flight 5191 crashed while taking off from Blue Grass Airport in Lexington, Kentucky. Forty-nine of the 50 people on board the flight perished.
Births 551 B.C.E. - Confucius (K'ung Fu-tzu), Chinese philosopher.
1770 - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, German philosopher.
1890 - Man Ray, American photographer, painter, filmmaker.
1908 - Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th President of the United States of America (1963-1969).
1910 - Mother Teresa (Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu), Macedonian-born Nobel Peace Prize-winner, missionary, humanitarian.
1953 - Alex Lifeson (born Alexander Zivojinovich), Canadian guitarist.
1959 - Juan Fernando Cobo, Colombian painter, illustrator, sculptor, and cultural promoter.
Deaths 1931 - Francis Marion Smith, American borax magnate.
1963 - W.E.B. DuBois, American civil rights activist and scholar.
1964 - Gracie Allen, American actress and comedienne.
1967 - Brian Epstein, manager of the Beatles, from an overdose of sleeping pills.
1971 - Bennett Cerf, American publisher and co-founder of Random House, and television personality.
1979 - Lord Louis Mountbatten, killed by Irish Republican Army (IRA) terrorists who hid a bomb on his fishing vessel.
1990 - Stevie Ray Vaughan, American blues guitarist.
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