On This Day

Today in History, March 27th

On March 27, 1964, a magnitude 9.2 earthquake, the strongest in U.S. history, struck Alaska. Plus the Tenerife disaster and the Goliad massacre.

By Today in History Updated November 10, 2026 3 min read Sources checked

Published March 27, 2026 · Last updated November 10, 2026

March 27 is best known for 1964, when a magnitude 9.2 earthquake, the most powerful ever recorded in the U.S., struck Alaska’s Prince William Sound region. The date also saw the Tenerife runway collision of two jumbo jets in 1977 and the Goliad massacre in Texas in 1836.

The big story: The Great Alaska Earthquake (1964)

At 5:36 p.m. local time on March 27, 1964, the ground in southern Alaska began to shake, and it kept shaking for about four and a half minutes. The quake measured magnitude 9.2, the strongest ever recorded in the United States and second worldwide only to the 1960 Chile earthquake. Its epicenter lay in the Prince William Sound region, between Valdez and Anchorage. Anchorage, the state’s largest city, took the worst property damage, with about 30 blocks of downtown homes and businesses wrecked or destroyed. The tsunamis were deadlier still. Waves topped 100 feet in places, battered towns along the Gulf of Alaska and reached as far as British Columbia, Hawaii and the West Coast. History.com counts 131 dead. Scientists got something lasting out of the disaster: USGS geologist George Plafker’s study of the quake read it as one plate sliding beneath another, a major step in understanding plate tectonics.

More events on March 27

Year	What happened
1814	Andrew Jackson’s army defeated Red Stick Creek warriors at Horseshoe Bend in present-day Alabama, ending the Creek War. The Creek were forced to give up about 23 million acres.
1836	Under Santa Anna’s no-quarter policy, Mexican troops executed more than 400 captured Texas rebels, including commander James Fannin, at Goliad. “Remember Goliad!” became a rallying cry.
1865	President Abraham Lincoln met Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman at City Point, Virginia, to plan the last stage of the Civil War. It was the first time the three met together.
1912	First Lady Helen Taft and Viscountess Chinda, wife of Japan’s ambassador, planted the first two of Japan’s gift of cherry trees along the Potomac in Washington.
1939	Oregon beat Ohio State 46–33 to win the first NCAA men’s basketball championship.
1941	Two days after Yugoslavia joined the Axis, a coup toppled its government and the new leaders renounced the pact. Germany invaded soon after.
1958	Nikita Khrushchev became Soviet premier, the first leader since Stalin to hold both of the country’s top jobs.
1977	Two Boeing 747s, from KLM and Pan Am, collided in fog on a runway at Tenerife in the Canary Islands, killing 583 people.
1998	The Food and Drug Administration approved Viagra. The pill, first studied as a heart drug, sold about $1 billion in its first year.
2020	North Macedonia joined NATO as its 30th member.

Born on March 27

1845: Wilhelm Röntgen, German physicist who discovered X-rays and won the first Nobel Prize in Physics.
1886: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, German American architect and director of the Bauhaus.
1924: Sarah Vaughan, jazz singer from Newark, New Jersey.
1963: Quentin Tarantino, director of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs.