February 27 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on February 27

• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807)

  American poet known for narrative poems including 'Paul Revere's Ride' and 'The Song of Hiawatha.'

• John Steinbeck (1902)

  American author known for The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.

• Elizabeth Taylor (1932)

  British-American actress known for films including Cleopatra and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and a two-time Academy Award winner.

• Kate Mara (1983)

  American actress known for the television series House of Cards.

This Day in History

• 1900 — The Labour Representation Committee, forerunner of the British Labour Party, was founded in London.

• 1933 — Germany's Reichstag building was set ablaze in a fire the Nazi regime used to justify the suspension of civil liberties and the consolidation of power under Adolf Hitler.

• 1973 — Members of the American Indian Movement began an occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, a 71-day standoff that drew national attention to Native American rights.

• 1991 — President George H. W. Bush announced a ceasefire, effectively ending the Gulf War and the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation.

What February 27 Says About You

John Steinbeck, born on this date in 1902, wrote The Grapes of Wrath as an unflinching portrait of displaced, marginalized Americans during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, work serious enough to earn him both the Pulitzer Prize and, later, the Nobel Prize in Literature. That same instinct toward giving voice to people pushed to the margins runs through the occupation at Wounded Knee, which began on this exact date in 1973, when members of the American Indian Movement took over the South Dakota town to draw sustained national attention to broken treaties and the mistreatment of Native American communities — a 71-day standoff that became one of the defining acts of the modern Native American rights movement. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, also born February 27, built much of his own literary reputation on narrative poems that gave dramatic, memorable shape to earlier chapters of American history, most famously 'Paul Revere's Ride,' helping cement certain historical moments in the public imagination well beyond what a straightforward historical account might have achieved. Reduce the 27th and numerology lands on 9, a digit folk tradition reads as humanitarian concern and a broad, outward-looking sense of justice — fitting, given how often this birthday's real history turns on people demanding to be seen and heard. The Reichstag fire of 1933, which occurred on this date and was used by the Nazi regime as pretext to suspend civil liberties and accelerate its consolidation of power, stands as a grim historical counterpoint: the same date that elsewhere marks acts of resistance and voice also marks a moment when a government moved decisively to silence dissent instead. The Labour Representation Committee's 1900 founding, a modest organizational beginning at the time, eventually grew into the British Labour Party, a major and lasting force in UK politics for well over a century since. President George H. W. Bush's 1991 ceasefire announcement, ending the Gulf War on this date, marked a decisive close to a conflict that had drawn together an unusually broad international coalition. Elizabeth Taylor, also born on this date, built a screen career defined by an unusually direct, magnetic presence that held audience attention across roughly six decades of film work. February's usual amethyst, violet, and primrose mark the date as they always do, though what distinguishes this particular birthday is a real history that repeatedly returns to the tension between voices demanding to be heard and forces trying to suppress them. Elizabeth Taylor became one of Hollywood's earliest and most prominent AIDS activists, co-founding the American Foundation for AIDS Research in 1985 at a time when the disease still carried enormous public stigma. Steinbeck considered East of Eden, published in 1952, his most personal and ambitious novel, describing it in letters as the book he had been preparing to write his entire career. Longfellow became the first American poet honored with a memorial bust in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner, a recognition rarely extended to writers from outside Britain.