December 27 in History

A 22-year-old Cambridge graduate with no formal scientific training boarded a ten-gun brig at Plymouth on December 27, 1831, for what was supposed to be a two-year surveying voyage. Charles Darwin nearly did not make the trip. Captain Robert FitzRoy initially rejected Darwin based on the shape of his nose, which FitzRoy, an amateur physiognomist, believed indicated a lack of determination. Darwin father had also opposed the voyage, relenting only after his brother-in-law Josiah Wedgwood argued that the experience would be valuable. HMS Beagle was ninety feet long, carrying seventy-four people on a mission to chart South America coastline. Darwin official role was gentleman companion to Captain FitzRoy, who feared the isolation that had driven the previous Beagle captain to suicide. Darwin paid his own expenses and shared the captain cabin. The voyage lasted not two years but five, taking Darwin along the coast of South America, to the Galapagos Islands, across the Pacific to Australia and New Zealand, and home via the Cape of Good Hope. The Galapagos stop, lasting only five weeks in September and October 1835, proved transformative. Darwin observed that finches on different islands had distinct beak shapes adapted to local food sources, and that giant tortoises varied by island. He did not recognize the full significance of these observations until years after returning to England, when ornithologist John Gould identified the finches as distinct but closely related species. Darwin spent twenty years developing his theory of evolution by natural selection, publishing "On the Origin of Species" in 1859 after learning Alfred Russel Wallace had independently reached the same conclusion. The book sold out its first printing in a single day. The Beagle voyage made Darwin the most influential biologist in history; the ship was eventually reduced to a customs watchtower in the Essex marshes.

Twenty-nine nations signed the Articles of Agreement on December 27, 1945, formally establishing the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Monetary Fund, the twin pillars of a postwar economic order designed to prevent the catastrophic financial nationalism that had deepened the Great Depression and helped cause World War II. The institutions had been conceived sixteen months earlier at the Bretton Woods Conference in New Hampshire, where 730 delegates from forty-four Allied nations spent three weeks arguing about the architecture of global capitalism. The intellectual force behind Bretton Woods was John Maynard Keynes, who proposed an International Clearing Union that would have created a global currency and penalized countries running trade surpluses. The American delegation, led by Harry Dexter White, rejected Keynes vision in favor of a system cementing American financial dominance. The dollar became the global reserve currency, pegged to gold at $35 per ounce, and the World Bank and IMF were headquartered in Washington rather than London, a geographic statement of power that infuriated Keynes. The World Bank original mandate was financing the reconstruction of war-devastated Europe, but the Marshall Plan quickly absorbed that role, pushing the bank toward development lending in the Third World. The IMF was designed to maintain exchange rate stability and provide short-term loans to countries facing balance of payments crises, preventing the competitive devaluations that had wrecked international trade in the 1930s. Both institutions evolved dramatically. The World Bank became the largest source of development financing, lending over $300 billion while facing criticism that its structural adjustment programs imposed austerity on the poorest populations. The IMF abandoned fixed exchange rates in 1971 when Nixon ended dollar-gold convertibility but remained the lender of last resort for nations in crisis.

Benazir Bhutto was waving to supporters through the sunroof of her armored Toyota Land Cruiser after a campaign rally in Rawalpindi on December 27, 2007, when an attacker detonated a suicide bomb beside the vehicle, killing her and twenty-three bystanders. Bhutto, who was campaigning to become Prime Minister of Pakistan for a third time, had survived a nearly identical assassination attempt just two months earlier, when a bomb at her homecoming parade in Karachi killed 139 people in the deadliest terrorist attack in Pakistani history. Bhutto had returned to Pakistan in October 2007 after eight years of self-imposed exile, following a power-sharing arrangement brokered with President Pervez Musharraf under heavy American pressure. The Bush administration saw her as the best hope for a democratic counterweight to Musharraf increasingly authoritarian rule and a civilian partner in the war on terror. Bhutto herself knew the risks. She had publicly identified three specific groups she believed would try to kill her, including elements within Pakistan own intelligence services, and had written a letter before her return naming suspects in the event of her assassination. The circumstances remain contested. Pakistan initially claimed she died from hitting her head on the sunroof lever while ducking. A UN investigation concluded she died from the blast and criticized authorities for hosing down the crime scene within hours, destroying evidence. Musharraf intelligence chief was later charged, though the case dragged through courts for years. Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as Prime Minister from 1988-1990 and 1993-1996, both terms ending in dismissal on corruption charges she maintained were political. Her assassination triggered nationwide riots and reshaped Pakistani politics. Her husband Asif Ali Zardari became president in 2008.

Show Boat opened at the Ziegfeld Theatre on Broadway on December 27, 1927, and the American musical was never the same. Based on Edna Ferber 1926 novel, with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, the show replaced the plotless song-and-dance revues that dominated Broadway with an integrated dramatic narrative that tackled racial injustice, miscegenation, and the passage of time across three decades on a Mississippi River show boat. Florenz Ziegfeld, the impresario famous for his lighthearted Follies revues, had reluctantly agreed to produce the show after Kern and Hammerstein convinced him that audiences were ready for something more ambitious. Ziegfeld nearly backed out multiple times during the troubled production, which ran vastly over budget and required a radical last-minute restructuring of the second act. The show ran three hours and forty-five minutes at its first preview and had to be cut by over an hour before opening night. The score contained some of the most enduring songs in American popular music, including "Ol Man River," "Can Help Lovin Dat Man," and "Bill." Paul Robeson, who became indelibly associated with "Ol Man River," was not in the original cast but joined the 1928 London production and the landmark 1936 film version. The show treatment of race was groundbreaking for its era, featuring an interracial couple and a scene in which a white character defiantly claims mixed-race heritage to protect his wife from arrest under miscegenation laws. Show Boat ran for 572 performances in its original production and has been revived repeatedly on Broadway, most notably in Harold Prince acclaimed 1994 production. Theater historians consider it the dividing line between the musical comedy era and the modern musical drama. Every book musical that aspired to tell a serious story through song owes a debt to what Kern and Hammerstein achieved that evening.

Joseph Stalin declared the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" on December 27, 1929, launching a campaign of forced collectivization and political terror that would kill millions of Soviet peasants, destroy Russian agriculture for generations, and establish the template for state-directed mass violence that defined the twentieth century. The kulak designation, theoretically reserved for wealthy exploitative peasants, was applied so broadly and arbitrarily that any farmer who owned a cow or hired seasonal help could be targeted. Stalin had consolidated power by 1928 and faced a genuine crisis: Soviet cities were growing rapidly, but grain deliveries were falling as peasants, lacking incentive to sell at state-set prices, consumed or hoarded their production. Rather than raise prices, Stalin chose to eliminate private farming entirely, forcibly merging individual holdings into collective farms controlled by the state. The kulaks, who were the most productive farmers and therefore the most resistant to collectivization, were designated as class enemies to be destroyed. The campaign operated through three categories: execution or labor camps, deportation to Siberia, or property seizure and local resettlement. Local party officials competed to meet quotas, often condemning ordinary peasants with no claim to kulak status. An estimated 1.8 million people were deported in 1930-1931 alone, transported in unheated cattle cars. Conservative estimates place the death toll from dekulakization, collectivization, and the resulting 1932-1933 famine at five to seven million, with Ukraine suffering the worst in what Ukrainians call the Holodomor. Soviet agricultural output did not recover to pre-collectivization levels until the 1950s. Stalin publicly declared collectivization a triumph while the propaganda apparatus erased the kulaks from history.