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1721 - France was given a claim to Texas by the explorations of René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle and his establishment, in 1685, of La Salle's Texas Settlement. In 1700 Louis Juchereau de St. Denis made an expedition up the Red River, and in 1714 he crossed Texas from Natchitoches, Louisiana, to San Juan Bautista on the Rio Grande in an attempt to open an overland trade route with the Spanish in Mexico.

Later at Natchitoches he traded with Indians of the Red River and East Texas area. In August 1718 Jean Baptiste Bénard de La Harpe established a trading post among the Caddo Indians in the area of present Red River County. He and his party entered a bay on August 27, 1721, which they thought to be San Bernardo but was probably Galveston Bay. Hostile Indians forced La Harpe to withdraw.

1835 - James Walker Fannin, Jr. moved to Texas in the autumn of 1834 when he and his family ,moved to Texas and settled at Velasco. Fannin became an agitator for the Texas Revolution and on August 20, 1835, was appointed by the Committee of Safety and Correspondence of Columbia to use his influence for the calling of the Consultation. On August 27 he wrote to a United States Army officer in Georgia requesting financial aid for the Texas cause and West Point officers to command the Texas army.

1842 - Commodore Edwin Ward Moore, commander of the Texas Navy, dispatched the schooner San Antonio to Yucatán on August 27, 1842, in an effort to collect enough money to keep the Texas fleet afloat and to pay bills already incurred. The San Antonio never reached Campeche and was never again heard from.

1848 - After the Mexican War the United States government initiated an intensive program to, among other things, survey its southwestern boundary. Texas, with its vast size, diversified geographic topography, proximity to northern Mexico, and strategic position on the trade routes to California, gave it a priority for such a survey. In 1848 the first organized effort, supported by the citizens of San Antonio, sent Col. John C. Hays of the Texas Rangers to find a practical wagon road to El Paso.

Hays and his Indian guides left San Antonio on August 27. They met thirty-five Texas Rangers under the command of Capt. Samuel Highsmith. After a perilous journey during which the guide lost his way and the party nearly starved, they reached Presidio del Norte, a Mexican village at the junction of the Río Conchos and the Rio Grande. They returned to San Antonio after an absence of 107 days. Hays reported that a practical wagon route to Presidio del Norte existed during all seasons of the year.

1856 - A legislative act of August 27, 1856, formed Palo Pinto County and specified that the county seat, to be named Golconda, be located within five miles of the center of the county. The county was organized on May 13, 1857, and at the first meeting of the county court (held on August 18 of that year) steps were taken to have Golconda surveyed and laid out. The Golconda post office was established in March 1858. That same year the name of the community was changed to Palo Pinto.

1857 - The Sabine and Galveston Bay Railroad and Lumber Company was chartered by Abram M. Gentry and others on September 1, 1856, to construct the Texas portion of a rail line connecting New Orleans and Texas. Groundbreaking occurred in Houston on August 27, 1857, and construction began early the following year. By December 1859 the company had completed about thirty miles of grade and had enough rails on hand for twenty-seven miles of track. On December 24, 1859, the railroad's name was changed to Texas and New Orleans Railroad Company. The company also received a charter from the state of Louisiana to build east from the Sabine River to form a connection with a line building west from New Orleans.

1867 - The site of Spring Branch, twenty-one miles northwest of New Braunfels in the hills of western Comal County, was settled by the D. Knibbe family in 1852 and named for a spring that flows into the Guadalupe River. The post office opened in the Knibbe store in 1858. Before the Civil War the post office was in the home of Peter Horne. G. Elbel, the first postmaster after the war, recorded in his files that United States mail service was reestablished between New Braunfels and Fredericksburg via Spring Branch on August 27, 1867.

1908 - Lyndon Baines Johnson, president of the United States, the eldest of five children of Samuel Ealy Johnson, Jr., and Rebekah Baines Johnson, was born on August 27, 1908, on a farm in the Hill Country near Stonewall, Texas. Lyndon Johnson was a significant force in Texas for almost four decades. His Senate race against Coke Stevenson in 1948 remains one of the most controversial episodes in the history of American elections.

Johnson's relationships with such men as Sam Rayburn, John Connally, and Lloyd Bentsen affected the direction of state politics for a generation. On the other hand, Johnson's feud with Ralph Yarborough was an important factor in the relative weakness of Texas liberalism during the 1950s and 1960s.

Johnson also had a large effect on the Texas economy during his political career, as he steered congressional appropriations to the state in the form of military bases, crop subsidies for farmers, government facilities, and jobs for federal workers. The Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, headquarters of the NASA space program in Houston, is a large symbol of the impact of Johnson's liberal nationalism on the development of Texas and the Sunbelt in the postwar years.

1917 - Call Field, one of thirty-two United States Army Air Corps training camps established in 1918, was five miles southwest of Wichita Falls in Wichita County. On August 27 construction began. On November 20 the first six army pilots arrived, and the field had 600 pilots by late December. On January 15 the army gave final approval of Call Field. The field was named for Loren H. Call, a native of Washington, D.C., who was killed in a plane crash near Texas City on July 9, 1913.

The training camp had forty-six buildings, which included twelve hangars that housed four to eight planes each, a hospital, and six barracks that held 175 men each. In May four additional hangars and a row of lofts to hold carrier pigeons were built. During its operation 3,000 officers, cadets, and enlisted men were stationed at Call Field, and 500 officers received their wings there. Two squadrons left the training facility for overseas duty. Thirty-four men lost their lives during training exercises, the smallest number of fatalities of any training center. After the war the training center closed. The last military personnel left on October 1, 1919.

1917 - On August 23, 1917, a riot erupted in Houston. Near noon, two policemen arrested a black soldier for interfering with their arrest of a black woman in the Fourth Ward. Early in the afternoon, when Cpl. Charles Baltimore, one of the twelve black military policemen with the Third Battalion of the black Twenty-fourth United States Infantry, inquired about the soldier's arrest, words were exchanged and the policeman hit Baltimore over the head.

The MPs fled. The police fired at Baltimore three times, chased him into an unoccupied house, and took him to police headquarters. Though he was soon released, a rumor quickly reached Camp Logan that he had been shot and killed. A group of soldiers decided to march on the police station in the Fourth Ward and secure his release. If the police could assault a model soldier like Baltimore, they reasoned, none of them was safe from abuse. Maj. Kneeland S. Snow, battalion commander, initially discounted the news of impending trouble.

Around 8 P.M. Sgt. Vida Henry of I Company confirmed the rumors, and Kneeland ordered the first sergeants to collect all rifles and search the camp for loose ammunition. During this process, a soldier suddenly screamed that a white mob was approaching the camp. Black soldiers rushed into the supply tents, grabbed rifles, and began firing wildly in the direction of supposed mob. The white officers found it impossible to restore order. Sergeant Henry led over 100 armed soldiers toward downtown Houston by way of Brunner Avenue and San Felipe Street and into the Fourth Ward.

In their two-hour march on the city, the mutinous blacks killed fifteen whites, including four policemen, and seriously wounded twelve others, one of whom, a policeman, subsequently died. After they had killed Capt. Joseph Mattes of the Illinois National Guard, obviously mistaking him for a policeman, the blacks began quarreling over a course of action. After two hours, Henry advised the men to slip back into camp in the darkness—and shot himself in the head.

Early next morning, August 24, civil authorities imposed a curfew in Houston. On the twenty-fifth, the army hustled the Third Battalion aboard a train to Columbus, New Mexico. There, seven black mutineers agreed to testify against the others in exchange for clemency. Between November 1, 1917, and March 26, 1918, the army held three separate courts-martial in the chapel at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio.

The military tribunals indicted 118 enlisted men of I Company for participating in the mutiny and riot, and found 110 guilty. It was wartime, and the sentences were harsh. Nineteen mutinous soldiers were hanged and sixty-three received life sentences in federal prison. One was judged incompetent to stand trial. Two white officers faced courts-martial, but they were released. No white civilians were brought to trial. The Houston Riot of 1917 was one of the saddest chapters in the history of American race relations.

1940 - On August 27, 1940, as World War II engulfed both Europe and the Orient, a joint resolution of the United States Congress authorized President Franklin D. Roosevelt to federalize the National Guard. Within days, Roosevelt issued orders for the mobilization of several state National Guard units.

The Texas National Guard began its tour of duty as the Thirty-sixth Infantry Division, United States Army, by reporting for federal active duty to Camp Bowie, near Brownwood, in the autumn of 1940. Within weeks, the new division increased its manpower from 11,737 officers and men to nearly 15,800 by the addition of new officers and Selective Service inductees from Texas and the surrounding states.