William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson, two Quakers who came from England in 1656 to escape religious persecution, are executed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for their religious beliefs. The two had violated a law passed by the Massachusetts General Court the year before, banning Quakers from the colony under penalty of death.

On October 27, 1873, a DeKalb, Illinois, farmer named Joseph Glidden submits an application to the U.S. Patent Office for his clever new design for a fencing wire with sharp barbs, an invention that will forever change the face of the American West.

On October 27, 1932, poet Sylvia Plath is born in Boston. Her father, a German immigrant, was a professor of biology and a leading expert on bumblebees. An autocrat at home, he insisted his wife give up teaching to raise their two children. He died at home after a lingering illness that consumed the energy of the entire household and left the family penniless. Sylvia’s mother went to work as a teacher and raised her two children alone.

John Joseph Gotti, Jr., the future head of the Gambino crime family and a man later nicknamed “the Dapper Don” due to his polished appearance and expensive suits, is born in the Bronx, New York.

The U.S. Justice Department announces that the U.S. prison population has topped one million for the first time in American history. The figure—1,012,851 men and women were in state and federal prisons—did not include local prisons, where an estimated 500,000 prisoners were held, usually for short periods. The increase, due to tougher sentencing laws, made the United States second only to Russia in the world for incarceration rates at the time. Today, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

On October 27, 2006, the last Ford Taurus rolls off the assembly line in Hapeville, Georgia. The keys to the silver car went to 85-year-old Truett Cathy, the founder of the Chick-fil-A fast-food franchise, who took it straight to his company’s headquarters in Atlanta and added it to an elaborate display that included 19 other cars, including one of the earliest Fords. “I do have this disease of collecting cars,” Cathy told a reporter. “I was very sorry [the workers at the Ford plant] lost their jobs,” he said, but “since I was gonna get the keys, I was glad for that.”