Also on this day
Lead Story
1890
On this day in 1890, in the final chapter of America’s long Indian wars, the U.S. Cavalry kills 146 Sioux at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.
Throughout 1890, the U.S. government worried about the increasing influence at Pine Ridge of the Ghost Dance spiritual movement, which...
Automotive
1989
On this day in 1989, 20-year-old actor Christian Slater is arrested for drunk driving in Los Angeles, California. He had a blood-alcohol level of .24, or .24 grams of alcohol per 100 milliliters of blood–three times the legal limit in California. Slater’s arrest came after a predawn car chase–he was...
Civil War
1862
On this day in 1862, at the Battle of Chickasaw Bluffs, Union General William T. Sherman is thwarted in his attempt to capture Vicksburg, Mississippi, when he orders a frontal assault on entrenched Rebels.
Chickasaw Bluffs was part of Union General Ulysses S. Grant’s attempt to capture Vicksburg, the last Confederate...
Cold War
1956
Just days before an official announcement is to be issued by the Eisenhower administration, the New York Times leaks the news that the United States is preparing a major policy statement on the Middle East. In the wake of heightened tensions in the area caused by the French-British-Israeli invasion...
Crime
1985
The “Railway Rapist” attacks 19-year-old Alison Day and abducts her from a London train. Her strangled body was recovered two weeks later. Although the perpetrator had attacked and raped many women since 1982, this was his first murder.
The Railway Rapist had a distinctive method of operation: He used a knife,...
Disaster
1876
A bridge in Ashtabula, Ohio, collapses on this day in 1876, causing a train to fall into a gorge, killing 80 passengers.
The Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway brought passengers into Chicago from points east. On December 29, a snow storm forced one of the trains (two locomotives and 11...
General Interest
1170
Archbishop Thomas Becket is brutally murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by four knights of King Henry II of England, apparently on orders of the king.In 1155, Henry II appointed Becket as chancellor, a high post in the English government. Becket proved a skilled diplomat and won the trust of Henry, who...
1845
Six months after the congress of the Republic of Texas accepts U.S. annexation of the territory, Texas is admitted into the United States as the 28th state.After gaining independence from Spain in the 1820s, Mexico welcomed foreign settlers to sparsely populated Texas, and a large group of Americans led by...
1940
On the evening of December 29, 1940, London suffers its most devastating air raid when Germans firebomb the city. Hundreds of fires caused by the exploding bombs engulfed areas of London, but firefighters showed a valiant indifference to the bombs falling around them and saved much of the city from...
Hollywood
1947
On this day in 1947, the actor Ted Danson, who will become best known for his role as bar owner Sam Malone on the mega-hit TV sitcom Cheers, which originally aired from 1982 to 1993, is born in San Diego, California.
After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University, where he studied drama,...
Literary
1916
On this day in 1916, James Joyce’s book Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is published in New York. The book had been previously serialized in Ezra Pound’s review The Egoist.
James Joyce was born in Dublin, the eldest of 10 children of a cheerful ne’er-do-well who eventually went...
Music
1957
In the mid 1950s, two young white men began their successful musical careers by bringing the sound of black rhythm-and-blues music to predominantly white mainstream-pop audiences. Both were steeped in religion and gospel music as boys, and both were raised in the segregated South, but one important barrier separated them...
Old West
1890
In the tragic final chapter of America’s long war against the Plains Indians, the U.S. Cavalry kills 146 Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.
Tensions had been running high on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota for months because of the growing popularity of a new Indian spiritual movement known...
Presidential
1808
On this day in 1808, future President Andrew Johnson is born in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Johnson’s career took him from mayor of Greeneville (1834) to the Tennessee legislature (1835) and then to the U.S. House of Representatives (1843). He went home to serve as Tennessee’s governor from 1853 to 1857, but...
Sports
1878
On December 29, 1878, the first game is played between two teams of the first professional baseball league in Cuba, later known as the Cuban League. Representing the city of Havana, the Habana club faced off against their greatest rivals, a club from the neighboring suburb of Almendares. Habana, coached...
Vietnam War
1962
Saigon announces that 4,077 strategic hamlets have been completed out of a projected total of 11,182. The figures also stated that 39 percent of the South Vietnamese population was housed in the hamlets. U.S. officials considered these figures questionable.
The strategic hamlet program was started in 1962 and was modeled on...
1966
Assistant Secretary of Defense Arthur Sylvester admits that the North Vietnamese city of Nam Dinh has been hit by U.S. planes 64 times since mid-1965, and that the air strikes were directed only against military targets: railroad yards, a warehouse, petroleum storage depots, and a thermal power plant. He denounced...
World War I
1915
On this day in 1915, the French National Assembly passes a law formally ceding the land that holds the British war cemeteries to Great Britain. The move ensured even as the war was being fought that its saddest and most sacred monuments would be forever protected.
The law stated that...
World War II
1940
On this day, German aircraft blanket incendiary bombs over London, setting both banks of the Thames ablaze and killing almost 3,600 British civilians.
The German targeting of the English capital had begun back in August, payback for British attacks on Berlin. In September, a horrendous firestorm broke out in London’s poorest...