Some of the great historical events that happened today in history, on October 29th!
| 1618 | Sir Walter Raleigh is executed. After the death of Queen Elizabeth, Raleigh’s enemies spread rumors that he was opposed the accession of King James. |
| 1682 | The founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn, landed at what is now Chester, Pa.  |
| 1787 | Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni opens in Prague. |
| 1813 | The Demologos, the first steam-powered warship, launched in New York City. |
| 1891 | Broadway star Fanny Brice was born Fanny Borach in Newark, N.J. |
| 1901 | President William McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, was electrocuted.  |
| 1923 | The Republic of Turkey was proclaimed. |
| 1929 | Stock prices collapsed on the New York Stock Exchange amid panic selling. Thousands of investors were wiped out. |
| 1940 | The United States America began its first peacetime military draft. |
| 1945 | The first ball-point pen goes is sold by Gimbell’s department store in New York for a price of $12. |
| 1947 | Frances Cleveland Preston, the widow of President Grover Cleveland, died at age 83. |
| 1949 | Alonzo G. Moron of the Virgin Islands becomes the first African-American president of Hampton Institute, Hampton, Virginia. |
| 1952 | French forces launch Operation Lorraine against Viet Minh supply bases in Indochina. |
| 1956 | Israel invaded Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula during the Suez Canal crisis. |
| 1956 | “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” premiered as NBC’s nightly TV newscast. |
| 1962 | The Beach Boys’ debut album, “Surfin’ Safari,” was released.  |
| 1964 | Thieves steal a jewel collection–including the world’s largest sapphire, the 565-carat “Star of India,” and the 100-carat DeLong ruby–from the Museum of Natural History in New York. The thieves were caught and most of the jewels recovered. |
| 1966 | The National Organization for Women was founded. |
| 1967 | The musical “Hair” opened off-Broadway. |
| 1969 | The U.S. Supreme Court orders immediate desegregation, superseding the previous “with all deliberate speed” ruling. |
| 1972 | Palestinian guerrillas kill an airport employee and hijack a plane, carrying 27 passengers, to Cuba. They force West Germany to release 3 terrorists who were involved in the Munich Massacre. |
| 2004 | Osama bin Laden, in a videotaped statement, directly admitted for the first time that he had ordered the Sept. 11 attacks.  |
| 2004 | European Union leaders signed the EU’s first constitution. |
Today’s historical facts are from various sites including, but not limited too: the History Channel, The New York Times, WHG Historynet.com, HistoryOrb.com, and On This Day blogs from my blogroll.
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I think they called this day Black Tuesday in 1929. After losing all their money on bad wagers, the majority of the nation went on to compound their initial folly of irrational exuberance by electing a socialist statist president named FDR who enacted the very legislation—social security later expanded to medicare and then medicaid and then most recently the Medicare Modernization act—that would after 240 years utterly bankrupt America. Learn to speak Chinese and hope you like Ramen noodles.