Aug. 29
Today in history
Today is Aug. 29. On this date in:
1533: The 300-year Inca Empire came to an end with the execution by strangling of Atahuallpa by Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro.
1842: China signed the Treaty of Nanjing, ending the First Opium War. The first of several unequal treaties foreign countries imposed on China, it required China to open five ports to Britain, pay $21 million and cede Hong Kong to Britain, among other privileges.
1867: Karl Heinrich Ulrichs pleaded for the repeal of antigay laws before 500 members of the Congress of German Jurists. He was the first avowedly gay person to make such a request. “I am proud that I found the courage to deal the initial blow to the hydra of public contempt,” he said later.
1893:
Whitcomb L. Judson patented his “clasp locker”: a sliding shoe closure that engaged and disengaged a series of interlacing teeth in a single movement. It evolved into the zipper.
1911: “Ishi,” believed to be the last member of the Yahi tribe, was found lost and starving at a slaughterhouse in Oroville, California. Officials brought him to a museum, where he lived for the rest of his life. “Ishi” means “man” in the Yana language; he refused to share his name without an introduction by a fellow Yahi.
1949: The USSR tested its first atomic bomb, ending the U.S. atomic monopoly. The Soviets called it “First Lightning” and Americans called it “Joe No. 1,” after Stalin. Thanks to a Los Alamos spy who stole blueprints, the bomb was a copy of the “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
1957: Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first federal legislation protecting racial minorities since Reconstruction. It created the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and authorized the attorney general to sue on behalf of Black people blocked from voting.
1962: President John F. Kennedy acknowledged concerns about the health and environmental effects of DDT and other pesticides in response to a question at a news conference. The Agriculture Department and Public Health Service “are examining the matter,” he said, and referenced Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring.”
1970: More than 20,000 Mexican Americans marched through East Los Angeles, calling themselves the Chicano Moratorium, to protest the war in Vietnam and highlight the fact that Mexican Americans were dying in Vietnam at about twice their proportion of the U.S. population. Law enforcement began beating protesters, sparking violence that killed three people, including Los Angeles Times journalist Rubén Salazar.
1970: Twenty-three Native American activists climbed to the top of Mount Rushmore to protest the broken Treaty of Fort Laramie, which gave them the right to western South Dakota. They renamed the monument Crazy Horse Mountain and camped on top for two months.
1997: Marc Randolph and Reed Hasting founded an online business that rented digital video discs through the mail, Netflix – or, as they called it, NetFlix. The company originally charged by the disc and sent DVDs in striking red envelopes.
2005: Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana as a Category 3 storm. Levees and storm walls failed, flooding and devastating an estimated 80% of New Orleans. The damage totaled about $125billion in 2005 dollars. Sixteen years later, Category 4 Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana on the same date.
2008: Republican presidential candidate John McCain named Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. It was the first time a woman appeared on the GOP presidential ticket. “This is America, and every woman can walk through every door of opportunity,” she said on Sept. 3, 2008, and joked, “the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.”
– USA TODAY Network
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Today in history, August 29
