What happened in 1929

31 events World 2, North America 6, Europe 12, USSR / Russia 1, Asia 1, Middle East 6, Latin America 3

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Highlights of 1929

World2

  • Jan 17The comic strip hero Popeye first appears in Thimble Theatre.
  • OctGreat DepressionAfter the crash of the New York stock market, the slump spread around the world. Unemployment in the United States reached nearly 25%. Countries walled off trade within their own territories and colonies (bloc economies), and tensions grew.

North America6

  • Feb 14"Saint Valentine's Day Massacre": Five gangsters (rivals of Al Capone), plus a civilian, are shot dead in Chicago.
  • Feb 26Grand Teton National Park is established by the United States Congress.
  • May 16The 1st Academy Awards are presented in a 15-minute ceremony at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, honoring the best movies of 1927 and 1928, Wings (1927) winning Best Picture. Gerald Duffy (died 1928) receives the only Academy Award for Best Title Writing ever awarded (for his intertitles to the silent film The Private Life of Helen of Troy (1927)).
  • Oct 24Wall Street Crash of 1929: Three multi-digit percentage drops wipe out more than $30 billion from the New York Stock Exchange (10 times greater than the annual budget of the federal government).
  • Nov 18The 1929 Grand Banks earthquake occurs.
  • Discovery of the expanding universeHubble in the United States showed that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away. The universe is not fixed in size but keeps expanding, which led to the Big Bang theory.

Europe12

  • Jan 66 January Dictatorship: King Alexander of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes suspends his country's constitution.
  • Jan 10The first appearance of Hergé's Belgian comic book hero Tintin, as Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (Les Aventures de Tintin, reporter..., au pays des Soviets), begins serialization in the children's newspaper supplement, Le Petit Vingtième.
  • Jan 29All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues), by Erich Maria Remarque, is published in book form.
  • Feb 11The Kingdom of Italy and the Holy See of the Catholic Church sign the Lateran Treaty, to establish the Vatican City as an independent sovereign enclave within Rome, resolving the "Roman Question".
  • Mar 17The second of the Davos University Conferences opens in Switzerland; this includes the Cassirer–Heidegger debate in philosophy.
  • Jun 7The Lateran Treaty, making Vatican City a sovereign state, is ratified.
  • Jun 8Ramsay MacDonald forms the United Kingdom's second Labour government.
  • Jul 24The Kellogg–Briand Pact, renouncing war as an instrument of foreign policy, goes into effect (it was first signed in Paris on August 27, 1928, by most leading world powers).
  • Jul 27The Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of prisoners of war.
  • Aug 8German rigid airship LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin makes a circumnavigation of the Northern Hemisphere eastabout out of Lakehurst, New Jersey, including the first nonstop flight of any kind across the Pacific Ocean (Tokyo–Los Angeles).
  • Oct 3The country officially known as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes changes its name to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
  • Oct 6Serie A, the top-class professional football league of Italy, replaces the Divisione Nazionale.

USSR / Russia1

  • Feb 9"Litvinov's Pact" is signed in Moscow by the Soviet Union, Poland, Estonia, Romania and Latvia, who agree not to use force to settle disputes between themselves.

Asia1

  • Mar 28Japanese forces withdraw from Shandong province to their garrison in Qingdao, bringing an end to the Jinan Incident.

Middle East6

  • Jan 17Kabul falls to Habibullāh Kalakāni's forces, beginning a 9-month period of Saqqawist rule in Afghanistan while the Afghan Civil War continues.
  • Apr 3Persia signs the Litvinov Protocol.
  • Aug 16The 1929 Palestine riots break out between Palestinians and Jews in Mandatory Palestine, and continue until the end of the month. In total, 133 Jews and 116 Palestinians are killed.
  • Aug 23The 1929 Hebron massacre: 65–68 Jews are killed by Palestinians and the remaining Jews are forced to leave Hebron.
  • Aug 29The 1929 Palestine riots: 18–20 Jews are killed in Safed by Palestinian Arabs.
  • Oct 13Afghan Civil War ends.

Latin America3

  • Mar 4The National Revolutionary Party (Partido Nacional Revolucionario) is established in Mexico, by ex-President Plutarco Elías Calles. Under a succession of names, it will hold power in the country continuously for the next 71 years.
  • Jun 3The Treaty of Lima settles a border dispute between Peru and Chile.
  • Oct 8Cubana de Aviación is founded.